Driverless cars do not need drivers.
Driverless cars do not need drivers.
W ould you take a flight on a plane piloted by AI? No one in the cockpit, just Claude? I’m sure it would be easier for the airline — no pilots to pay, no worries about crews timing out. The tower would just say, “Agent, fly the 737 to London,” and the plane would take off, then nose-dive into the ground.
Tower: “Claude, you killed everyone on board by trying to go straight through the earth instead of flying through the air.”
Claude: “You’re absolutely right! That’s on me. I won’t make that mistake again. After all, you can’t say airplane without air, and that’s where I’ll make sure I go.”
No, you’d want a pilot in the cockpit. So why wouldn’t you want a driver in a driverless car for hire?
Because it’s a stupid idea. And being a stupid idea, it was embraced by the Minneapolis City Council.
Back up a bit. I am not an anti-automation Luddite. I do not think humanity lost anything when we developed a machine for manufacturing candles at great scale. Why in the old days, a man could support his family from the honorable job of hand-drilling holes to insert the wick! Today’s candles are just soulless simulacra of the handcrafted artisanal tapers that once lit our lives. No. But cars are different. When you drive a car, you engage with machinery on an emotional and physical level. Even the most mundane trips around town have a certain verve if you have the right attitude — scanning the traffic ahead for idiocy, gauging the flow, being engaged and involved with the world in which you live. The idea of sitting in the backseat staring at a screen, tapping and scrolling — as if there’s not enough time for that in our daily lives — seems like a banal dystopia in which vitality has been drained from life, and we sit with folded hands as our machines do our work.
I don’t even like the lane assist features in new cars, which give you a chastening rumble of the wheel if you stray from the appointed path. I bridle like a bronco fitted with a bit for the first time. Don’t tell me what to do.
That said, I’m not opposed to self-driving cars, if people want them. Imagine that! Letting people choose an option I’d personally reject! What a Nazi dog-whistle. And if people want them for public transportation to take the place of taxi drivers, I don’t mind that either. But if I did want to take a driverless car somewhere, I would not want . . . a driver.
Minneapolis decided that automated taxis must employ a driver as well. Why? For one thing, according to one particularly dim City Council member, they’re murdering cats. They’re squishing the cats! They’re squishing the dogs! Apparently, no animal has ever had an unfortunate encounter with a motor vehicle before. Apparently, the driverless driver would grab the wheel should a tabby saunter onto the highway.
The most important reason, though, had to do with the community affected by the increase in driverless cars. The City Council naysayers said driverless taxis would have a disparate impact on the immigrant communities, since Ubering and Lyfting are popular jobs for recent arrivals. Ergo, everyone is obliged to have the cost of their ride increased to pay for someone who sits in the driver’s seat, not driving.
The mayor, a progressive himself but despised by the DSA wing of his party for foiling their mad schemes, promptly vetoed the bill, as they knew he would. In a sane world, they would be chastened and re-examine their worldview, and get to the business of reducing crime, taxes, and municipal bloat, but of course, if that’s something of which they were capable, they wouldn’t be in the party they are.
You expect that they will find new ways to protect jobs threatened by societal advances. Think of all the entry-level pump jockey jobs lost! When people were permitted to refuel their cars on their own! The city should require all gas stations to have someone stand by every pump, doing nothing. After a year at this position, they will be eligible to be promoted to stand by the electric car charging stations, doing nothing.
Starting wage for these jobs: $31.50 an hour.
And yes, you will be expected to tip.