Samuel Schwartz, who served as New York City’s traffic commissioner in the 1980s, was nicknamed “Gridlock Sam” for his devotion to the conundrum of traffic (and for coining the loathsome term). Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/27/books/review
"Futurists may have promised us flying cars, but what we’re going to get instead are driverless ones, and Schwartz’s is the first comprehensive analysis of what that will mean on the ground. Most likely, there will be far fewer fatalities. With nearly 40,000 people killed in 2017 in the United States alone, that’s a huge benefit. But cars that can drive themselves will bring with them other knotty societal problems. . .
Imagining What Happens When the Robots Take the Wheel
(Book review in New York Times by Matthew DeBord
NO ONE AT THE WHEEL
Driverless Cars and the Road of the Future
By Samuel I. Schwartz
272 pp. PublicAffairs. $30.
Driverless Cars and the Road of the Future
By Samuel I. Schwartz
272 pp. PublicAffairs. $30.
An appalling statistic appears toward the end of “No One at the Wheel,” Samuel Schwartz’s valuable primer on self-driving cars: In the century since the automobile arrived on the scene, 70 million people have been killed by it, and four billion injured. . .
By next year, both General Motors’ self-driving unit, Cruise, and Alphabet’s Waymo (formerly the Google Car) aim to have driverless cars available for ride-hailing services in major American cities. And that’s just the beginning. Schwartz figures that autonomous vehicles, or A.V.s, will arrive in huge numbers in the decades ahead, bringing cheaper mobility options, improved safety, reduced pollution thanks to the electric motors they will favor, but also profound ethical dilemmas — namely, the restaging of the conflict between walking and driving. . . cars that can drive themselves will bring with them other knotty societal problems.
The advent of smartphone-enabled businesses like Uber and Lyft has accelerated this disruption, as Schwartz points out. The riches are plainly in sight: Cruise was valued at over $14 billion, and one Wall Street bank thinks Waymo could be worth $175 billion.
These players want to launch autonomous mobility services quickly to gain market share, leaving until later the debugging of the ensuing mayhem . . .
We should have better thought it through the last time around. If we heed Gridlock Sam and this valuable, humane book as we move toward a future in which we largely surrender the wheel, we can avoid messing up again.
From his perspective, we don’t have a choice.
________________________________________________________________
RELATED CONTENT:
The dream of driverless cars is dying
Billions have been invested but autonomous vehicles will not be on a road any time soon
"The assumption that this technology will soon transform our lives has been speeded along by gullible journalists who fail to look beyond the extravagant claims of the press releases pouring out of tech companies and auto manufacturers, hailing the imminence of major developments that never seem to materialise. Yet a careful reading of these announcements is sufficient to expose the limitations of what is actually being promised...
If the more extreme claims were to be believed, we would already be adapting to the new reality of driverless cars. And what a reality it is supposed to be. We are told by the likes of Uber and Waymo, Google’s autonomous vehicles wing, that we will forego our individual cars for the delights of being transported in driver-less, shared-use electric vehicles reminiscent of the new dockless hire bikes or car–sharing companies like Zipcar.
This is a strange conflation of three separate revolutions, electric, shared use and driverless, each of which on its own would have enormous societal impact and yet are presented by the tech companies and some politicians as desirable and inevitable. In truth, all three concepts are fraught with obstacles, not least the shortage of battery capacity in the world, people’s natural desire to own their own vehicles, and everyone’s understandable hesitance about putting their lives in the hands of a computer . . "
1
Driverless Hype Collides With Merciless Reality
The bubble around self-driving cars turns into a ‘trough of disillusionment’; firms refactor for much later arrival
Christopher Mims
The Wall Street Journal
Hardly a week goes by without fresh signposts that our self-driving future is just around the corner. Only it’s probably not. It will likely take decades to come to fruition. (Even...
0:00 / 0:00
Experts Break Down the Self-Driving Uber Crash
__________________________________________________________________________
2
Self-Driving Cars Explained | Union of Concerned Scientists
https://www.ucsusa.org/clean-vehicles/how-self-driving-cars-work
3
https://www.wired.com/story/guide-self-driving-cars/
The complete history of autonomous vehicles, from their birth in a chaotic skunkworks race to their future as a global industry.
4
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/.../who-s-winning-the-self-driving-car-race
Most of the companies now building autonomous vehicles can already handle basic driving at low speeds. This can give an impression of ...
5
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/10/...autonomous-cars/280360/
Sometimes good judgment can compel us to act illegally. Should a self-driving vehicle get to make that same decision?
