“I would much rather have control…”

On self-driving cars and our need for control

This seems to me the crux of the matter: not so much a misplaced confidence in our ability, but an insistence on being the one making the choices we care about.

Which is understandable.

For instance, I’m personally not keen on driving because quite honestly I’d rather be driven so I can do things like read, or write or anything else I consider a better use of my time than being merely getting from A to B. It’s a major reason I actually prefer public transport to driving myself.

My point is, while nobody cares equally about every single available choice, when it comes to those we care deeply about, our behaviour may appear irrational to those who don’t grasp that our concerns are different.

Which is how I temper my instinctive response to this post, which was to wonder why someone would be so confident in our inevitably fallible abilities, the limits of which are well documented.

So yes…

• There’s certainly a bit of straw-manning here in the way AI is portrayed: it’s already far more advanced than this post makes out.
• And there’s a downplaying here of human error: the staggering numbers of daily road accidents which go unreported because they’re so everyday are conveniently overlooked.
• And finally there’s an overestimation of what it takes to make a good driver: being highly skilled puts you by definition in the minority. Bringing up the average skill level via automation is simply far more practical than attempting to turn everyone into an expert, which as far as I know has not been achievable in any field of human endeavour.

And yet I also understand that for anyone to whom being control is super important, none of this carries that much weight. It’s not for nothing that people who aren’t pilots still fear flying, after about a century of planes being part of our reality. (Might one perhaps argue that we don’t fear dying as much as we fear being killed?)

What then? I think it’s worth it for self-driving car engineers to really spend time with doubters and disbelievers. Not to convince them, but to understand them. I hope this is already being done.

Because while it might feel like fun to pooh-pooh doubters, unexpected innovation might be unlocked by respecting their right to their reservations and rather than dismissing them, actually doing the work to make sense of them.

Case in point. Tesla has shown that a lot of the pushback against electric cars wasn’t about electricity itself, but about the driving experience and the aesthetics. Before Tesla electrics and hybrids were ugly things it wasn’t even fun to drive. Many still are. But listen to Tesla owners talk about how much they enjoy driving their cars and the difference is clear.

Maybe the key to unlocking the potential of self-driving cars is to figure out how to have them honour the human need for control?