I have long held the opinion that our society has become narcissistic and delusional. The driverless car movement has convinced me of that proposition. Those who insist that driverless cars are a good idea, have forgotten the one thing that always accompanies technology like this - hubris. Mankind's ridiculous belief that humans are capable of circumventing the laws of physics and mastering all technological challenges, demonstrates that we have never learned, or have forgotten, what history has to teach us.
The notion that we must pursue technological advances like this is not, in and of itself, a bad thing. Much has been accomplished to improve our lives because of pioneering efforts like this. But to have autonomous vehicles foisted on us by fiat, leaving the average citizen no choice to decline the invitation (more like a dictate) reeks of Fascism. The driverless car movement leaves the realm of benevolent quest and becomes a pathological self-destructive pursuit when it puts many thousands of lives at risk.
Space technology (to cite just one of many risky technologies) has proven that hubris endangers lives, and several of our astronauts have paid the ultimate price. The difference between that technological risk, and the driverless car risk, is that the astronauts knew what the risk was, and agreed to proceed anyway. I sincerely doubt if most people who may someday be exposed to driverless car risk would agree to accept that risk if they could opt out.
Because an automobile is such a complex mechanism, it has a myriad of potential points of failure. The next time you are driving through your city, take a look at the many car-repair shops, and the many vehicles that are being serviced in them. When you get back home, do an internet search of vehicle recalls. Your research should lead you to the conclusion that cars are generally poorly built and are constructed with parts that are poorly built. Parts fail due to shoddy workmanship, insufficient quality control, or poor-grade materials. Making all of the disparate parts collaborate successfully is another issue. And I haven’t even touched on the points of failure which are due to a bad design.
The parts that go into our cars are generally built by the lowest bidder. Catering to low bids to cut costs, definitely does not resonate with quality and reliability. Do you think that part-failure, poor workmanship, and bad design will automatically vanish when we add an inconceivably intricate and complex system to every car? It will only make vehicle reliability worse. Consider what happens when a car experiences a major failure when on the road. It often crashes, and it's not just the vehicle's passengers who are put in danger, but often, the traffic around it is subjected to two tons of metal hurtling out of control.
And have you thought about hacking? A driverless car will need an internet connection in order to get road and signage updates. The temptation to take control of someone else’s vehicle may be too enticing for the average teenage whiz-kid to resist. There will be mischief by young geeks to “count coup” for their peers, and there will also be a criminal and terrorist element who will do as much damage as possible simply because that is their mission. Today, there is a favorite tactic among computer hackers. It involves hacking into a personal computer and holding it for ransom. They will not let you use your computer until you have paid them. This tactic is bound to migrate to automobile hacking as well.
Most people have never had a forum in which they could raise their objections to autonomous vehices. Most people don’t have any say in whether or how this technology should move forward. The industries involved (automotive, taxi, ride-share, etc.) all seem to be in lock-step to make driverless cars our only vehicular option in the not-too-distant future. If they are successful, we all are at risk of suffering bodily injury (or worse) because of their ill-conceived folly.
Just because we can do something does not mean that we should do it. Just because a new technology seems really cool doesn’t mean that we should abandon common sense to make it a reality. There are too many technological issues which need to be remediated in order to make driverless cars safe, practical, and endemic. But because of humankind’s rapture for technology, and because our hubris, like the little cartoon devil standing on our collective shoulder and whispering in our ear, “Go ahead. You can do it!” we seem destined to find out the hard way that it ultimately just won’t work.
Hubris and science are incompatible. -- Douglas Preston
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