One last time with feeling
I’ve received the third and final speeding ticket of my life. The first was roughly 40 years ago, the second 20 and the most recent yesterday. It follows that if there is to be a fourth it will be 20 years from now, by which time I’ll be dead or 84. If I’m dead I’m dead, and if I’m 84 I shall be hunched over the steering wheel, wearing a hat, and going so slowly that 64-year-olds curse me. Ergo, this is the final speeding ticket of my life and I think that calls for a drink.
Actually, should I get to 84 – and here I make the sign of the evil eye – there may not be a wheel for me to hunch over. Most cars by then will be self-driving, and it will be a very different world. Last week in California a self-driven Tesla self-drove itself into a tree. Two people died, so there is no cause to gloat, but if the accident slows the rise of the selfdriving car, and with it the bid by Elon Musk to run the cosmos, then the dead may be considered martyrs.
People will tell you that self-driving cars take the wheel out of the hands of fools and drunks. But they do not tell you into whose hands they put it. The answer, of course, is into the hands of the people who programme the cars, people whose names we do not know and whose faces we never see. On balance, I prefer the fools and drunks.
The self-driving car will grant enormous power to those who oversee its chips. Imagine 20 years from now if I defaulted on a speeding fine. How simple it would be to immobilise my self-driving car remotely. Or even to lock its doors with me inside and deliver me, screaming with impotence, to the nearest police station. All of which sounds both futuristic and amusing, so long as it’s happening to someone else.
Such a world is closer than we think. There were portents of it even in yesterday’s ticket. When the lights came on behind me I thought I knew the drill. I pulled over, wound the window down and got my licence ready. But the policeman tapped on the passenger window, no doubt for new-age reasons of health and safety.
On the footpath he’s less likely to be struck by a passing vehicle, and better placed to thwart my signature move which is to seize him by the throat, drag him through the window, overpower him and drive him so deep into the mountains that by the time he’s walked out, I’ve emigrated to South America.
Twenty years ago the young policeman licked his pencil and laboriously took down my details. Forty years ago the policeman cut himself a quill and dipped it in a little well of ox-gall. But yesterday when I offered my licence the policeman waved it away and addressed me as Julian, the name that I discarded half a century ago for being too Famous Five, but that lingers in official databases like the smell of buttered crumpets. Thanks to the internet the policeman already knew all about me.
Perhaps because he had that power over me, he could not have been nicer. He explained how he would have loved to let me off with a caution, but my transgression was too great. The notice of fine would reach me in a week or so. Meanwhile, I should have a nice day.
I thanked him with deep insincerity and drove on, reflecting that it is always later than you think.