RIP to the first victim of an autonomous car. Details are still coming in, but it seems like an Uber robot SUV being tested in Tempe, Arizona killed a woman who was walking her bicycle. Well, I guess technically some rich guy was already killed while incorrectly operating his semi-autonomous Tesla, however today’s accident feels more real to me and, judging by headlines, to everyone else as well.
I used to be deeply in love with the idea of cars. They represented power, freedom, and status…until I tried to drive one and realized A) I am terrible at it; and B) it is profoundly easy to hurt or kill someone with a car. American society is designed to normalize this in all sorts of ways… to such an extent that most people don’t even notice our rising traffic fatality statistics. In Holland, if you kill somebody with a car, no matter what the circumstances, it is a real problem, but in America, even if you pretty much straight-up murder somebody through volition or grotesque incompetence, the police will come and rationalize a way it was the bicyclist’s or pedestrian’s fault and give you a hug and a root beer sticker. (If you kill more than six people you get a free foot-long hero sandwich!)
The deep indifference of the authorities is born out by the numbers: in 2016, 37,461 people died in traffic-related accidents in the United States. If 40,000 people died in a war or by gun violence, society would be up in arms (so to speak) and we would be having a national conversation about how to improve things (editor’s note: in 2016, 38,000 Americans were killed by guns. What sort of dark carnival are we running over here?).
America is too spacious for us to ever be free of automated carriages. I live in New York because, despite the cars, I can bicycle here (barely) and because there is a 24-hour subway (also barely…thanks a lot, Cuomo). But beyond the coral-reef lifestyle of America’s one worthwhile city there is too much distance to cover. Even if we were all Lance Armstrong (and we’re really not) we would still need motors to get around.
We have decided not to invest in effective national mass transit. Likewise, we are not redesigning roads in ways which have been proven to make them safer in Europe and Japan (safer for motorists, pedestrians, and bicyclists alike). Our only hope of diminishing the carnage and damage wrought by our 1950s/60s era national transportation system is effective robot cars. This won’t work if we take the lamentable current state of transportation as something to aspire to.
So, although today’s headline was scary and terrible, we need to keep looking at the bigger picture. We are fixated on the person tragically killed by a robot car because it is novel and garners attention (look, here I am writing about it too), but the real headline should be the hundred people who were killed in the United States today by normal human drivers. Of course, that is the same story every day so nobody remarks upon it. So Uber (and Google, and Tesla), get your act together. Break down the data and figure out what went wrong and fix it. Why didn’t your car stop (they are supposed to have faster reflexes than any person)? Also, why was the “car” a giant hulking tank to begin with? What is wrong with robot cars that are adorable little soft alien bug cars, like the Japanese are working on?
Robot cars are coming and I believe they will be glorious, but a lot more work is needed…and more imagination and creativity are needed too. So let’s slow down for a moment, but then speed up. Think of the one person killed, but think of the hundred too.
ferrebeekeeper 
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