Do the teens want self-driving cars?
On feeling like Cassandra in the age of autonomous vehicles
I grew up in the exurbs of Hartford, Connecticut. Living in an unwalkable public transit desert meant that, until my junior year of high school, I was wholly dependent on my parents to drive me if I wanted to leave the house. Though my life outside the home consisted of little more than school and meeting friends for lunch at Cosi or peppermint hot chocolates at Starbucks, or browsing international society magazines at Borders, by the time I got my driver’s license at 16, I was unsurprisingly desperate to move through the world alone with music at my desired volume. Having one’s parents call and say they were waiting outside at the agreed-upon pick-up location felt like an abrupt interruption of newly-claimed autonomy; having to immediately participate in parental chatter upon hopping in the car was a further affront when all I wanted to do was turn up the music and mourn, to the dulcet tones of Damien Rice, that I had not run into my crush in West Hartford Center and had thus wasted a new outfit.
My junior year, I returned to this banal existence after spending the previous summer in Paris. Living with a host family with curiously little oversight, I had encountered for the first time many of life’s greatest pleasures: the combination of chocolate and hazelnut, well-designed paper goods, and, perhaps most formatively, aimless urban meandering. In Paris I developed my taste for taking the long way home, for dressing up and staying out in the world in order to increase the possibility of encountering something or someone thrilling.1 Getting one’s driver’s license in the Greater Hartford area hardly compared to strolling down the Rue du Four with new ballet flats and an ice cream cone, especially since I had a 10 pm curfew, wasn’t allowed to drive on the highway, and didn’t really have anywhere to go. But I had my dad’s old car and an iPod cassette adapter, and could dangle the keys to escaping my ennui as I walked into school in the morning. I was remarkably compliant with my parents’ rules and content with these measly freedoms until I started dating someone whose house was only reachable by highway. At that point, driving to my high school boyfriend’s house—and taking the long way home—became this non-drinking, non-smoking, early-decision-at-Williams student’s lone act of rebellion.
On my way back from his house in Glastonbury, I would exit the highway a few miles early, in the West End of Hartford, to extend my drive home by winding through the elegant historic neighborhoods that straddle the West Hartford city line, admiring the houses that resemble the Banks family’s in Father of the Bride and the McAllisters’ in Home Alone. It was late enough that the streets would be empty, but the homeowners would still be awake, meaning I could slow down and peer into the ivy-wrapped colonials and warmly-lit tudors and bricks across from the greens of the Hartford Golf Club, and fantasize about which I would pick if I had the choice. I can scarcely remember what I would daydream about on those drives home, listening to “Swallowed in the Sea” or “The District Sleeps Alone” for the 754th time. I do know those roundabout drives home filled me with a sort of yearning, but one that was comforting and dreamy to lean in to. They were also my own little secret, my one expression of spontaneity and autonomy.
Pre-pandemic, it was not unusual to go to a party in the Bay Area and encounter a friend of a friend who worked at a company developing self-driving cars. My natural inclination upon meeting this person was to express enthusiasm. “Cool!” I said, the first time I met someone working in “AV” (autonomous vehicles) and realized these jobs were not just held by whimsical Stanford drop-outs, but that people in my own social circle were already developing, marketing, and lobbying for an innovation I wouldn’t have been sure I would see within my lifetime.
It wasn’t until I had automatically feigned interest a couple of times that I began to sense my own simmering discomfort with autonomous vehicles and the excitement surrounding them. More specifically, I felt resentful towards others’ genuine enthusiasm and the technosolutionist zeitgeist it represented. Politeness aside, what was the source of our automatic veneration of AV? What made a self-driving car intrinsically “cool,” besides the fact that it was something we could have only dreamed of as children? The more I thought about it, the less obvious it was to me that automated vehicles were a socially worthwhile innovation. Even as I recognized I was perhaps just missing the chromosome that would make me fascinated with things that go VROOM and BOOM, my apathy towards the disruption ethos of Silicon Valley already went far beyond self-driving cars. But it was in the course of these conversations about AV that my indifference towards techno-optimism began to shift into unease. The culture of innovation for innovation’s sake—throwing money at pushing and proving the bounds of human intelligence regardless of its social consequences—began to haunt me.
Why the deluge of investment in automated vehicles? Why should we laud an innovation that could very well deprive us of the precious remaining waking moments of a day when we are not required or tempted to look at a screen? Why, the humanist in me wonders, would we choose to surrender the freedom of being our own conductors?
