Self-drive cars and the myth of freedom
Many of our readers will spend part of this holiday weekend in a traffic jam. It’s a British tradition: rail repairs plus road works equals long queues. But is there a solution around the corner? This time next year, you may notice that the vehicles creeping along the adjacent lane are travelling very close to each other and very carefully: a small number of self-drive lorries are to be tested on British motorways for the first time. The hope is that they will not only be safer but less likely to cause congestion. The public is promised a technological revolution.
In fact, surveys suggest most Britons are not convinced that self-drive cars will be available to the masses soon, and we’re not sure we would want them even if they were. But assuming that progress cannot be stopped – and, for the sake of argument, let us call self-drive progress – a conversation still needs to be had about where all this is leading. If it takes off, self-drive could have as big an impact upon our society as the spinning jenny or the internet.
There are limits. Self-drive is likely to be very expensive, and if anyone thinks they can rely on their clever car to get them home after a long night at the pub, they are mistaken. There is a good chance that the law will still require them to be alert and on standby, just as pilots cannot have three martinis before departure, even though most aircraft now fly on automatic. The Air France Flight 447 disaster showed why. The captain was on a break when sensors on a flight from Rio de Janeiro to Paris went haywire, and two inexperienced co-pilots took the wrong action. Flight 447 stalled and crashed into the ocean.
Car technology will advance, as things tend to: costs will fall and safety will improve. But we are certainly not there yet. One of the three lorries to be tested in convoy next year will have a human driver – the one in front. Up to two other lorries will follow closely behind. Critics say that the experiment is not only a waste of time, because our motorways are so clogged that self-drive vehicles will have to travel as slowly as everyone else, but it could create danger. Won’t three huge lorries travelling in a row block road signs and obscure exits? Moreover, they may well be driven by robots that know the highway code inside out, but they will still share the roads with flawed human beings. In some situations, roads are only as safe as the least safe driver on them – and having a smattering of automated cars probably won’t enormously reduce the risk of accident.
It will, however, create new ethical issues. Academics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have invented an online “moral machine” in which users are invited to choose what to programme their vehicle to do in a series of deeply unpleasant scenarios that self-drive cars could encounter. For example, what happens if the car is speeding and, suddenly, there is an obstruction in the way? Option A is to plough into the obstruction, killing everyone in the car. Option B is to swerve away from the obstruction into a crowd of pedestrians. To make things even harder, the moral machine asks users whether they would prefer their car to crash into the elderly or the young, people crossing at a green light or a red light, strangers or their own family.
The point is that technological revolutions may make life easier, but they never remove our moral responsibility for how said technology is used – just as the free speech bonanza unleashed by the internet has actually demanded greater consideration of how we speak to each other, while the state increasingly steps in to mitigate offence or even to censor controversial opinions. With every bit of freedom that science grants the individual, society finds some way of limiting it, often for perfectly good reasons.
One word associated with the car is “freedom”. It’s a very Thatcherite invention. Being completely in charge of a powerful machine – being free to ride it wherever you want – is a fantasy that those trying to sell the self-drive revolution may struggle to beat. Of course, we have to remember that it is a myth. The roads are financed by the taxpayer; driving is governed by hundreds of rules and regulations. And when one is crawling behind a horsebox on the M3 on a Bank Holiday Monday, it hardly feels like driving at all.