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Autonomous Vehicles Are Coming
How the AV revolution will be engineered
When the first adumbrations of a new technology appear, thoughtful people try to discern the likely future implications. Today, a lot of thoughtful people are worrying about the impact of autonomous vehicles (AVs). Jobs will be lost. People will feel robbed of agency. What are the ethical implications of software making life-or-death decisions?
While such weighty questions do deserve some thought, they are in fact completely irrelevant to the adoption of AVs.
We humans are evolved to seek the path of least resistance because for 98% of our evolutionary history that was the strategy that would most likely aid survival. Expending excess energy on an unnecessary task burned calories that could be needed for moments of exigency. So we are adapted to do as little as possible, both physically and mentally. This is why today, surrounded by an excess of calories and a plethora of entertainments, most of us are fat and indolent and our heads are filled with ephemeral trivia. Furthermore, we have a built-in bias to keep doing whatever is familiar because that’s generally the easiest thing to do.
So how are people going to be persuaded to adopt AVs?
The Dunning-Kruger effect means that 99% of drivers hugely over-estimate their competence, imagining themselves to be “better than average” drivers, even as they update their InstaSnap accounts on their smartphones while attempting to cross three lanes of commuter traffic by means of one wrist limply draped across the top of the steering wheel. AVs would rob the average person of their sense of agency. AV marketing folk worry about this a lot.
It is, however, not a problem. Instead of attempting to address the loss of agency, clever AV marketers will simply circumvent the problem entirely. We have the example of Orwell Boxes to illustrate this phenomenon. Today, millions of people have enthusiastically spent their own money to put third-party surveillance devices into their own homes. Why? Because these were designed to appeal to human nature. They are cute, they glow in pretty colors, and they mimic human responsiveness. No one who buys one of these devices thinks for a moment about the fact that literally anyone with a few dollars and some…
