Much is being said about self-driving cars. In fact, the
government is about to issue policy on them, and knowing how the government
works, that can’t end well.
There are a lot of unanswered questions: In a game of
chicken, who is more likely to win — a driverless car or one with an adolescent
behind the wheel? If someone in a conventional vehicle cuts off a driverless
car, how will the driverless car flip off the driver of the conventional car?
Or will the driverless car be equipped with special “get back at you” devices
we don’t know about yet?
Is the goal to do away with regular cars and pickup trucks
and become a nation of passengers in cars that have all the control? What will
happen to aimless Sunday afternoon drives with no particular destination in
mind? What will we do with all those unemployed driver’s ed teachers? What will
backyard mechanics tinker on?
I’m not so sure about driverless cars. When I was in
elementary school, the Junior Scholastic magazine — or was it the Weekly
Reader? — predicted flying cars and jet packs. In fact, if the magazines had
predicted correctly, we’d all have them by now. Imagine flying around a traffic
jam in your flying car. Or strapping on a jet pack and just zooming off to a
distant city in a matter of minutes.
In fact, I’m really disappointed that no one has perfected
the flying cars by now. We Baby Boomers were promised those, and we feel
cheated. Driverless cars? Phooey! Give us a car that can fly! Just imagine the
chaos we could cause with that; rush hour would take on a whole new meaning.
If scientists want to do something useful and keeping within
the magical promises of the Weekly Reader, come up with something more
practical. I’d love to see a trash can that wheels itself out to the curb on
pickup day. All week long it sits in the garage or just outside the back door
for easy loading, and then on pickup day its motor kicks in and it scoots over
to curb where the trash truck unloads it and then it ambles on back to start
over again.
We have self-propelled vacuum cleaners. Why not a
self-propelled cart that collects the mail from the mailbox? And is equipped
with sensors that will put mail in to be collected and put up the red flag
alerting the postal carrier? That would be so handy on snowy or rainy days.
I’ve heard there’s talk about programmable shopping carts;
the shopper keys in what’s on the grocery list and turns the cart loose.
Imagine the money you could save from impulse purchases. But if you forgot to
put an item on the list, you’re pretty much out of luck. That idea needs work.
I might be inclined to consider a driverless car if it had
self-cleaning features, if it could hover over an icy road instead of sliding
on it, or if it would load its own trunk after the programmable shopping cart
finished at the grocery store.
But on the whole, I’d rather have a jet pack.
