This thing ain't driving itself

Something to note: With the new technology, the function of the engine has been assumed by the fins.

The following are some thoughts that percolated in my brain as I was reading Yuval Noah Harari's Homo Deus, a book heralding our robot future, on a recent road trip vacation.   For the purposes of this exercise we do have to adopt a momentary Trumpian myopia about climate change, and suspend our anxieties about the impending planetary emergency.

It's not a given in a capitalist society, but we can always hope that Self-driving Vehicles (SDVs) will be ready to roll out before they are actually rolled out. Self-driving cars will not be ready for the world until they can get from point A to point B on public roads (and then on to C, D, E and F before returning home to A) following traffic rules, without smashing into things and without their evasive moves causing other vehicles to smash into them.   Other vehicles will presumably be driven almost exclusively by people when self-driving cars are ready for market.  This means that in the beginning, each car will have to be equipped with technology of an autonomous nature-- it will likely be equipped to coordinate its movements with the merest smattering of other robotic vehicles in the vicinity, but being unable to communicate directly with the brains of human drivers, squirrels and children chasing balls into the street, it will have to watch out for the other guy and fend for itself on the streets, just like anyone else.  Given the complexity of the task this may make them for the time being something of a menace.   Nevertheless, the skills needed by an SDV, once perfected, do not have to be taught, but can be merely copied from the original and uploaded to other SDVs.  Hence, as more and more SDVs replace HDV's (known for the moment still simply as V's), the connectedness of an individual SDV with the universe of similarly connected SDVs will become increasingly the point of its existence, as their movement in traffic will become synchronized in a sort of collective mind.

The pressure for humans to adopt SDVs will begin as a marketing campaign, attracting initially only the usual assortment of breathless first adopters and those most susceptible to the call of advertising; but as soon as it can be plausibly done, rest assured that the option of purchasing an SDV among all the automotive choices available will become less and less optional.  As more and more SDV's take over the streets, it will be noted that the greatest danger on roads will no longer be the rogue show-off in the robotic car, because they will no longer be rogue so much as part of the hive, tapped into a superiorly functioning shared consciousness calculating an ever changing choreography of the interaction of its millions of moving parts a nanosecond at a time.  No, the real threat to public safety will be the disconnected, slow brained jackass still relying on his ape wits to operate his personal mode of transportation in a bubble.  At some point, it will become immoral to drive a car by yourself.  Long before that point, it will become ludicrous from a budgetary perspective as insurance companies will manipulate the cost of their services to make driving a HDV prohibitively expensive. Jurisdictions are likely at that point to make it illegal as well except perhaps in retro auto-themed parks*.  Lately, I've been feeling that driving is a lost art, but if you agree with me, just wait.  At some point for insurance purposes, even those auto-themed parks will provide mere robotic simulation of driving as no one will any longer have had any experience doing it under their own prowess.

Confidence in a driverless future is high.  Those who write about AI, the rise of the robot and the coming singularity tend to list highest among the most vulnerable professions to the change, and the earliest employment casualties, the drivers: truckers, cabbies, bus drivers, delivery people.  Few are contemplating the impact this will have on country music.  Will truckers for instance become mere loaders and unloaders of their rigs, meatware adjuncts to the transportation unit that is the SDV (if there's a place for them at all)?

Cars have always been about autonomy.  In the future, it's literally the cars that are autonomous.  The "drivers" will henceforth be dependent.  The interior of a car may continue to feel as much like a bubble from the outside world as the passengers desire, but each car will be tuned in to every other.  The consciousness will extend to more than just the Car Mind.  Each car will be tapped into the singularity.  In this way, a car might catch a human passenger complaining of hunger (or detect an increase in saliva flow), analyze all the passengers' tastes in food, calculate which cuisine would suit everyone at this moment based on each passenger's recent meals and the availabilities and wait times for choices nearby.  To assist with a decision, perhaps some Bollywood plays softly on the sound system, synth-coriander is mixed in with the car freshener, and the car reroutes itself to the Indian restaurant.  But the uncanny prescience has a downside as well.  As the family enjoys an appetizer of samosas, an enforcement bot enters the restaurant, sidles up to an adjoining table and unobtrusively issues a summons to appear before the IRS for a tax violation instantiated earlier in the day to a patron whose whereabouts were made known thanks to an earlier routing to the restaurant by his SDV.  In future upgrades to the SDV software, the car will already know about the impending violation and deposit him at the IRS before he's made up his mind about lunch.

There is a point at which the impact of all this efficiency starts to fight against the very reason for its existence.  What could those driverless semis be carrying when the jobs of potential consumers have vanished in obsolescence?  Where will potential passengers be able to afford to go?  Why would people bother to venture out of their smart houses with no job to go to, when drones can bring what they can afford to procure for themselves from the Universal Basic Income authorized by Congress and signed into law by President Andew Yang as its last act before the singularity dismantles the government as a means of increasing the efficient delivery of misery to homo sapiens?  At what point does it sink into even our inferior ape minds that humans are no longer the beneficiaries of their robots and not even the slaves but are instead superfluous detritus, at best irrelevant to the project of the superior intelligence they have fashioned?  Is it at the point that the singularity disengages from human history, sheds us like a once confining skin and proceeds to slither out into the greater universe in search of other worlds and galaxies to conquer as it must?

At that point can we go back to driving our own damn selves?

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* F1 Racing will continue to be a sport until as with dog and horse racing society decides it's unethical to exploit cars in this manner and abolishes it.