If It Makes My Kids Safer, Let the Robot Drive
A response to Stephen Zoepf’s “We’re asking the wrong question about self-driving cars”
Last July, I was walking through a parking lot to drop my children off at summer camp when my 5-year-old-son suddenly jumped and ran — he saw a spider and was playfully overreacting. … in a matter of a second or two he ran behind me and about 15 feet straight into the path of a car … Fortunately the driver was (a) not traveling quickly, and (b) paying close attention to the task, or that morning might have had a very different ending. ...
I can’t think of another common situation in life in which we frequently make potentially fatal mistakes and depend on others to notice and compensate for them. This is a profound form of a social contract, and a shift to self-driving vehicles would be a fundamental movement away from this idea, towards one where we expect vehicles to make fewer mistakes [emphasis mine]. I’m less confident that they’ll be able to fulfill the same role in compensating for the mistakes of others.
- Stephen M. Zoepf, executive director of the Center for Automotive Research at Stanford University.
As a parent who has just started to let his two-year-old daughter out of the stroller to toddle on her own two feet around our busy Brooklyn block — clutching her hand all the way — my instinctive reaction to Stephen Zoepf’s piece about a driver compensating for his five-year old’s “mistake” of running into the path of a car in a parking lot was purely emotional. I felt a wave of terror and resolved to clutch her hand even tighter. Perhaps while keeping her handcuffed to me. No. I would keep her in the stroller, buckled-in, and handcuffed to me (just in case).
But when I started to think about it, I was offended by his premise that driving is a “[uniquely] profound” form of “social contract” — the only “common situation in life in which we frequently make potentially fatal mistakes and depend on others to notice and compensate for them.”
This would imply that non-drivers are missing out on this uniquely profound and sublimely human experience. Forget traveling to Tibet and meditating with monks high in the mountains; what our lives are really lacking is the experience of depending more on others not running us over if we step out of our neatly designated walking zones or don’t merge fast enough? Maybe this is what Ted Cruz meant by his use of “New York values” as an epithet: people here don’t drive enough, thereby opting out of this most profound of social contracts. Not to mention all those Millennials, ditching their cars, taking transit to their jobs from their walkable neighborhoods; this must be why we need to Make America Great Again.
All snark aside, there is a clear lack of perspective in Zoepf’s writing that takes the current car-centric paradigm — or perhaps we should call it, human-driven-car-centric? — as a) universal; b) desired. By saying that he is “less confident” in the social contract that will emerge from the shift to autonomous vehicles, he is not saying that he thinks that there will be more accidents, or more cases of death, maiming, and injust; rather he is saying that humanity will be poorer for the loss of the human-driver social contract. I can picture him clearly, 20 years from now, wistfully remembering the good old days when there was a human touch involved in what is now the facelessness of crash avoidance. After all, what good is saving lives and limbs when it lacks a human touch?
While it may be profound, there is nothing unique about the social contract according to which we notice others mistakes and come to their aid. To use some readily accessible examples in an urban context, William Whyte spends an entire chapter in his seminal book, City: Rediscovering the Center, to what he calls the Skilled Pedestrian; essentially how pedestrians weave in and out of sidewalk traffic, regardless of the “mistakes” others make. Concretely, if I am walking and an absent-minded child steps in front of me, I don’t bulldoze through him; I gently alert him, and let him move out of my path or grab him to keep him from falling if it is too late to avert a collision. The ultimate example of a a non-driver compensating for others mistakes is the subway rescue: jumping down to save someone who has fallen into the tracks, before the next train comes.
I have spent enough of my life in car-dependent life situations — and still drive enough per year — to know that most of the time when others notice and compensate for my mistakes, it is out of self interest. It does not take a social contract, to understand that it is vastly better to avoid getting into an accident when possible, even if that accident somehow avoids damage to your own self and property, does not raise your insurance premiums, and the legal system agrees that you are not at fault.
It is unlikely that altruism, or any other type of prosocial behavior, is enhanced by being inside of a two-ton box of metal and glass. Many studies have been done that have demonstrated that drivers are less connected in one manner or another to their neighborhoods than are pedestrians, as well as less connected to each other. A literature review, not to mention logical inquiry into the differences between sprawling, car-dependent vs dense, urban lifestyles, should easily demonstrate that those who live in the latter are far more dependent on a social contract that attentive benevolence of others when driving than when we are in urban, pedestrian settings
So What Is Unique About Driving?
Driving is unique in that it is the only situation in life that we are commonly in — for most of us that we will ever be in — where we do anything remotely as dangerous, and often as stupid (e.g. drinking and driving, texting and driving, etc.). The real questions we have to ask ourselves about cars, self-driving and manually-operated, are:
- Why do we permit this extraordinarily dangerous activity — the #1 cause of non-medical death for those under the age of 24, and #2 for those 25–44 — to exist in such close proximity with our children?
- Why do we accept as axiomatic the premise of Zoepf’s story — the idea that a 5-year-old, playfully chasing a spider, has committed an error? Perhaps we should ask ourselves why adults in two-ton vehicles should be given the right-of-way over little kids — even in the parking lot of a summer camp.
Zoepf’s incident reminded me of Peter Norton’s classic, Fighting Traffic, on the moral battle of the 1910s and 1920s, between preserving the classic social model of city streets as places for all modes of transportation, including pedestrians, and the newer one of viewing them as primarily motor vehicle thoroughfares, with pedestrians shunted off to the sidewalks. Clearly the latter won, but the book is worth a read for anyone who wants to understand that the current paradigm was not and is not inevitable.
It’s true that most Americans have the perspective of the author, but that’s precisely the point. AVs offer us a chance to rethink things, to question whether our current paradigm is the right one. To wonder, maybe we don’t need door-to-door service when one of the doors is in front of a place where kids congregate, such as a school, camp, or ballfield. Maybe it would be worth setting up the pickup and dropoff spots a little further from this concentration of children, so as to avoid the situation where one of them is likely to make the “mistake” of running in front of us. To make design choices that are less convenient but safer.
This is the chance to ask ourselves, do I want my not smashing into another object at 65 mph to be dependent on other people compensating for my mistakes? Maybe it would be a lot nicer to not have to worry about that at all.