Those first summers in LA, I never felt more lost than when I would get in my car after a yoga class or drinks with coworkers and not know what destination to put in the GPS. With the summer sun still high in the sky at 7:15, it felt too early to go home only to sit alone in front of the television. I knew so little of my new city and was eager to understand and explore it. But LA made it so difficult. While in New York, you can always delay arriving home to your lonely and sticky apartment by taking a new route home on foot, in Los Angeles, I would map my route home and learn I was six or eight miles away—only 20 minutes on the freeway, the GPS would tell me. But I didn’t want to be home in 20 minutes. I wanted to stop for ice cream or browse at a bookstore or glance at the menu of a cute bistro, all things that would extend my journey home but that in LA required more Googling, more mapping, and more articles on EaterLA and The Infautation ranking East Side dairy-free ice cream options. I wanted to understand the neighborhoods in between Eagle Rock and West Hollywood and how they blended into each other, but instead I learned about LA listening to KCRW while eating an ice cream cone alone in my car. Eventually, I learned that most of the city was a grid, that I rarely had to take the freeway if I didn’t want to, and it was only once I grew comfortable trusting my instincts on service streets that I came to recognize the taco stands on certain corners and the grocery store parking lots that were easy to get in and out of on a weeknight, and that LA became home.
A few years later, autonomous vehicles are already present on our streets. Their proliferation feels like an inevitable reality. Waymo testing vehicles can be seen on the streets of San Francisco. They remind me of the rolly backpacks of cars. When I see one at a four-way stop, I get the urge to stuff it in a locker—to sabotage the test-drive by doing something wildly unexpected that it won’t know how to respond to. But it already feels too late. A 2016 law in Florida allows anyone with a valid driver’s license to operate an autonomous vehicle; the operator does not need to be in the car. Tennessee has prohibited local governments from banning the use of autonomous vehicles.2
The arguments in favor of autonomous vehicles are frequently utiliarian: through reductions in human error and accidents, we will enjoy enhanced safety outcomes and perhaps even reductions in emissions. There is also the argument that AV will liberate us by freeing up otherwise wasted commute time, and that the car will become a place of leisure, dwelling, or most terrifying of all, increased productivity.
I am skeptical of these advancements, and even more skeptical that they constitute progress. When I first recognized the imminent threat of AV, I listened to an episode of Radiolab called “The Driverless Dilemma,” which provides an accessible and worrying overview of the ethical dilemmas inherent in programming a machine to make life-or-death decisions. 3 How should an autonomous vehicle be programmed to address the classic Trolley Problem? What values and hierarchies will be embedded in whatever system we program? These legal and moral questions of machine ethics, “involving dilemmas of decision-making principles and and subsequent valuation of liability” are the focus of most social science research on AV.4 These are important questions and the ones that, alongside safety concerns, will likely slow down the proliferation of AV on our streets. But the dilemmas they pose seem, ultimately, resolvable in one direction or another, and may not be enough to stop AV altogether.
But the proliferation of AV would have far-reaching consequences on society in all directions. To what extent does investment in AV divert from investment in public transit infrastructure? (To me, this question is a grating example of the technosolutionist ethos, to the extent that investment in autonomous vehicles purports to solve a problem that doesn’t really exist, insofar as we are just developing a new form of car for people who already have cars or access to them, rather than solving the legitimate mobility problems of the rest of the population.) I found one article by Australian sociologistics calling on sociologists in the field of “mobility studies” to ask these questions - how might the development of AV transform or replicate inequalities and alter the urban landscape? How might AV systems alter the types of power that people are subjected to?5 (“But you already always have your phone next to you,” someone pointed out to me, when I protested the prospect of being forced to be subjected to yet another layer of surveillance.)
We are perhaps not that many years away from a world where a father could plug into his phone a home address, ensuring the family’s autonomous vehicle takes his daughter directly home from her high school boyfriend’s house by the most efficient route possible. Losing our ability to meander home on service streets without surveillance is by no means the most dangerous outcome of AV. But it deeply saddens me nonetheless. It feels like one of many steps towards the obsolesence of human agency that our society is willing to take. I only feel a glimmer of optimism when I remember that it is not already too late. We are at a moment where every level of government is or will soon be grappling with how to regulate autonomous vehicles. Legislators and regulators will be subjected to intense lobbying by AV companies, however, who have billions of dollars at stake. What worries me is whether there will be anyone out there trying to stop them.
I’ll get back to writing about what I read in 2020 soon.
Of course the French even have a word for this - flânerie. According to the Wikipedia entry for flâneur, the nineteenth century French writer Victor Fourne understood flânerie to be active rather than passive, a way of taking in and understanding the variety of the urban landscape and experience. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fl%C3%A2neur#cite_note-gdu-3
https://www.ncsl.org/research/transportation/autonomous-vehicles-self-driving-vehicles-enacted-legislation.aspx
https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/radiolab/articles/driverless-dilemma
Bissell, David, Thomas Birtchnell, Anthony Elliott, and Eric L Hsu. “Autonomous Automobilities: The Social Impacts of Driverless Vehicles.” Current Sociology 68, no. 1 (January 2020): 116–34. https://doi.org/10.1177/0011392118816743.
Bissel et al., supra at 122-23.