Driverless cars are coming to change the way we view our cities
LONDON: If you live in a city, step outside your front door and look around. Consider the construction of your environment. What are the fundamental principles in play? How has the world been planned?
This is a hard question to answer, because the truth is so obvious and fundamental that one doesn’t notice it. But I think it’s this: your environment is designed so that you can easily navigate it. It isn’t built for comfort, or for our aesthetic edification, or there would be mosaics on the pavement. It’s built for speed. It’s built so you can get from A to B as quickly as possible. For most of us, that means: by getting in a car.
Even for those of us who don’t own one, the car is a critical prop of modern life, one of a very few things the transformation of which would make the world alien. (Smartphones and the growth of online retail are the only such gamechangers I can think of in recent years.) And its evolution has been sufficiently slow that one hardly pays attention to it or imagines how else it might be: if you were to switch your cellphone, your computer and your car for a 20-year-old model, I think the car’s the only one of which you could live with the difference. No one texts on a vintage Nokia, or sends their e-mail on a classic Amstrad: whatever romance they might have had has been extinguished by their incompatibility with modernity. And yet a 1995 Corsa will comfortably get you to work.
That stasis breeds conservatism, and an assumption that it will continue for ever. But, last week, Vince Cable announced that from January, driverless cars will be allowed to test on public roads. The move would be revolutionary, he said, “putting us at the forefront of this transformational technology”.
To which many of us will, say: hang on a second, Vince. Do you really expect us to entrust our fate, in a speeding two-ton metal box, to the vagaries of the same technology that sits in our laptops? Computers might be good at repetitive tasks, but driving is a dynamic business, a constant management of risk and progress; no computer could know when to nudge forwards at a junction, or when to sneak into the other lane..
The thing is we’re not really all that good at it. In 2010, the last year for which data is available, some 1.24 million people died in road accidents around the world. And the evidence of the many trials going on across the globe, pre-eminent among them the experiments being carried out at Google’s headquarters in California, is that some prototypes are probably already a safer bet than the piloted alternative; in a decade’s time, the difference will be a chasm. Some car companies are aiming to have fully automated vehicles on the market within five years. Most analysts expect the majority of new cars to be driverless by the early 2030s.
There are other things we will lose when driving ceases to be normal. We’ll lose one of the few activities that demand our absolute focus.
The pleasures of speed will become luxurious and lulling, instead of giddy, raw, even subversive. The traveller whose sense of a place is built in part by how he navigates it will find another normalising layer of cotton wool inserted between him and the exotic. And all of us, at least for a while, will sharply draw breath when our automated chauffeur overtakes. All sorts of problems, ethical and practical, will arise. Will there be a way to go faster just because we’re late? If a child is in the road and a carload of pensioners is coming the other way, will the computer be programmed to swerve or carry on?
When it comes, it will become normal more quickly than we could imagine. It’s worth remembering: for each of those practices we will lose, another will arise. Lives will be saved, car parks won’t be needed if our vehicles can potter home after delivering us to work or the shops. And, perhaps, with our Clarksonite tendencies neutered, we will start to look at our cities with fresh eyes. Instead of being places to navigate, they might become places to live.