The Fight for the Right to Drive

Important quote:

political philosopher and motorcycle mechanic Matthew B. Crawford argues that manual competence—our ability to repair the machines and devices in our lives—is a kind of ethical practice. Knowing how to fix things ourselves creates opportunities for meaningful work and individual agency; it allows us to grasp more deeply the built world around us.

The article is about people concerned about the future of autonomous cars. Not just cars that can drive themselves, but cars with no ability to be driven. You can’t drive them because there are no manual controls. I fully expect that if western civilization doesn’t come crashing down in the next decade or two, the roads will inevitably be littered with self-driving autoboxes. These will be vehicles that the occupants only control insofar as that they tell them where to go; cars that the occupants have no idea how to repair or maintain; cars that very likely aren’t owned by the occupants. I will not be the slightest bit surprised if at some point some cities – London, say, or San Francisco or Manhattan – ban anything manually driven and quite likely anything privately owned, with the possible exception of private autoboxes that require massively expensive permits. This will result in terribly efficient transit systems… as long as everything runs normally. But as soon as New Yorkers gets word that they have seven hours to evacuate the city because La Palma has collapsed and a tsunami is on the way, some people will evacuate in their Uber autoboxes… and everyone else, not having access to cars of their own, will be left to walk. Or some enthusiastic and especially ambitious little hacker taps into the system and has all the autoboxes crash into each other or drive at full speed into the East River.

Fully autonomous cars may well be inevitable. Laws mandating that driving be done solely by computer may be inevitable… but may be unnecessary. If autonomous cars prove themselves to be safer than manually driven cars, and if ridesharing them is far more convenient, then the natural course of events could well result in people simply giving up the ability to drive in favor of the perceived convenience of being driven. We have, as previously mentioned hereabouts, largely given up all pretense to privacy; not only do many people happily install devices like Alexa into their homes that they *know* listen to every word they say and transmit that information elsewhere, we’ve also pretty much all decided to willingly carry small hand-held supercomputers designed for the specific function of communications. These supercomputers have microphones and GPS trackers and surprisingly high quality video cameras; who among us would be truly shocked to discover that our phones are, 24/7, listening to, watching and tracking us? If autonomous cars come creeping in to our consciousness as smart phones did, then it’s entirely possible that people will *easily* give up the ability to drive themselves.

It’s clear to see that a simple autobox would be massively convenient for a lot of people in many situations. If you live in some urban hellhole and you need to get from A to B, or you need to cross hundreds of miles from C to D… these things would be awesome. But what if you wanted to just go Thataway, to explore at random? What if you wanted to chase a balloon or a UFO or another car? What if you wanted to sightsee, with many, many sudden stops? Do donuts in the K Mart parking lot? Autoboxes might serve well the function of keeping people stuck within major metropolitan ares by sucking the joy out of driving and turning cars into simply and merely mechanisms of conveyance.

I leave it as an exercise for the reader to determine if it would be better if people who decide that learning to drive is too much of  bother would be best kept from flyover country.