Robot, Take the Wheel

This book is about the coming age of autonomous cars and is an attempt to get you to consider them as something beyond cars as we understand them today. It’s not a book about the details of the technology, because that changes so fast and so many people so much smarter than me can write those books. This book is essentially a giant thought experiment, where we’ll try and imagine what the coming of autonomous vehicles means to us, how we’ll get along with the robots that will take over our cars’ jobs, what these things will look like, what sorts of jobs they may do, what can we expect of them, how they should act, ethically, how we can have fun with them, and how those of us who love to drive, manually and laboriously, can continue to do so.It’s probably worth pointing out just what sort of a book this will be. If you’re looking for something crammed full of the latest facts, statistics, and research about autonomous cars and their development and up-to-the-minute information about the current state-of-the art cars, this isn’t that book. If you want that, look on the internet. It gets updated far more often than books do, and you’ll be much happier. I don’t want to compete with the internet for anything like that, because I’ll lose.This book also doesn’t reach out to too many experts, despite how often PR people and agents for these experts like to email me. I’m not ignoring the experts in the field out of any disrespect, but the truth is that the full impact of autonomous cars isn’t even close to being felt. Even if an expert has more degrees than a thermometer, and despite however closely they’re working with this or that autonomous car start-up with acres of venture capital funding, they’re going to be pulling guesses ex recto, just like I am. So I’m just going to give it a go myself, because why not?Think about this book like that—some guy, we’ll call him “me,” is interested in cars and robots and the culture around both, and is thinking a lot about it and asking a lot of questions, not all of which he has answers to or can even pretend he has answers to.Because I don’t. But the questions are still worth asking, and it’s still worth thinking about how things could be, how we want them to be, and how we’re afraid they may end up. This is a conversation about what autonomous cars may be or mean or become, and if you’re reading this from some point in the future, laughing about how wrong I was about everything, I can’t say I’ll be too shocked.This is an exciting era we’re in. Autonomy will be the biggest shift in how we interact with our cars in decades, and it’s going to reshape how we transport ourselves more than any other advancement in recent memory. It’s going to end up far, far weirder than we think, I’m pretty sure, so we may as well get a head start and think some things through.Don’t worry. It’ll be fun.