TITLE: A View of Self-Driving Cars from 1956
AUTHOR: Eugene Wallingford
DATE: October 15, 2016 10:47 AM
DESC:
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BODY:
A friend and fellow classic science fiction fan told me that one
of his favorite books as a teenager was Robert Heinlein's
The Door into Summer.
I've read a lot of Heinlein but not this one, so I picked
it up at the library.
Early in the book, protagonist Daniel B. Davis needed to make the
most of the next twenty-fours. He located his car, dropped some
money into the "parking attendant", set course, and relaxed as
the car headed out into traffic:
Or tried to relax. Los Angeles traffic was too fast and too
slashingly murderous for me to be really happy under automatic
control; I wanted to redesign their whole installation--it was
not a really modern "fail safe". By the time we were west of
Western Avenue and could go back on manual control I was edgy
and wanted a drink.
This scene is set December 1970; Heinlein wrote it in 1956. He
may have missed the year in which self-driving cars were already
common technology by 45 years or more, but I think he got the
feeling right. People like to be in control of their actions,
especially when dropped into hectic conditions they can't control.
Heinlein's character is an engineer, so naturally he thinks he
could design a better. None of my programmer friends are like
this, of course.
It's also interesting to note that automatic control was required
in the most traffic. Once he got into a calmer setting, Davis
could go back to driving himself. The system allows the human to
drive only when he isn't a danger to other people, or even himself!
Today, it is commonplace to think that the biggest challenges of
the move to self-driving cars are cultural, not technological:
getting people to accept that the cars can drive themselves more
safely than humans can drive them, and getting people to give up
control. It's neat to see that Heinlein recognized this sixty
years ago.
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