Autonomous driverless cars, thanks — no thanks

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Coinmonks

5 min readJul 26, 2018

Commuting by car is hell: getting up early, trying to leave before the traffic gets too heavy, a coffee for on the way, 1 minute too late... For me, it was the most brain killing experience I ever had. I slowly started to feel like a sack of potatoes queued up in a wheeled cookie jar waiting to be chopped into French fries.

To gain my life and brain activity back, I switched to a motorbike: every morning the fresh wind, no traffic jams and the need to be super alert because every car on the road tries to kill you, mostly all those apping Teletubby-like morons. But there isn’t a better way to begin the day for me. It wakes me up, triggers my brain and kick starts my day.

And this is exactly my problem with all the self-driving stuff: Wall-E cocoons of pure blobbiness. Before we know it, we are transported as dull sacks of potatoes, and sentient machines harvest our body heat and electrical activity. At the same time, we consume our bubble news and Netflix series projected on the windscreen. I don’t want an autonomous driving car; I don’t want any traffic jams.

But let’s not act as Ford’s customer that wants a faster horse and have a look at what driverless cars can offer in a world where red traffic lights are seen as a bad user experience instead of an act of safety.

Traffic is stuck, and the situation will not improve unless we change our transportation system. But it’s not only a machine shift from our current petrol-fueled car to a driverless/autonomous electric car. And here it is getting interesting. Not only the vehicle will change but our whole society and economy.

A YouTube series called “The Autonomous Ecosystem” describes these changes.

For instance, parking places in the city centres are not needed anymore. This will transform the whole infrastructure of inner cities. Also, the value proposition of a car will change. Who will own/buy/possess the car, an individual or a company? Is the car's brand important or the company and the services it offers?

There will also be an enormous impact on personal and city finances. All the money people spend on buying a car, insurance, and fuel can be spent on something else. Good for you, but cities will have to deal with an enormous gap in their budget.

“The problem, as speaker Nico Larco, director of the Urbanism Next Center at the University of Oregon, explained, is that many cities balance their budgets using money brought in by cars: gas taxes, vehicle registration fees, traffic tickets, and billions of dollars in parking revenue.” (Autonomous vehicles might drive cities to financial ruin — Wired)

So the city's design will change and the way to organise the economics of a city too. In that way, driverless cars will also trigger a complete transformation of our infrastructure. Maybe we get

“mobility hubs,” where riders switch between a bike and a car and the public bus and the subway. Could a station be a place to charge electric bikes and scooters and maybe even cars? (Lyft’s big bike-share buy is about ruling the streets — Wired)

But we are not there yet. At the moment, many companies compete to release the first truly driverless car. They try to come up with their own autonomous driving system. However, traffic safety is in the public domain: traffic rules, roads, traffic light and not to forget traffic regulation and enforcement are all general matters and organised by or under the supervision of government agencies. Can and should all the effort, energy and capital put in by numerous companies be combined and directed to one safety system that rules them all?

Seat belts, airbags, and crumple zones are clearly parts of the car that keep the passengers from being harmed in an accident. Roads, road signals, traffic lights, and traffic rules are public measures to prevent accidents. Is the autonomous driving software and safety system part of the road or part of the car? I would say, food for thought for ethicists. And it is a giant meal, so start eating. Here are some appetizers.

“If we had a single system with clear expectations, clear deliverables, clear failure modes, and outcomes there would be a greater level of transparency and understanding,” says Deborah Hersman, CEO of the National Safety Council.”
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“However, some experts see a serious risk to the one-code-fits-all approach. “It locks everyone into a single system that might not allow for future innovation or change going forward,” warns Argo’s Salesky. “Not everyone is solving for the same reasons or solutions.” (Should autonomous driving systems be compatible — Digital Trends)

That our transport system will change is evident. Traffic is already changing. Red traffic lights are seen as bad user experience. Operating your mobile phone instead of the vehicle you are driving is not an exception anymore. So allowing drivers to hand over control to software, is not a bad idea. Whether developments around driverless cars will lead to fewer traffic jams, I don’t know. The real test will be on the road to the beach on the first hot summer weekend after a cold winter.
Personally, I hope that the change will bring a three-layered road system, a top layer for delivery drones, a middle layer for autonomous transportation and a ground layer for the people that need to kick start their day with electric bikes like the Star Wars naked speeder 74-Z. Cannot wait for that…

Autonomous driverless cars, thanks — no thanks

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Written by Jan van Boesschoten