AnchorDesk

The (robotic) road ahead
Last weekend, I had the good fortune to cover the DARPA Grand Challenge, a race of autonomous vehicles through the Nevada desert. The $2 million race was sponsored by the military--DARPA is the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, which has been responsible for kick-starting past projects, such as the invention of the Internet. And indeed, part of DARPA's motivation for sponsoring the race is to kick-start vehicle automation. According to DARPA director Tony Tether, 30 percent of military vehicles must be fully autonomous by 2015, by Congressional mandate.

The military saw the Grand Challenge as an important step toward that military development, but some of the teams involved, including the winning team, Stanford, are looking to autonomous vehicles as the future of consumer transportation. In English? Cars that drive themselves.

Whose car exactly are we talking about?
Driverless cars have obvious advantages; they're absolutely key to independence and safety for seniors and people with disabilities. Imagine being blind and not having to take public transportation or be driven around by anyone. Imagine reaching your 80s or 90s, an age when driving often becomes perilous or just plain disallowed, and not worrying for even one second about the loss of mobility and freedom. That, far beyond any military applications or simple robotic cool factor, is the awesome promise of autonomous vehicles.

But we can't talk safety and independence without talking about everyone on the road--not just those with disabilities or other impairments. I love driving, but I cannot stand other drivers. There's the speeding, the tailgating, the lane changing, the naked aggression, heck, even the blatant slowpoking. Speed limits aren't just an upper limit, people--it's not safe to drive 40 miles per hour on the freeway. It's just not. And irritation is hardly the biggest problem we have.

According to the U.S. National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), motor vehicle crashes are the leading cause of death for Hispanics between the ages of 1 and 34, and the third leading cause of death for all ages--only heart disease and cancer kill more people. In 2002, 42,815 people were killed and more than 2.9 people injured in about 6.3 million traffic crashes.

The World Health Organization reports that more than 1.2 million people were killed in traffic accidents worldwide and suggests that by 2020, traffic injuries could be the third largest cause of death and disability in the world--affecting more people than malaria, tuberculosis, and even HIV/AIDS. Why? Well, the top two reasons are pretty straightforward: drinking and speeding.

I think we've pretty well established that silly little things like laws and consequences are not working and maybe never will work. Speeding, in particular, is virtually never enforced in my geographic region. I'll admit right here that my standard California freeway speed is 80 miles per hour, and that it is absolutely necessary to keep from being mercilessly tailgated, honked at, and passed in the far right lane. I am constantly passed by cop cars that are clearly not in hot pursuit of anyone, much less my speeding little self. Meanwhile, more than 40 people die every day in drunk driving accidents, and drunk driving between 1998 and 2002 actually increased in 17 states.

In fact, according to the NHTSA, nearly 97 percent of Americans see drunk drivers as a threat to them and their families. But you know what? I'm betting the statistics will bear out my assertion that more than 3 percent of Americans have driven, will drive, or constantly drive under the influence. And what would any American, or anyone anywhere, say if you came to them and said, "Eureka! I have the answer. We just don't drive anymore. The cars do it for us."

Robots in charge
I can hear you now. "Well, it's not me who's the bad driver. It's everyone else." Of course it is. But you can't really stop the bad drivers without stopping all drivers. If we ever got serious about autonomous vehicles as the safety solution, well, we'd be looking at a pretty nuclear solution. Because it has to be all or nothing. You can't let some people drive because they insist they're the safe ones, right?

Obviously, our unsafe and dangerous insistence on independence will keep us from becoming a driverless world. But there are some in-between solutions. For example, in-car breathalyzers are a good idea that doesn't always work to keep drunk drivers off the road. But if your in-car breathalyzer would automatically put your car into robotic mode, with no option for a manual override until your blood-alcohol level decreased, we'd be making some serious progress. And if semiautonomous vehicles could limit speed increases after a certain level or even take over the driving duties if you're performing in an unsafe manner, would we be willing to accept that?

Technology that can save our lives always comes with these sorts of trade-offs. I, for one, would have a very hard time accepting the possibility of not piloting my own vehicle. I doubt that a driverless world is coming anytime soon, and I suspect that we'll continue to die in droves while we fight against any robotic restrictions. But no one ever said personal freedom doesn't come with a cost.