The perils of ‘passenger brain’
Trusting in skill of a driver — human or otherwise — is a gamble
We are heading down a pathway I think of as passenger brain; we act differently when we are passengers than we do as drivers. Not all of us, but many of us. Some people don’t do up their seatbelts in a taxi, often people who would always buckle up in their own car. A colleague and I were recently discussing how often we go somewhere for work and are ushered into waiting vehicles to head to a hotel or airport. Some of the drivers are better than others; we have no way of knowing how good they are or their background. Some are great. We’ve also both had some horrible experiences.
I’ve written about teaching your kids to be able to stand up for themselves and get out of a car if they don’t feel safe. I write that, knowing I’ve endured rides I shouldn’t have to avoid making a scene. That’s passenger brain.
We assume someone behind the wheel, especially a stranger, is somehow automatically qualified to be there. So what does it say that so many are prepared to let artificial intelligence take the wheel?
There may be a steady drip of news reports of crashes involving self-driving cars, but even when programs are suspended when it happens, don’t expect the testing to stop any time soon. Last month, a Tesla driver in California was killed while on Autopilot, even though records show the driver had five seconds and 150 metres to respond to warnings, yet he never put his hands on the wheel. A pedestrian was killed that same month by an Uber car — a Volvo SUV set in self-driving mode. The car should have sensed the woman as she walked her bike, but never even slowed down. Camera footage shows the human driver behind the wheel was looking down and not up at the road at the time of the accident.
That last part matters. What’s the point of even pretending a driver is supposed to still be in control when some are so willing to surrender that control? We are rapidly moving into the next phase of “get off of my lawn” when it comes to autonomous vehicles: You may choose whether you get in one or not, but how about not wanting them on your streets?
The naysayers aren’t dismissing or denying the sensational technology being developed at warp speed. For me, no matter how much you convince me how great the technology, you are never going to convince me you can stamp out human nature. Software developers and automotive manufacturers may trumpet their innovations, even with an asterisk beside their safety features (all the fine print says a driver must always be in control of the vehicle at all times), but we will continue to see incident after incident, and crash after crash, until it is made abundantly clear who is in control: you or the car.
Hell, I think it’s even dangerous that Tesla has a system called Autopilot. They make drivers promise to keep their hands on the wheel. Time and again, drivers remove their hands from the wheel. It’s called Autopilot; what does that mean to most of us? It doesn’t mean Sorta Autopilot, or Close Enough Autopilot. It means scroll your emails or have a nap because we’ve all seen an airline pilot come out of the cockpit to use the bathroom. Technological marvel meets human nature. If you think some drivers are dangerous, think how stupid passenger brain can make us, and yet now the line between the two is even more slender.
I’m not a killjoy for wanting to see checks and balances in place to protect both employees and users. Good policy is not an impediment to advancement, it is a much needed oversight for a world that often celebrates the achievement while forgetting the cost.
If autonomous vehicles are going to save lives, they’re going to have to start by not killing people on their way to perfection. To do that, they’re going to have to make it abundantly clear that cars still need drivers when being tested and developed in areas where real humans operate. But of course, if a person is driving, the autonomous features aren’t being tested.
We’re told repeatedly — and correctly — that the most dangerous part of a vehicle is the driver. Injuries and fatalities will plunge when we get the driver out of the equation. So, we need the driver, but the driver is the cause of the problem. How do we get from here to there?
F. Scott Fitzgerald once said, “The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.” I doubt Fitzgerald had ever considered an autonomous car, but he still adroitly sums up the dilemma facing everyone who wants to rush out the driverless era.