‘AUTONOMY’: THE FIRST (AND BEST) BOOK ABOUT DRIVERLESS CARS
The first (and best) book about driverless cars
There are far more automated vehicles on Pittsburgh roads than there are books on the topic in the Carnegie Library system.
The popular nonfiction offerings tend to be as helpful as an astrology column — well-intentioned, theoretical, unspecific. The more scholarly works fight a losing battle against proprietary information.
The best option is often YouTube, assuming you’ve got 45 minutes to watch a CEO dodge questions after a presentation in a lecture hall.
So it’s rather easy to identify a new leader in the emerging field of ‘driverless’ literature. Both informative and slog-free, Lawrence D. Burns and Christopher Shulgan’s “Autonomy: The Quest to Build the Driverless Car — And How It Will Reshape Our World” succeeds for the same reason all great science writing does: its interest in people is par to its interest in objects.
The central narrative functions like a heist movie. The target is the Department of Defense’s off-road robot races in 2004, 2005, and 2008. The prize: $1 million for the first contest, $2 million thereafter.
The reporting in these early pages is both nerve-wracking and humorous, providing an inside look at the trial runs of a Carnegie Mellon University-based team of engineers and roboticists that, within a decade, would helm a glut of autonomous vehicle companies.
Prior to a race in the Mojave Desert, a mess caused by a splashy wastewater tank is “so traumatizing that the team outlawed use of the RV’s bathroom.” During an important on-stage demonstration, an engineer secretly crouches inside a driverless vehicle, ready to pounce on the brake should the car unexpectedly accelerate.
These page-turning details can likely be attributed to the efforts of Mr. Shulgan, the reporter receiving a “with” credit on the cover, but it’s Mr. Burns who is the agitated, hopeful heart of the book. If the desert races are written as a heist, then the Burns-centric sections woven throughout “Autonomy” function as a spy’s memoir.
Across 30 years, Mr. Burns rose through General Motors’s research and development division despite driving a flowery Volkswagen Beetle in his youth.
He depicts his younger self as “bearded, shaggy-haired, not exactly a full-on hippy, but pretty close.”
Mr. Burns isn’t after peace, though. He wants change. He argues that cars, unused “about 95% of the time,” are the world’s most underutilized asset. They have disfigured human spaces (suburbs are “designed to be more hospitable to automobiles than human beings”) and human lives (in 2016, 37,461 Americans died in crashes).
I have a violent allergy to tech evangelism, but once Mr. Burns began feverishly calculating an AV’s savings per-mile, I had to concede that me and my pithy biases were unprepared to seriously rebut him.
He is most persuasive when he frames an aversion to automation as a tacit handshake with ‘car guys,’ those industry lifers whose confident skepticism ranges from driverless cars to climate change.
The book convincingly (and self-critically) demonstrates how Detroit lost to Silicon Valley in shaping the future of mobility.
As with any field’s emergent book-length work, “Autonomy” has gaps that future texts must fill. When it comes to the forthcoming automation-induced labor crisis, “Autonomy” mostly gestures toward oft-cited consultancy reports on massive job losses.
The book’s greatest oversight is its representation of women, who are quite literally hidden inside parentheticals in Autonomy: “(He and Jennifer had since had a second boy).” Later, a secretary cries when informed of a production setback, and as is the case with other “Autonomy” women, she is unquoted.
Nonfiction cannot invent interviewees, but correctives to the historical record, such as Claire L. Evan’s superb “Broad Band: The Untold Story of Women Who Made the Internet,” serve as necessary reminders that championing marginalized voices is the job of both the industry and the enterprises who tell said industry’s stories.
It’s also possible that, in a field hellbent on proprietary information, a bit of writerly invention is what’s needed to further explore how driverless cars will change America.
It is easy to imagine a literary editor or agent perking up as they find the AV generation’s “On the Road” in a slush pile.
A Pittsburgh playwright channeling August Wilson might station an AV in the middle of the stage like a piano, fence or phone.
For car companies, the race to market is coming down the home stretch, but now, beginning with “Autonomy,” the race on the new releases shelf is officially underway.
Patrick McGinty teaches in the English Department at Slippery Rock University and is a staff writer for Propeller Magazine. He lives in Morningside.
“AUTONOMY: THE QUEST TO BUILD THE DRIVERLESS CAR — AND HOW IT WILL RESHAPE OUR WORLD” By Lawrence D. Burns with Christopher Shulgan Ecco $27.99