Multi-National Corporations, from Tesla to Amazon, have a new fetish: autonomous driverless vehicles. In their dream world, people gain freedom by being able to read a book or go to sleep whilst their car drives itself to their workplace, the shop, or leisure facility. The car then does not remain idle, but picks someone else up (organised through a smartphone app), and accesses ‘snake’ charging points when the humans are asleep at home.
In the USA, there are around 35,000 fatalities on the roads each year caused primarily by human error, so it is believed that by letting machines take over, this could be reduced by 90% or more. It is believed by removing the necessity for parking spaces, more land can be used for growing trees, there is less traffic congestion so journey times are sped up, and things are a lot safer, road-rage is abolished, and we have more leisure time.
In Scotland, a bus route between Edinburgh and Fife, is serving as a pilot trial for a driverless bus service. The bus company hopes to eliminate its driving workforce, who are often unionised and militant, by automating the service, believing this will reap greater dividends for its shareholders.
Arguments Against Driverless Vehicles That Miss the Mark
Some critics, such as out-spoken British broadcaster Jeremy Clarkson, have moaned all this takes the pleasure out of driving. But Clarkson is unclear what that pleasure consists in. Is a person rushing to work but stuck in the frustration of a traffic jam, really experiencing pleasure? Or does the pleasure derive from travelling at speed? In which case an autonomous fleet would cause more pleasure since, being safer, speed limits could be raised. In my view, the pleasure of transport is really about experiencing scenery, and there is no sense in which this declines with an autonomous fleet.
Another popular argument against driverless vehicles is that they cause unemployment. Sure, bus drivers and taxi drivers are thrown out of work. Furthermore, there is less call for police to attend accidents (since accidents have declined), which could lead to a reduction in their number. However, the sustenance of the fleet ultimately requires more workers overall: designers, software engineers, manufacturers, and a hell of lot of cleaners. The sensors on the vehicle need regular cleaning to function in the rain, and internal cleaning is required if the vehicle is to be used for other people as well in the context of the various viruses around today.
The Real Problem with Driverless Vehicles is Safety
That an automated system can be unsafe does not derive from any malevolence within that system itself. No machine can ever become ‘self-aware’ like Skynet in The Terminator movie franchise. This is because machines cannot understand meanings, they can only process code. If a driverless bus gets people somewhere, it does not know it has done this, because that would be to assume it has a mind independent of the task, an ability to reflect on what it has done. Such mental states are only attributable to highly evolved living creatures, beings who are aware of their needs, they are not something that can be programmed into a lump of metal, no matter how ingenious the programme is.
The first issue with safety concerns a simple elementary form of autonomous vehicle. So, we have this bus route between Edinburgh and Fife in a context where nothing else on the road is autonomous. So, what happens if the on-board computer encounters a bird on the road? Does it apply an emergency stop to save the bird, thus risking a non-autonomous vehicle crashing into its rear? In which case, people may die. Or is it programmed to kill the bird? Indeed, with every manifold hazard on the road, is the bus to be constantly slowing down, thus provoking mere human drivers to risk dangerous overtaking? With all this slowing down, how does Skynet meet its central obligation of keeping to the timetable in the context where speed limits have not yet been increased (because the majority of drivers are fallible humans)?
The only solution to these dilemmas is to fully automate all the vehicles on the road. With improved artificial intelligence, and in online ‘conversation’ with all other vehicles, the machines learn how to be safe in a way tolerable to humans (who, remember, are supposed to be the masters here). In this total or expanded form of autonomous vehicles, each component inter-relates in order to perfect the system as a whole. Each vehicle is also inter-relating with satellites in space for navigation purposes.
Now, we do not consider the total expanded form of autonomous vehicles a technical impossibility. What is naïve about it, is its assumptions about human nature. So, trivially, is it really expected that bus drivers, thrown out of work, won’t want to rebel against Skynet? To smash it up? Or car users, or indeed any traditionalist, thinking this is some kind of anti-freedom brave new world?
However, there is an even deeper problem related to safety: hacking. Are we assuming none of these vehicles will become targets for hackers? They are heavily reliant on some form of online communication, and as hostile governments repeatedly demonstrate, nothing online is immune from complex cyber-attack. Also, the total expanded form of autonomous vehicles has to exist in every country. Human driving skills have been lost due to reliance on autonomous machines. So, with worldwide driverless vehicles, are we seriously expecting everyone in the world to be kind at all times, never tempted to sabotage that truck carrying weapons to Ukraine, etc? So, it is a pipe dream. Unless…
…Unless human nature is perfected prior to the roll-out of Absolute Safety. The problem is that capitalism creates crime on two grounds: firstly, the quest to accumulate wealth inevitably leads to sub-legal attempts to do so (even by those already rich), and secondly, in capitalist society, everyone is fundamentally a bastard. The latter occurs because we work to produce capital, not directly for each other in a voluntary relationship. Social relations are thus impoverished, giving rise to incredible mistrust, suspicion, and misanthropy. The two grounds for crime thus mean driverless vehicles are a real non-starter in this society. Change society, and we might be able to have a conversation about the proposals. Right now? Nah.
barryessex 