Human Drivers Make Bad Robots
For a number of years I drove everywhere, then I moved to a place where I don’t. I am currently enjoying an extended visit to a place where I am driving again. Some things that seem to have changed in the last five years:
☠ Nobody is looking at the road. The road is the distraction. The cars mostly don’t hit each other but they seem to come close basically all the time. Driving is insane and horrifying and I can’t believe we modernized our country around its demands. A few weeks ago I saw a driver with a phone propped in front of the instrument panel playing some kind of video. This driver was watching TV! Which is possibly not as bad as texting, which 100% of drivers do all the time.
☠ Nobody knows where they are or where they are going, because they are following the directions of either toy robots plungered to their windshields or toy robots gripped in their non-driving hands (there is no such thing as a non-driving hand). The fullness of this dependency isn’t clear until you find yourself on a quiet residential street in Los Angeles, carefully creeping along with four more cars behind you — maybe ONE of which is actually consciously taking a “shortcut” — because this “street” is really more of a “driveway” because I’m sure it doesn’t look that way from space/get parsed that way from the data set. Recently I was following my/the machine’s directions to a ski resort north of New York City. It took us out of the cell service area, down an empty road, to a trailhead on the other side of the mountain. When we turned around we saw a line of cars decorated with skis and full of worried-looking young people coming the other way, heading to the same dead end. Finally, back at the corner of the “main” road, we saw some kids out in front of their house. They were standing behind a sign that said: “$$$ MAPS TO HUNTER MOUNTAIN $$$.” They get it. We don’t.
☠ Nobody knows anything about cars, except Car People and Truck People. But regular Driver People just seem to Google “best car.” The most important “luxury” option seems to be a system through which to connect your phone and your car, which for now allows you to play music and amplify navigation commands but in the future might just be a way to keep your passive passenger placation devices charged and placating.
☠ Nobody can tell you how to get somewhere, including people who drive for a living, because wouldn’t it be such a huge waste of time to learn all that information?? I get the feeling that people have even begun unlearning routes because they assume their machines will take them a better way. They might be right! Or they maybe they’re wrong, and every “ROUTE” command just throws your vehicle and body into a giant overcomplicated Plinko game. In any case full submission to GPS is a strange feeling. Well, sort of: it is not something you always identify as a feeling, because you’re still busy looking at the road to know when to hit the go pedal and the stop pedal, and when to move the wheel left or right (“after the machine asks you to” is the answer but we still like to wait and see, I guess). But that sense that you get, as you passively submit to the voice with the sinister elocution, that everyone around you is also on invisible rails, and that you feel safer that way, and that you might actually feel better if the voices just went ahead and said, all at once, here, let me take the wheel: that’s a little strange.