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Driverless Cars and Sobriety
I’d like to make a prediction: driverless cars — which are back in the news — will undermine our culture’s strong censure of drunkenness. I think we will revert to the kind of relaxed view toward mild inebriation that was the case in, for example, pre-automobile England.
Giving ordinary people the power to control high-speed vehicles initiated a unique era where anyone might wreak unintended violence upon innocents through a mere moment’s inattention. The driverless car era will bring that to and end and, consequentially, the stigma against being tipsy will fade. I predict people will look back on this era with pity and horror (probably over drinks).
I’m not saying this will be a good thing; I’m just making a prediction. Certain drinking habits, now hidden, will come to light and we’ll learn about the true extent of alcohol consumption and high-functioning alcoholism.
How else might driverless cars change the culture?
Published in Culture, Science & Technology
Why flying cars are a terrible idea.
You think trying to find a parking spot sucks now? Imagine hovering over the street trying to find a spot. Now land without chopping a pedestrian’s head off.
Back To The Future 2 made it look so easy.
I’m betting it’ll be an EMP blast from an enemy. Want to make a wager? When it happens I’ll PM you and…oh, wait.
You won’t be allowed single-passenger trips. Those are wasteful. Your Centrally-controlled car will not operate until there are at least two or three people in it.
I had to read #10 a couple of times before I understood what you meant here. It’s been a long day . . .
Driverless cars, genetically engineered people–we’re living in a science fictional world. ;-)
Aggregating all your comments on this thread, Drew, I am nominating you for the “Optimist of the Day” award.
Living through the Obama years has cursed me with precognition.
That rarest of things, the disappearance of a government bureaucracy. G’ bye DMV.
No more cruising for parking downtown, or walking blocks after you park. Just get off where you want and send the car home till you need it.
Leading to, a vast reduction in unsightly and land wasting parking lots.
100 mph on the freeway. Or will it be 150? Few to zero traffic jams.
Order 80% of your usual supermarket items. A little three-wheeler with nothing but shelves and an ice box (no space wasted on seats) will deliver it to your front door,
We’re retiring back to the States next year. Driverless cars have opened up great new possibilities for us in terms of considering where we want to live, and considering that our ability and desire to drive places will begin decreasing in the foreseeable future.
No need to think about reliance on friends and relatives to get places in, say, a couple decades.
Oh, please. The Bureaucracy for the Autonomous Auto (BAA!) will spring up in a thousand counties overnight, populated by 10,000 brand new government workers, all with designs on controlling your life.
BAA, huh? Have Americans sunk to the level of your dreary prognosis while I’ve been away? I hope and pray … and believe … you are wrong, but I have to admit I wouldn’t bet money on it.
Americans? No. Our government? Yes.
Two words: senior citizens.
Autonomous cars will extend the mobility of older people who cannot or should not drive. It will be great.
Younger, capable, healthy people say, “I’ll never give up driving!” But when they’re 85, they will sing a different tune.
We are talking portal-to-portal service here. No waiting. How great is that?
Love older people. In fact, I’m getting older myself. But I love driving. If what you’re saying is I should give up driving independently and not be able to determine when, where, how, and how fast I drive so that a senior citizen (fully hoping to reach senior citizen status myself) can take a car to bingo?
Not feeling it, Koblog.
No, man. We just want you to be able to get around when you decide for yourself that it’s time to hang up the keys. We don’t want you to be stranded.
In a driverless society, in populated areas, instead of owning a vehicle, you will subscribe to a service. Need a pickup to move furniture? Just order it on your app. Going to work? The service picks you (and maybe other people in your area) up and delivers you to your office. Ten year old daughter needs a ride home from soccer practice, order it on her phone.
That would be awesome. Then people wouldn’t pay thousands of dollars for a machine that sits idle 23 hours
a day.
I’ve heard that GPS and Googlemaps are rendering all of us less able to read maps and navigate…so of course, I do my best never to use the GPS to find my way. I’ve still got my battered old Delorme book, which not only shows me logging roads (most of them, anyway), it lets me know if I’m going to be going uphill or down, whether I can anticipate stopping on the way home for a swim in a lake or a glimpse of a good view.
