The romance of the open road still beckons us

Imagine this.

A line of cars is stopped at a red light. Everyone’s chatting or surreptitiously glancing at their phone, or watching a jogger pass by. The light turns green. Car number one hesitates as the driver struggles to return from Pokemon world. Oncoming traffic takes advantage and two cars bang a quick left. Car number two honks and number one wakes up – they both begin to move, and further back in the line, drivers stir to life and slowly tap the gas as the car immediately in front of them begins to move. Like a loose-jointed snake, the conga line finally progresses, but not many make it through before the next red. The guys in the rear are disgusted.

Now imagine this.

  

A platoon of Marines, at ease. The drill sergeant calls them to attention, then issues a command: “Platoon, forward… March!”

All of the Marines, from the front of the ranks to the rear, step off smartly, simultaneously. Each Marine in the column trusts that his or her fellow, directly in front, will step off as commanded. The entire platoon moves as a single unit. It is a beautiful sight to behold.

The behavior of the slovenly, civilian cars and that of the polished Marines could not be more different. The difference is that the drivers do not implicitly trust those in front to move immediately when the green light lights. Lack of trust begets sloppy performance.

Meanwhile, last week, Ford Motor Company announced that they will be delivering “fully driverless cars,” with no steering wheel or pedals, within the next five years.

Now reimagine that intersection. It is 2021, and a line of odd, bulbous cars are all waiting for the light. Each contains one or more passenger and no driver. Everyone is chatting or overtly glancing at their phones, or watching a jogger pass by. While waiting, the vehicles communicate with each other to verify that there are no substandard (human guided) cars present. The light turns green, and the entire line instantly begins to move, accelerating smoothly, akin to a platoon of Marines doing close order drill.

Longer term, all of the traffic lights will have disappeared, replaced with more efficient and fluid roundabouts. Traffic will flow though cities and across the land in electric silence, with the ease of corpuscles in our veins.

Why should we want to do such a thing?

Because vehicles are very deadly, accounting for 33 thousand deaths and over two million injuries each year. Stop and reread those statistics.  The odds of being injured in a motor vehicle accident are enormous, many orders of magnitude greater than that of winning the lottery. While this carnage has been gradually reduced by safer vehicles, increased seatbelt use, and improved roadways, the human and economic cost is still enormous.

And while an occasional blown tire or faulty ball joint or failed brake may cause an accident, the great majority are the result of one thing – operator error. Robots offer great promise in reducing these driver-induced accidents.

Another good reason – because today, drive time is often among our least productive. If your time spent in a wifi-connected, driverless vehicle could be as productive as your home office, multiplied by millions of journeys, every day, the productivity boost to our economy would be huge.

What might stand in the way of this vision? The technology? No, advances in sensors and computing and artificial intelligence are already capable of basic driverless vehicles. Indeed, Google and Tesla have both fielded vehicles capable of high degrees of autonomous operation. Five years from now, those capabilities will have doubled, or tripled, or more.

No, the major impediment to autonomous vehicles will be regulatory and legal. Will autocar developers have a level playing field in all fifty states, or will they have to deal with a patchwork of local regulations? When the inevitable accidents occur, who will be at fault? Will you sue Ford Motor Company, or the laser sensor vendor, or the artificial-intelligence software developer who built and enabled your car? The specifics of autonomous vehicle law and insurance protocols will need to be developed.

There is one regulatory tic which must be avoided at all cost – the demand for 100% perfection. We must be prepared to accept the occasional autocar accident, without flinching, in the face of fierce media barrages. Say that autocars are only 90% effective, but reduce the human carnage to 10,000 deaths, and one million injured. While the carnage is still significant, the human and economic costs will have been reduced enormously.  We cannot allow the perfect to become the enemy of the good.

In the end, shall we ban human operators? After all, we are proven imperfect and dangerous.

I think not. The romance of the open road still beckons us. The beauty of a downshift and acceleration through an ascending curve should not be lost.

Robots are OK when we just want to go somewhere. But we need to be able to express ourselves, to control our trajectory on the road and in life.

Don’t let that spark be stamped out.