Cars that drive themselves: traffic jams gone forever; no more speeding tickets; drunk driving a thing of the past; no need for red lights; cars that calculate the speediest, safest routes based on cameras and GPS data.
This is not science fiction. The technology for this is here. Tested by Google, computer guided cars have already driven themselves through long road trips, and their safety record is practically flawless. However, due to certain technical and legal kinks, they are not yet available for ordinary buyers.
But the idea has captured my imagination; I want to fast-forward myself into a future where self-driving cars are the norm; for me, their promise is personal.
Most kids dream of the magical day when they will get their license. They see it as the ultimate freedom and an important rite of passage into the magnificent world of adulthood.
As a teenager I wanted freedom, too, but I viewed driving a car in a different way than my classmates did; whereas they saw freedom, I saw rules, a ponderous array of them; driving felt uncomfortable, something forced on me.
I hated the clunky, awkward feeling of maneuvering a car, as if I had suddenly gained five hundred pounds and was in danger of ramming into someone with my excess girth.
I imagined — even worried — that a sudden freak impulse might seize control of my hand and cause me to veer into oncoming traffic. It would take so little, just a flick of the wrist to go sailing head-on into another car.
Whenever my dad said, “Are you ready for your driving lesson?” I thought I should say yes; instead, I would make excuses not to go. Either I could lug around a lurching behemoth made of heavy metal, steering it this way or that, or I could finish reading The Chronicles of Narnia.
I preferred snow-swept Narnia. In Narnia, people walked. I liked that.
I did ultimately get my license; I had to. Aside from being permission to drive, a license is the standard proof of identification everywhere, and proof of adulthood.
But also, in my small SC town, public transportation was, and still is, scant. If you wanted to get anywhere beyond walking distance, you had to have a license and a car; you had to drive.
But I never liked it. And later something happened to make me like it even less.
One day driving home from college registration and fretting about a scheduling problem, I had one of my mind blinks; that is, I had a sudden, quick attention lapse as I was making a left turn.
It was easy to zone out; my path to home was well-worn and automatic; habit took over, and I began sliding into the right lane.
I caught myself. Regret flashed. What was I doing? I had not turned around to look behind my shoulder first, before I started shifting lanes. Everything happened in a single breath, and it is hard to remember what happened first: the car moving or my moment of wishful thinking that I would get lucky, that there was no one there, that I was fine; I would be more careful from now on.
Then I felt a bump, a light crunch of metal. A sickening feeling nailed me to my seat. Horrified, I veered away. The car I had hit moved ahead, pulled to the side of the road, and stopped. I pulled up behind it, braked, and switched off the ignition.
The driver, a girl my age, was unhurt, but she was understandably not happy with me; I would not have been happy with me either, but I was as much in shock as she was. I went into a nearby nursing home and I called 911. There was a feeling of unreality as a highway patrolmen arrived and jotted down my insurance information.
Despite everything, I was glad it was only a fender bender and no one was physically injured; it could have been much worse. However, my insurance premiums rose, and the memory etched itself inside me. I hated driving more than ever.
I have always lived inside my head a lot. “Mind blinks” have plagued me since early childhood. The transition always happens easily, without warning, without awareness, like falling asleep.
In math classes they caused me to add numbers I should have been subtracting. Sometimes they caused me to accidentally wear my shirt inside out. Or to shake my carton of orange juice – after I had opened it.
But in all of those situations, the consequences were embarrassing at worst. The potential for them to physically harm someone was nil.
Behind the wheel of a car, everything changed. The same momentary lapse of attention that could cause me to accidentally throw a sock away could do major physical damage to another person. A simple harmless gesture at home could mean liability or fatality in a car.
When I drove after that, I was always scrupulously careful, but I was so self-conscious, so aware of the potential for an accident, I avoided driving whenever I could.
Family members tried to encourage me. “You can be a better driver than most people from now on; you know what can happen.”
