Читать книгу Robot, Take the Wheel - Jason Torchinsky - Страница 7

Introduction

Empty your pockets.

I’m going to bet that among the wadded-up receipts, an effectively valueless amount of change, and something that may have once been gum, you’ll also find a small, powerful, handheld computer. Let’s think about what you call that computer. In the US, you probably call it a “phone,” and in most of the rest of the world you likely call it a “mobile,” a truncated form of “mobile phone.”

Even though the actual business of voice-based telephoning is just one of the millions of things you could be doing on your device and is likely not even the most common thing you use your device for, the name has stuck. We call these machines “phones” because when they first started to become something that normal, non-jet-owning people could own or use in the early 1990s, that’s really all they were. They were portable phones.

If, in the early 1990s, you were paying attention to these portable phones, and you were the bright, thoughtful person you are today, then I bet you could have easily imagined a future where everyone had their own personal cell phone, ready to take calls anytime, anywhere. The world you could have imagined would have been a big improvement over the real world, plush as it was with those miserable, wall-tethered boat anchors we used to make calls on. A world where we each have our own personal, portable phone would have been a smart, reasonable extrapolation of the world as you knew it.

Of course, as we know now, you would have been totally wrong.

What portable phones became is not something most people could have predicted. Very few people looked at the crude, brick-like portable phones of the early 1990s, with their one-line numeric displays, and imagined that, someday, these devices would become the primary terminals for people to access the small but growing network of government and university computers known as the Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANET), and that through this network people would use their pocket-computer terminals to read magazines, send short messages and longer letters to one another, use integrated cameras to take photographs, broadcast video to a global audience, read short, strange missives from the president of the United States and comment back on them, consume television shows, pornography, and movies, and send pictures of their own genitals to people, possibly destroying their careers in the process.

Nobody in the early 1990s imagined that this would be where those clunky portable phones would take us, and yet here we are.

When it comes to autonomous cars, for most of us, people and companies, it’s 1990 all over again. This time, instead of portable phones, we’re talking about autonomous cars—but we’re still imagining the future the same way: like now, but better. If portable phones have taught us anything, it’s that we’re really bad at predicting where new technologies will lead us.

Most automakers developing autonomous vehicles, which is pretty much every major car manufacturer, is still thinking of what they’re building as cars. That’s because, at the moment, that’s exactly what they are: cars that are learning to drive themselves. All semiautonomous cars being sold today, from Tesla or Volvo or Mercedes-Benz or whomever, are based on cars originally designed for human drivers, augmented with sensors and computers to allow for some, quite limited, degree of driving autonomy. Right now, we’re at the bag phone stage (remember those? We don’t seem to put new tech in bags anymore); or at best, the brick phone stage. These machines are effectively doing the same job as their predecessors, but have one key new trait: for phones it was portability, for cars it’s self-driving.

If we want to get a sense of what the future may hold, and how that future may affect us and our culture, we need to start looking at autonomous cars as something separate from cars. If we take a step back to get a wider perspective, we can see that once fully autonomous cars are developed and sold to the public in a meaningful quantity, this will represent the first truly large deployment of large-scale, highly mobile robots into human society. These are not Roombas—scuttling about under couches, foraging for Dorito fragments—but machines weighing close to two tons, fully capable of ending a human life.

I’m not trying to be an alarmist here; cars have been capable of ending human lives for well over a century, but until now only at the hands of human pilots. Besides, autonomous cars will probably save more lives than they’ll take; one of the effects of their wide-scale deployment will likely be less loss of human life, because the cars will drive better and more safely than we do. But just as today’s cell phones are so much more than just phones, autonomous cars are going to be so much more than just cars, and we may as well accept that now.

This book is about the coming age of autonomous cars and is an attempt to get you to consider them as something beyond cars as we understand them today. It’s not a book about the details of the technology, because that changes so fast and so many people so much smarter than me can write those books. This book is essentially a giant thought experiment, where we’ll try and imagine what the coming of autonomous vehicles means to us; how we’ll get along with the robots that will take over our cars’ jobs; what these things will look like; what sorts of jobs they may do; what we can expect of them; how they should act, ethically; how we can have fun with them; and how those of us who love to drive, manually and laboriously, can continue to do so.

It’s probably worth pointing out just what sort of a book this will be. If you’re looking for something crammed full of the latest facts, statistics, and research about autonomous cars and their development, and up-to-the-minute information about the current state-of-the-art cars, this isn’t that book. If you want that, look on the internet. It gets updated far more often than books do, and you’ll be much happier. I don’t want to compete with the internet for anything like that, because I’ll lose.

This book also doesn’t reach out to many experts, despite how often PR people and agents for these experts like to email me. I’m not ignoring the experts in the field out of any disrespect, but the truth is that the full impact of autonomous cars isn’t even close to being felt. Even if an expert has more degrees than a thermometer, and despite however closely they’re working with this or that autonomous car start-up with acres of venture capital funding, they’re going to be pulling guesses ex recto, just like I am. So I’m just going to give it a go myself, because why not?

Think about this book like that—some guy, we’ll call him “me,” is interested in cars and robots and the culture surrounding both, and is thinking a lot about it and asking a lot of questions, not all of which he has answers to or can even pretend he has answers to.

Because I don’t. But the questions are still worth asking, and it’s still worth thinking about how things could be, how we want them to be, and how we’re afraid they may end up. This is a conversation about what autonomous cars may be or mean or become, and if you’re reading this at some point in the future, laughing about how wrong I was about everything, I can’t say I’ll be too shocked.

This is an exciting era we’re in. Autonomy will be the biggest shift in how we interact with our cars in decades, and it’s going to reshape how we transport ourselves more than any other advancement in recent memory. It’s going to end up far, far weirder than we think, I’m pretty sure, so we may as well get a head start and think some things through.

Don’t worry. It’ll be fun.