I recently watched the Clint Eastwood movie “The Mule” about an old feller who falls into the role of drug running, driving a truck from city to city with a hundred kilos of coke in the back. He is successful at it because he’s a good, nondescript driver. It got me thinking… in ten to twenty years, technology should provide an even better mule: the self driving car. Even better: self driving Uber-like cars.
Consider: you want to transport two hundred kilos of drugs, or ammunition, or vintage MAGA hats, or guns, or Jordan Peterson books, or whatever is illegal in the 2030’s, from Orlando to Anaheim. You use a burner phone and a non-personalized account to call up a HAL-Uber. It meets you somewhere public yet quiet; you load up the car, install a realistic mannequin (a second-hand “Real Doll,” perhaps) in one of the front seats, then send it on its way. You aim it towards, say, an unoccupied house at the target city. If it all goes to plan, you have some of your boys waiting there to unload. If it gets intercepted en route… shrug. You lose the shipment, but you don’t lose the driver. Probably a minimal concern given the line of business you’re in, but a driver un-caught is a driver who can’t rat you out. You could always hire a *number* of such self-driving cars, either to spread the load or to serve as distractions and decoys.
There are doubtless a lot more details than that; my experience in the field of drug running goes little further than knowing that there are storage compartments under the floor panels of your standard Corellian Engineering Corporation YT-1300 Light Freighter that can be used for smuggling things. Such as how the frak does an unoccupied self-driving vehicle drive for thousands of miles without someone onboard to either refuel or recharge it. But the big question is how does Uber, Lyft, or whoever *prevent* the use of their vehicles for such an obvious illegal use? Package delivery services at least theoretically prevent this sort of thing by occasionally scanning and/or drug sniffing the packages they handle. But if the HAL-Ubers have drug sniffers built into them, they’re going to lose a *lot* business by constantly ratting out the drugged-up partiers loading into them. I suppose AIs could track the origin/destination points and come to learn that certain combinations – starting in some quiet out of the way park, ending in an abandoned Chinese restaurants parking lot, perhaps – is the sort of thing that the DEA would be interested in. But in that case, the cartels will simply change up the plans while hiring a bunch of decoys to run the “expected” routes while filled with candy bars.