Although much of this provocative article reads like science fiction, the author does a good job of anticipating how people may change when we become an autonomous-vehicles society. “Driverless cars posit a possible future without street life and without spaces for spontaneity,” she concludes, after noting dozens of ways we would change.
As with previous planning mistakes in developing automotive-oriented cities, carmakers and technology companies are moving forward with their ideas without reckoning with the full range of potential social impacts. These futures must be imagined before they can be embraced or resisted. Otherwise driverless cars may steer society into a blind cul-de-sac, and we will discover we have nowhere left to go.
Some examples:
With the possibility of traffic collisions theoretically eliminated, safety requirements mandating fixed seats, air bags, and seat belts would become obsolete. Passengers who no longer needed to be restrained would be able to move around freely. And since the people inside wouldn’t necessarily need to see where they were going, a growing range of possible wall fixtures — storage cabinets, LCD screens, perhaps a kitchen sink — could substitute passenger convenience over views of the world outside.
Such a vehicle would not have to travel any faster for us to perceive a dramatic reduction in travel time. The time once spent in vehicles inertly waiting to arrive could now be filled with the same sort of activities we’d be doing if we were already there — or had never left.
The user interface for navigating space would no longer be a map, but a clock or calendar. Distances once traced on a map would be transmuted into blocks of time plotted on one’s daily schedule.