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Stephen King’s Christine: The First Self Drive Car?
Stephen King’s Christine: The First Self Drive Car?
This is quite a damning indictment of technology that should make the world safer, but will the self drive vehicle become the saviour of the road which safely guides us from A to B or an autocratic artificial intelligence, the kind of stuff Stephen Hawkins has been warning us about recently!
If you have not read the book or seen the film, Stephen King’s ‘Christine’ was essentially an evil spirited Plymouth Fury, literally. Imagine a mute Decepticon without the ability to turn into another vehicle!
Self drive vehicles I don’t think will start acting on their own, Christine-like or take on a Decepticon persona, but taking away human intervention can be a fragile area, at least in total.
Currently, car manufacturers and other companies that are looking into self drive vehicles have the data to show that human error is inherent in more than 90% of traffic accidents. – , so it should make sense that taking away humans from the equation will make for safer roads, right?
This will work if the highway infrastructure and the vehicles can prove they have a 90%+ success rate in autonomously driving humans from A to B. This means lots of money to be invested in the highway structure, which in some states they are battling with even at present levels, let alone to have the funding to put in place everything needed for self drive vehicles to run safely.
Benefits
Taking off my ultra-cynical head for a moment, wouldn’t it be amazing if I could just get in my car, punch in a destination and the car would chauffeur me to wherever I wanted including detours, and other places I wanted to go.
Plus, those days where I can barely get out of bed, all I would need to do would be to fall into my car and it would take me to work!
Even if only one self drive vehicle saves one life on the road, isn’t that worth it?
Wouldn’t this in theory stop traffic jams and traffic congestion? Cars would no longer be able to bunch up, not make progress, make decisions while driving, we would all get to where we wanted to faster, safer and actually make use of the dead time we sometimes find ourselves in, especially in busy traffic, as we wouldn’t be driving, we could do other things OR would we still be needed to monitor all road going activiites, just in case, thus still driving of sorts.
Negatives
I cannot help but think that anything that takes away or tries to take away the entire human interaction with a car, at least at this point in our technology curve, is giving the total brainpower to a CPU rather than the human brain?
Yes, but humans make massive mistakes at times and on far too regular a basis, but we are also amazing at filtering out un-important information, especially on the road.
We have so much information flying at us, yet we can still operate a car and make split second decisions, think about our day’s work and drive safely. We have been doing this for years, so why change now?
Solution
When I was a kid, I loved the show Knight Rider. Imagine, owning a car which I could just tell where I wanted to go.
But K.I.T. also had a ‘manual’ mode for when Mr. Knight wanted to takeover driving responsbilities. So, instead of us having no human interaction, why not a sort of autopilot which can be switched on and off? Would this work in reality?
Essentially, the technology is too young to make any conclusions, only vague predictions of where this technology will take us.
The ultimate outcome for myself would be the choice of self driving cars and also the choice of a full-blown musclecar and everything inbetween.
Why? Because we all like choices rather than ultimatums and we like to have control, at least some of the time. Bring on the self drive car, but have it as an option, not the complete solution.
Image – http://www.pspublishing.co.uk/christine-30th-anniversary-edition-by-stephen-king-1712-p.asp
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