No terrifying robo-cars for me, thank you.

Every few days, another news item appears to herald the imminent demise of the human-operated automobile. Latest to the party is Canada’s BlackBerry, which aims to recast itself as a maker of software for autonomous cars. That’s fine. Good for BlackBerry.

Yet one can’t help but wonder: Why the rush to robo- cars? Surely it can’t be consumer demand. Surely it can’t be economic or political necessity. Surely it can’t be driver and pedestrian safety. Oh wait, here’s a thought: Maybe it’s corporate greed.

Now, I know what you’re thinking: Here’s a guy of a certain age, who came up in the 1980s, who saw both James Cameron’s Terminator films (1984 and 1991) in their original runs, and who consequently cannot cope with modernity. He’s an old Gen-X- er, nostalgic for yesteryear, bellowing “Get off my lawn!”

It’s a fair point. I enjoy driving. I can’t imagine feeling anything but terrified in an autonomous bubble car, piloted through rushhour traffic by circuitry, a sensor array and a navigation beam. As Murphy’s Law holds, anything that can go wrong, will. I therefore visualize my little robo- bubble careening off a bridge, guided by an errant GPS, as I am engrossed in an Ed McBain novel or watching Stranger Things on Netflix. This is how it goes.

Perhaps there is a cohort of consumers, quietly clamouring for this technology. If so, I’ ve seen little evidence of it. This strikes me as more of a wait- and- see market: Wait and see if they work, wait and see if they’re safe, and then… maybe take one for a spin. We can foresee, however, a huge appetite for autonomous vehicles as money- savers in the shipping industry. Imagine transport trucks, fully automated, on the road 24/ 7. Think of the possibilities!

Economics, t hen. Can technological innovation, particularly when it comes to transportation, ever be a loser in this regard? Boston University economist James Bessen, writing in the Harvard Business Review last March, argues no – and yes. Computerization and automation have not historically killed jobs, Bessen says. Indeed, the reverse is true. But they have exacerbated income inequality.

At issue is not employment, but the quality — and pay level — of the jobs available. “New computer technologies require major new skills,” Bessen writes. “Workers who learn these skills see their wages grow, but many workers have difficulty acquiring the new skills. And their wages have been stagnant, leading to a growing wage gap.”

There are, in the United States, more t han t hree million professional truck drivers, hauling ten billion tons of freight each year, according to an article by The Guardian’s Olivia Solon, last June. Mining company Rio Tinto, Solon reports, has already begun using driverless trucks to move iron ore in Australia. In Canada, according to the labour- force survey in the 2011 census, transport- truck driving is tied with retail sales as the most common job for men ( comprising 2.9 per cent of jobs held by men, and 3.3 per cent, respectively).

Inevitably, remote, northern truck- driving j obs — which are also the highestpaid — will be the first to go, followed by all the rest. What happens to the workers displaced? Most will eventually find other jobs, as people do. But if the new job is precarious, or lowpaid, there is a social cost. The only lasting offset, most economists who study inequality agree, is education. Is there a program in place whereby shippers who boost their bottom lines via automated transport, plough a portion of that into re-training for their former drivers? No? Hmm.

Last and not least, safety. You’ve seen the stories, doubtless, about the virtual infallibility of Google’s selfdriving cars; how they’ve been i nvolved in only a handful of crashes since testing began in 2009, almost all caused by human error.

But a RAND study released last April, reported in Popular Mechanics, found the tests thus far are statistically insignificant. As of last spring, Google auto- cars had logged over a million miles. But “even if you’re not a statistician,” researcher Nidhi Kalra told the magazine, “you can say: If I want to prove through test driving that autonomous vehicles are safer than humans, I’ ve got to drive them at least 100 million miles without a fatality.”

Finally, there’s another wrinkle, even more serious; the question of life- or- death decisions in the event of an imminent crash. Artificial intelligence will soon be up to the task, if it isn’t already, of determining t he best course to minimize loss of life in a micro- second. But what if the algorithm calculates, given your robo- car is headed for a busload of children, that your car must swerve into a brick wall to avoid the bus and save the children? It’s what logic and humanitarianism dictate should happen.

Try selling that to a prospective car buyer.