This may have been true. I would never talk on a cell phone while driving and I would never try to pass a driver over a solid yellow line; I would never ride the bumper of another car in the hope of making them go faster.
And it was true that I saw bad drivers every day, many of whom seemed unaware of the risks, drivers who thoughtlessly drifted into oncoming traffic, who swerved drunkenly, who zoomed around other cars in a reckless display of machismo.
Compared to them, I was a good driver because I cared, because my sense of danger never left. But I hated driving; I hated being in control of a metallic juggernaut, and I hated that I seemed to have no choice.
In my reading, I was delighted to discover that renowned science fiction writer Ray Bradbury had a dim view of driving, too. He had never gotten his license, nor wanted one; not needing to rationalize away the risks, he saw the dangers better than most.
However, most drivers drive well enough, and for individuals the risk of having an accident on any single trip seems low.
But there have to be people who are congenitally bad drivers, who simply have no aptitude for it, the way some people have no aptitude for surgery. But if someone confesses to a lack of scientific aptitude or fine motor skills, no one says, “You’re just under-confident, you would make a fine surgeon; you just need more practice.”
With driving, if someone has the insight into themselves and the courage to admit, “I hate driving and have no talent for it,” family members are likely to scold the deviant for under-confidence and encourage him back onto the road. Driving is considered such a basic life skill that is it better to do it ineptly than not at all.
I wonder, how many of the bad drivers on the roads are people who once admitted not liking to drive, or being bad at it, but were derided for cowardice and then encouraged onto crowded roads by well-meaning family members?
Is one of them the guy who insists on driving 20 miles an hour, swerving, on the interstate highway?
Traffic jams, wrecks, driver fatigue, road rage; most everyone accepts the risks as being outweighed by the benefits.
Which is why I love the idea of self-driving cars, machines that never get tired, angry, or impatient; that are optimized for the single, concentrated task of driving.
But like all technology that has the potential to radically alter society, it has led to a firestorm of resistance; the idea of cars driving themselves horrifies many people. They see it as giving up their freedom and individuality.
It is hard for me to imagine what they consider freedom. It is waiting in a traffic jam for two hours when you need to go to the bathroom? Or driving 10 miles an hour on a 50 mile per hour road because the truck in front of you is crawling?
With self-driving cars, these frustrations could disappear; attention would be freed for other activities: passengers could read or watch movies. Designated drivers would become unnecessary.
There would potentially be no more drunk drivers at all, ever – a whole social problem wiped out in one technological stroke, a major source of danger gone.
Though everyone is aware of the dangers of driving, few bother complaining; people have to get to work and buy groceries. People want to go places. What good is complaining?
But the new technology opens the door to more ambitious safety expectations.
Unfortunately I am told that this technology will not reach its full potential in my lifetime, in part because of the massive resistance against it. But I am ready.
A mind blink should be just that; not a cause for danger, not a crime, but as harmless as throwing a sock away. Human error will always be with us, no matter how much we strive for perfection.
But the situation of controlling a powerful machine can turn momentary, and normally innocuous, human lapses into fatal tragedies.
Computers, however, excel in mechanical tasks. They will never get angry, fall asleep behind the wheel, get emotionally distracted, or succumb to road rage. Trips would be faster and probably more relaxing. Passengers could focus on doing things they enjoy, not with the fake freedom of a car commercial, with cars that seem to soar through space; rather, passengers would have more time to do the things that matter to them.
Until then, driving will remain the prevailing form of locomotion, although my new town in Florida has more transportation options: bus stops are everywhere and many people ride bicycles.
But I still hope the predictions are wrong; I like to imagine that self-driving cars will become ubiquitous in my lifetime; in my imaginary autonomous car, I will get in, set the destination, and relax. I will eat chocolate pretzels, drink Ginger ale, and play a video game.
Or maybe I will read The Chronicles of Narnia again, the car humming below, navigating smoothly, while I wonder if magic might be real, after all.