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The flip side of autonomy.

Google. Volvo. Mercedes. Tesla. Uber. Everyone with wheels...

The idea of the autonomous car is barreling into our collective consciousness, as inevitable as death and taxes, as benign as a cold glass of mountain spring water poured by a monk and brought to you by a vestal virgin.

Soon, they say, we'll be able to snooze or read the paper during our morning commute. Our cars will park themselves and return at our command, buying gas and a Twix bar while you're otherwise occupied. Congested roads will flow once again. Accidents will be a thing of the past. Routes will be optimized, fuel consumption reduced, and the Earth a greener place.

But if we dig a little deeper, we find a hundred little implications. Things we didn't originally envision. Side effects. Misgivings. Oddities. Let's explore...

When cars become autonomous ...

Inside the car

Rather than being more enjoyable, your commute will feel even worse due to abject boredom as you ponder your lousy job.

The number one (no pun intended) requested feature will be an in-car restroom. Number two? Nap-optimized seats.

People who can't ride backwards will be seen as prima donnas.

Parents will wonder how young is too young to let their child ride by themselves ... perhaps while strapped into the baby seat?

Knucklehead teenagers will get hurt trying to cross from one car window to the other while on the highway.

We'll be really annoyed when all that beautiful glass throws reflections on our tablets and phones.

They'll play 'vroom vroom' sounds when they drive so that they feel peppier than they really are.

We'll carry our seat setting preferences with us in our phones and any car will adjust to our favorite recline.

Slowing to check out a nice house or a beautiful person will require three taps, a swipe, and a manual override, and the moment will be missed.

Windshield wipers, rear-view mirrors, and eventually brake pedals and steering wheels will be optional extras.

At first, you'll always get into the "driver's" seat, but eventually you'll just get into whichever door is closest.

There will be epic battles over the music, because "driver's choice" won't work any more.

Driving your own car will be sexy and rebellious, like riding a motorcycle, driving stick, or getting your hair cut with a razor.

Traffic

Putting an entire city into gridlock will require little more than semi-organized wandering in the streets, started with but a tweet.

We'll be annoyed when our cars have to comply with antiquated stop signs, stop lights, and lane markers for the non-autonomous cars.

It will be frustrating when they decide to go get gas three minutes before we need them to come pick us up urgently.

Intersections won't have stop lights, and will be terrifying high speed crisscrosses to the uninitiated as they blaze through at full speed.

They'll drive down the exact center of the lane, eventually creating two strips of left-behind rubber like the kiddie race cars at Disney.

Cars will all go at the same gentle but efficient speed. But there'll be a 'hurry up' button, too. Which will be abused.

Streets will become clogged with human-less cars ferrying forgotten lunches, 2-page legal documents, and shared puppies.

Database race conditions will lead to gridlock on the lightest of traffic days.
Bumper-to-bumper traffic will mean your commute is going swimmingly at somewhere between 74.99 and 75.01 mph.

You'll be able to get a per-mile discount if you program your car to let others go first at stop signs.

Routing

It'll be possible to optimize for a comfortable ride or a bat-out-of-hell stomach-churning fastest possible (but still technically 'safe') ride.

Some cars will have an optional 'clear my head' route which takes you through tree-lined paths and to beautiful sunset overlooks - but it'll cost extra.

You'll rarely spill your coffee because cars will build a global, real-time map of potholes and speed bumps.

Quaint neighborhoods and side streets will become thoroughfares, as algorithms optimize for speed and fuel economy, not aesthetics.

(Not) Driving

It'll be harder for cops to figure out who is the bad guy, because nobody will be driving erratically.

People will forget how to drive, and then when it snows heavily the autonomous systems will give up and people will have absolutely no idea what they are doing.

Sassy teens will write their own firmware to make their cars always drive in reverse, just for the LOLs.

People from developed countries won't be able to get around by themselves when they travel the world.

Society

Your car might be subpoenaed to provide data on something that someone else did, even though you personally never saw it.

Parents will wonder just how young their child can be and still send them alone in the car. While still in the baby seat, perhaps?

Our workdays will expand to incorporate our commute time, rather than commuting becoming relaxation time.

Every once in a while you'll see an empty car barreling down a desolate highway to rescue a spurned lover and bring them back home.

Driver's licenses will no longer be the de-facto ID in the US, and carrying a non-driving ID will feel 1984ish at first.

Kids will be able to play baseball on the streets again.

Under the right circumstances, it'll make more sense to send something to Chicago via your (otherwise) empty car than via FedEx.

We won't give our cars names any more because they will just be a shared resource.

Misfits will paint new lines on roads to redirect them into oncoming traffic; software will need to be smarter.

Technology

The latest software push will cause thousands of accidents in just minutes.

They'll have tiny little motors and draft each other on the highway for efficiency, a long metallic pea pod of humanity.

Brands

They'll have their own driving records. Certain brands will cost more to insure due to software bugs.

Less-expensive cars will require their passengers (the horror!) to manually put the snow chains on.

Prestige cars will allow others from the same 'marque' to merge – owners will be buying into an ease-of-traffic-flow club.

Everything Else

Parking lots will become human-less, densely-packed, self-organized bumper-to-bumper grids of cars awaiting their masters (or their side jobs as driverless ubers).

The primary reason for using a GPS will no longer be driving, but for walking directions.

It will be exceedingly frustrating when cars break down sufficiently that they can't drive themselves to the shop for repairs.

Written in 2017. Most of these will probably be true by the time you read this.

Elsewhere

Interested in more thoughts on autonomous vehicles? Check these out:
People hacking the roads to confuse autonomous cars on BLDGBLOG
Rodney Brooks' excellent article on unexpected consequences of self-driving cars
A roadmap for a world without drivers on Medium by Alex Rubalcava
These two bits about the ethics of autonomous cars
A long one about the privacy implications of the data being recorded by autonomous vehicles
A gorgeously-researched article on second-order consequences of autonomous vehicles
Vox.com on why the transition to self-driving cars is fraught with problems
Damon Krukowski on the musical sounds emitted by some hybrid Hondas
Why is this Self-Driving Car Confused? at FastCompany
Ford's self-repossessing car patent is a "nightmare of the connected-car future" on the Verge


 

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