I recently wrote that self-driving cars were inevitable and would change nearly everything about our understanding of traffic flow and how the demand for travel (a person wanting to be where he or she is not) will map onto actual trips. We’re planning using the old models, which are sucky and broken, but now they are even more sucktastic and brokeriffic.
Today in the LA Times business section1 an article reports that a “watchdog” group2 is petitioning the DMV to slow down the process of adopting self-driving cars. It struck me that this act is very similar to bargaining, which means we’re at the 3rd stage of grief.
The first stage is denial. “It can never happen.” “Computers will never be able to drive a car in a city street.” Over. Done. Proven wrong.
The second stage is anger. I haven’t seen that personally, but I have seen hyperbole in attacks like “what are you going to do when a robot chooses to kill innocent children on a bus”. A cross between stage one and stage two is probably this article from The Register.
The third stage is bargaining. The linked page above has the example of “just let me see my son graduate”. In this case, we’ve got “slow down to 18 months so we can review the data and make sure it is safe”. While I’m not suggesting we rush to adopt unsafe robot cars, it is interesting to see how quickly the arguments against self-driving cars has moved to stage 3.
I’m keeping an eye out for depression (old gear-heads blaring Springsteen’s Thunder Road while tinkering with their gas guzzling V-8s?) and then acceptance (we’ve got a robot car for quick trips around town, but we also have a driver car for going camping in the mountains).
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