By Kevin D. Williamson
Friday, December 18, 2015
Maybe it’s just the new “Star Wars” movie intensifying
that weird mix of nostalgia and day-dreaming that the best science fiction
produces, but: We’re still waiting on our flying cars, damn it.
And California is getting in the way.
Not in the way of flying cars, to be precise — the FAA
has just approved test flights by Terrafugia’s prototype — but in the way of
the slightly more pedestrian but potentially much more significant self-driving
automobiles. California regulators have drafted new rules for partly autonomous
cars (the ones that can, for example, take over for you while driving on the
freeway) and they’re about what you would expect: sundry safety-certification
processes and big fat fees paid to the state. But the rules do not regulate
fully autonomous cars: They ban them outright.
California is for various reasons a regulatory bellwether
on matters of automotive regulation, but don’t expect the other 49 states to
follow along on this one. Bryant Walker Smith, an academic who studies
autonomous cars, tells Wired that
California’s move is “great news for Texas.” Google already has turned to Texas
as a testing-ground for its vehicles. Why? “Austin has always been extremely
welcoming to Google and to innovation of all kinds,” the company said in a
press release.
(I’d love to tell you a great deal more about Google’s
autonomous-car project, but, so far, the company has categorically refused to
consent to so much as an interview with me on the subject. I find this
perplexing.)
When we talk about the benefits of autonomous cars, the
conversation often focuses on the individual level: They will be less prone to
error than the typical driver is, and they don’t get drunk or put on makeup or
fire up the ol’ crack pipe on the Schuylkill Expressway as one young
well-dressed commuter in a new Passat did next to me early one morning on my
way into Philadelphia. But the real promise of autonomous driving lies in
network effects: Imagine how Los Angeles or Houston might be changed if every
car on the road were aware not only of its own position and destination but
also the position and destination of every other car on the road, with the
network serving as a sort of Leplace’s Demon for traffic. With a well-designed
network (Google knows a little something about that) we could go from directing
commuters away from traffic jams to simply routing them in such a way that
traffic never gets snarled up in the first place. This would represent an
enormous quality-of-life improvement in traffic-choked cities such as Austin
and Washington.
It could also revolutionize the delivery of goods,
particularly last-mile delivery to commercial establishments in dense urban
areas. (In places such as Manhattan, where individual vehicle ownership is
relatively low, a great deal of traffic trouble is caused by trucks servicing
businesses.) Distribution costs represent a very large share of the costs of
many products, including one dear to my own heart: daily newspapers.
No doubt many people (myself included) will continue to
drive for pleasure. People still ride horses for pleasure, too, but we don’t
deliver the mail that way. New technological models will produce new economic
models. Commuting very likely will be transformed from an investment in
equipment to a subscription service.
This will dispossess big, powerful chunks of entrenched
economic interests, not just the big automakers (which are every year falling
behind innovations from the likes of Tesla and probably won’t be able to keep
up with Google or Apple) but also the Teamsters and similar unions, the taxi
cartels that have been given fits by Uber and Lyft and don’t have what it takes
to compete against robots, the employees and management of mass-transit systems
that could be rendered obsolete in a matter of only a few years, and others.
These guys have some clout: At the moment, the National Auto Dealers
Association is the 66th largest political contributor in the United States, and
the Teamsters are the 53rd largest; the National Rifle Association, by way of
comparison, is way down at No. 290.
Just as the fear of economic freedom is rooted in fear of
freedom itself, the persistent terror of technological innovation is simply the
fear of technological change itself. Because the people who are most afraid of
technology tend to be those who know the least about it, this often has some
humorous consequences: We’re still hearing from people who are bothered about
numbered Swiss bank accounts when the real hot action is in encrypted Swiss
e-mail accounts. We’re still talking about conventional wire-tapping when
anybody with a couple of hundred bucks can get himself an encrypted mobile
phone that bypasses the public telephone switches entirely by using an Internet
connection.
As the Golden State’s 38th governor once put it, the
future was invented in California. (And, being from the future, he would know.)
There’s a reason that those desolate planets visited by Kirk and Spock look a
great deal like Los Angeles County. And the future is still coming. The question
for California — and for the rest of the country — is: Is it coming here?
In Washington, home to the nation’s worst commute,
drivers spend an average of 82 hours a year sitting in traffic. All those
social engineers and central planners have a lot of time to sit and think about
how to mitigate that problem. They’re sitting, and sitting, and sitting.
Are they thinking?
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