The Contrarian: The Big Lies of Driverless Cars

It seems to me that every day I have someone telling me how diverless cars are going to upend life as we know it, that Elon Musk has huge “hush hush” projects that will change the world, and that the Nazi’s had secret weapons they never used. All these stories have a common theme – bullshit.

First off diverless cars have been around for years working in the mining and mineral industry. All those big massive trucks driving around the pits have no union driver in them. Therefore, let me say that I do think driverless cars have a place in the technological universe, however many of the claims made are completely baseless and the result of bean counters and engineers trying to predict the future which they have no business doing.

LIE 1) “You wont need a car because they will be everywhere!”: The argument is that with a driverless car on call and on every corner you wont need to own. Really? There are plenty of people I know with cars in New York City and there seems to be a cab on every corner. Did Uber do away with car ownership? This is an oft quoted and completely spurious claim because people who already have non-autonomous car alternatives STILL own plenty of cars. What might happen is that there will be less buses and the cabs will be automated.

LIE 2) “You will give up your car because sharing is now easy!” This flies in the face of human psychology. Listen up you dim witted engineer turned fake social scientist – cars are status symbols. Ask an engineer if you need a 200k Ferrari vs a $20k Fiat and he will say “no they both get you there!” People like owning stuff they don’t need and that wont change. People live in their cars and leave their stuff in them, there will NOT be fewer cars on the road this is a fiction.

LIE 3) “Self Driving Cars are better drivers!” Really? Says who? Show me that data. I know enough about vision science to know an AI can’t distinguish between a manhole cover and a pot hole and a puddle with the ease that our bologna sandwich powered brains can. Right now AI does great with what a normal driver does well with, but toss in snow, sand, shifting road conditions and it all falls apart. One day it might be there but that day is not now, or in the next few years and with the time it takes to get equipment certified for use on a car it is years and years off. Expect long haul trucking to be effected because it uses the best of roads and can leverage longer hauling times and the AI wont text or watch movies while driving.

LIE 4) “OMG there wont be auto-body repairs, mechanics, tire salesman or gas station attendants!” Really? You need to get your head out of your own butt. First off all those systems are going to need to be repaired and there will be plenty of people crashing and AI’s getting hit, and AI failures too to keep business going. Business will shift from one kind of repair such as “fenders” to another “onboard sensors”.

LIE 5) “AI is here! It’s going to change your world now!” Uptake of AI will be slowed by regulations and lawsuits and insurance issues and the deaths that will result from their failure and the monetary rewards are going to be far far larger in those lawsuits as jury’s are going to be far less sympathetic to a big corporation and a faceless computer than a human. Sorry Mr. Engineer you seem to have overlooked the very real human factors that effect a product role out by assuming that your study will be enough to change government and lawmakers. Last I checked there are thousands of scientists talking about global warming yet the government of the USA, the largest market in the world, acts in a manner contrary to facts. Grow up, it will take years and years and years for regulations to accept realities, which I must add do not really exist yet.

Conclusion? The tech industry and finance industry is awash in shallow thinking about deep learning and AI. The very limitations of the technology are overlooked constantly in favor of the belief that many very difficult problems will have simple solutions, which they do not. Mired in this cult of technology and singularity worship is the failure to appreciate the human elements that drive uptake and slow adoption. Driverless cars have been here for a long time already and the only reason people talk about them today vs years ago is the hype and empty promises made by companies eager to curry favor with investors and the gullible public-- in short money is driving the story not technological innovation. Innovation will come but it is going to be a clumsy graceless and slow uphill slog so that by the time all the promises are achieved there will be no grand “disruption” as we wont have envisioned it coming, we will have accepted it as normal progress.