But I like looking at maps when I’m on an airplane, too. Basically, I’m geographically nosy: I want to know what that loop-de-loop river is, or whether the buildings shooting suddenly out of a brown landscape is, indeed, Dallas…and is big whitish body of water the Great Salt Lake or a Lesser Salt Lake or maybe a mirage? (Utah is strange from the air, people…) So I’d imagine my Delorme will still get a decent thumb-through now and then, even when my car is navigating itself.
I get carsick so I can’t read or do anything as a passenger except sleep. That would be nice sometimes, I suppose, but it kills the “get something done while you’re waiting” option.
I didn’t think of this! Dang!
I can knit as a passenger, but I can’t read or look at maps.
Oh, man! This changes everything.
Maybe they’ll have come up with better Bonine?
The one problem with the end of personal ownership of cars is shortages during peak demand. I can’t even imagine what would happen to a driverless-dependent crowd at a Michigan football game when it’s time to leave–which, now that the Rodriguez/Hoke era has ended, is the end of the game. ;-)
An interesting thought. I wonder what the cost for such a service would be. Would it ultimately cost more than owning a car? To me, it sounds like it would be prohibitively high. Still, a possible outcome I hadn’t considered.
Presumably traffic would flow more smoothly and a higher speed if you don’t have people randomly braking/changing lanes/gawking at something on the other side of the road.
It’s always bugged me how long it takes for traffic to get moving when a stoplight turns green. In theory, everyone in line should be able to step on the gas at the same time, instead of “first, driver #1 notices the light changed, steps on the gas. Driver #2 waits until driver #1 has moved 20 feet, then decides to step on the gas himself. Driver #3 eventually quits staring at the hot chick in the car next to him and decides to step on the gas himself. Later, rinse, repeat”.
Look at it this way:
One guy with a disabled vehicle can cause a substantial slowdown. A minor accident causes rubbernecking which causes more rubbernecking. Ditto for when a cop pulls someone over. Major accident can cause hours long traffic snarls.
So all things being equal, if nothing else, every driver who doesn’t rubberneck speeds up traffic slightly. You add enoigh robot cars and eventually you reach a critic mass that speeds up traffic.
When you reach a different critical mass of a robot cars then you get more benefits. Everybody can go faster because robots can make decisions faster than humans. If you network them all together, then they can speed up or slow down together and you get more efficiency gains.
It appears that the State of California is going in the opposite direction than that being predicted in this thread:
http://fee.org/freeman/california-s-plan-to-kill-the-driverless-car/
Indeed, if all cars were driverless and networked, there would be no need for traffic lights at all. The cars could be timed to weave through the intersection without having to stop.
This wouldn’t necessarily require that the cars be under the control of a central processor (presumably owned by the government). Mesh networking could theoretically allow the calculations to be done by the vehicles’ themselves.
Which will bring a clash of rights into play. Does my right to drive my own car overrule the right of the other guy to get to work 20 min sooner?
Of course, people will just move further out. People have a mostly fixed limit to the commute time they will tolerate (some higher than others). If mine is 30 min, and you cut my current 30min in half, I can move out another 15 min, and most likely have more land, etc.
Now, Diverless cars might be the first thing in ages to change that fixed limit. If I can work/sleep/read/watch TV on the way in, maybe 30 min is not so bad. Maybe I go for 60, and my workday starts when I get into my car, and ends when I get home.
Rush hours could shift!
And, if all the big trucks are doing this, they can be timed to avoid high congestion times.
Of course, this sort of “clash of rights” is already in play. For example, plenty of research shows that passing slows down traffic, but you wouldn’t get anywhere making it illegal to pass.
(One European country did make it illegal for trucks to pass on the highway. Trucking companies were against it at first, but then their own statistics proved that their drivers were making way better time.)
The roads would be fine without two groups of people: The Stupid and The Maniacs.
Get rid of them, and it will be fine!