It is pretty funny to read an essay about autonomous vehicles from Rodney Brooks, the subject of the documentary, 'Fast, Cheap, and Out of Control’. Like the author, I too in a previous life encountered many of the same automotive navigation dilemmas on the streets of Cambridge, Massachusetts. In fact, I was back there just a few months ago for a family gathering, and the re-discovery of the massive pain it is to operate a motor vehicle in the Boston/Cambridge/Somerville area neatly balanced out the years of nostalgia I still feel for my erstwhile home.
As Brooks describes, every day of driving a car in Cambridge offers the operator genuine dilemmas, which while seldom (never, maybe) rising to the level of the trolley problem, seem to me genuinely to require the full cognitive capacity of a typical human for their resolution. The author asks how we are likely to solve them, offering perhaps changes in the laws, new technologies, or changes in users’ expectations of how cars and streets even work.
As someone who has driven a lot in Cambridge, in Seattle, and in dozens of other places on this continent and a couple others, and seen the wide variation in the ‘user experience’ of driving a car among all those places, I’m pretty confident that the way we’re most likely to address all those problems is All of the Above. That is, there is no chance on earth that there is likely to be more than a superficial similarity between the way you ride in an autonomous vehicle in (for instance) the Bay Area in California and the way you’d do so in Cambridge, or in Montreal, or Nairobi, or Shanghai. Driving around is a whole different thing in places all over the world, in ways that are both codified in law as well as unwritten, just implicit in the local social contract. You only have to watch the way drivers act at a four-way stop in Boston, and compare it to the radically different approach taken by drivers at a similar stop in Seattle, to know that there are expectations about driving that are embedded deep in every driver’s subconscious mind.
Driving is different everywhere already. Add in autonomy: it touches so many different areas of life, and there will be many ways of approaching all the questions that come up. Autonomous vehicles will be, among other things, computers; it would be surprising if we didn’t see iPhone vs. Android, or Mac vs. Windows (vs. Linux vs. some other Linux), replayed once again, only now with cars.
Or we can look at cars and the law. Brooks describes a minor legal dilemma that arose when the only reasonable course for him as a driver in Cambridge was to do something nominally illegal. But spend five minutes in Boston, and then another five in Seattle, and you see that different municipalities have radically different expectations about how literally drivers are meant to take the municipal code with respect to parking. It’s reasonable to expect that different cities are going to have different attitudes about how much to worry about it if driverless vehicles have to stretch the definition of ‘One Way’, or ’15 Minutes Load/Unload Only’, or ‘Arterial Speed Limit 45 mph’.
An interesting area that Brooks doesn’t touch on is the matter of autonomous vehicles and public transport policy. Cities around the world have a wide range of different means of regulating taxis and car services, and the appearance of Uber, Lyft, and Grab somehow hasn’t made the regulatory picture in any of those places more transparent. In any future that includes any kind of autonomy, some cities will regulate driverlessness heavily (maybe to the point of uselessness), and some will not regulate it at all (no driver, no driving license! My toaster doesn’t have a license, either). Empty cars will contribute to congestion, or at least they’ll be suspected to, and constituencies that hate crowded streets will not vote any more sensible about it than they currently do, so there will be all sorts of different legal regimes applied to when and where and how empty driverless cars are even allowed to be.