A persistent idea is that many problems related to automobiles could be solved if only we could have robots drive them instead of people. Google's robot car has attracted great attention. MIT (my alma mater) has annual contests related to building such cars. My opinion: they will never work. And thank God for that. Here's why.
Imagine a car driven by a robot which gets into an accident and kills somebody. Who is to blame? Legally that is. In other words, who pays? Right now, with humans driving and car companies only making the cars, the answer is clear: the driver pays (or his insurance company, which is the same thing, since the driver pays for the insurance). In a very few cases, the manufacturer is found liable due to faulty brakes or the like. In the vast majority of cases, of which there are tens of thousands per year (remember cars kill about 40,000 Americans annually), the car's manufacturer needn't even show up at court. The contest is between the drivers, and non-driver victims such as pedestrians and bicyclists.
Should robot cars be introduced, liability would be transferred from the driver to the manufacturer. This would open up a swarm of lawsuits. Even minor imperfections would attract bloodthirsty news reporters and attorneys. We all know that many human drivers have flaws. Nobody is perfect. We have limited vision, our attention wanders, our emotions rage, we take stupid risks, many of us don't really care that much if we hurt other people, as long as we don't have to pay. Yet, people exhibiting all these flaws are allowed to drive. Even after causing accidents most drivers are not restricted from driving! We simply accept human frailty, so every time we drive, walk, or cycle, we acknowledge the risk that "the other guy" is an idiot.
But what if machines, supposedly perfect, were driving? They might reduce the number of accidents. But it won't happen. An imperfection excused in a human driver would become the focus of endless litigation if the machine similarly lapsed. One reason is that a human error is, particularly with American obsession with individuality, assumed to be that driver's own problem. It's fine, as long as he avoids an accident. This is the philosophy of cure after the fact as opposed to prevent before the fact. Just because one driver exhibits a flaw that proves fatal, nobody then assumes that every other driver might similarly fail. But in the case of a machine, any flaw would be ascribed to all machines, of at least that model. Every tiny imperfection would raise a frightening prospect of millions of copies all doing the same thing. And indeed this is not an idle fear. This is the downside of mechanization: the construction of large-scale systems based on endless copies of identical components, with any design or manufacturing flaw replicated across the entire system.
Unfortunately some in the disabled community have seized upon robot cars as some sort of mechanized salvation. The disabled, particularly the visually impaired, have been cut out of the American transportation system by the endless gutting of our once-wonderful transit systems. This wholesale destruction, led by the auto and oil interests in the 1950s and 1960s, left the disabled with little other than crappy skeletal bus systems run for those too poor to drive. These people don't want to ride the bus either, and who can blame them given the lousy service remaining after decades of (mostly) Republican characterization of transit as socialism. Many places are not accessible without cars, so the disabled have limited access to jobs, entertainment, or even visiting friends. Trips easy 75 or 100 years ago are often more difficult now, for those who cannot drive. They hope that robot cars will bring them back into the mainstream of American life. But don't you believe it. It's a cruel fantasy which the legal liability issue alone will block, regardless of technological advance. After all, if you were a car company, would you make a car that would have you in the defendant's chair as soon as your latest model got into an accident?
Let's take a simple example of how hard this robot car business really is. Suppose you're a human driving a car and you have to hit one of two things: either a single person standing in the roadway, or two mannikins near the person. If you recognize the single person as real, you swerve and hit the mannikins. If you incorrectly think the mannikins are real, you have a lawsuit on your hands. Now what if you are a robot. How do you tell the difference? Unless you are an awfully sophisticated robot, you will see two people not two mannikins, so the choice is clear: do the lesser of two evils and hit the single person. Too bad that was the live one! LAWSUIT! But machines can't be defendants, so it's the manufacturer that gets the summons.
How about this pretty scenario. Mr. Robot has again two choices. One is to hit an obviously wealthy white person. The other an equally obviously down-and-out black person. Can you imagine the media feeding frenzy regardless of which our robocar chooses to snuff?
What about cats and dogs? Can Mr. Robot even notice them? How about bicyclists? Do I want to trust car companies, who hate bicyclists almost as much as they hate trains, to build cars to avoid them?
Some say that the answer is to redesign our cities to accommodate robots. Build a whole second road system just for robot cars. Funny how when you propose a public transit improvement, all anybody talks about is what it will cost, but when you propose an automobile improvement, nobody brings up the cost. Or make every person wear a transponder, perhaps implanted at birth whether you want it or not, so as to continuously inform all the cars around "hey, I'm a real human being, please don't hit me!" Naturally the Republicans, based on their recent debate performance in which they loved the idea that sick people without medical insurance should be killed, will say that if a robot car kills somebody without a transponder it's the victim's fault. The Republicans will also love the transponder idea because the FBI now can spy on everybody's location. (then they will accuse the Democrats of being the party of "intrusive big government")
I say the answer is not to redesign cars so that we can cram more into our long-suffering cities. The answer is to redesign our cities so as to need fewer cars. That is what will improve the lives of the disabled and others who cannot drive. That is what will save tens of thousands each year, many of them children. That is what will cut pollution. That will reduce energy use, our dependence on foreign sources, and reduce those sources' support for terrorism. That is what will restore a lost civility and community spirit. It's as simple as that.
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