Blog post 5: rejection

Not only are there government problems that have to be solved when dealing with autonomous vehicles but there is also a human component that could be an issue. In the previous paragraph, the idea that residual formations could reject a mandatory change in infrastructure was mentioned. To expand on this, it can be compared to another situation that occurred in The Circle. It was previously stated that the objective of the company was to have information about everything and allow everyone to have access to it. But that information was more than just exploring all parts of the world to discover new species or having millions of recipes for a particular dish; it was also having the ability to know everything about a person to the extent that you could go to their page and see what was their current heart rate. The majority of the people in this book embraced this openness and could not understand a world without all of this knowledge about one another, regardless of how pointless a piece of information. This means that there were a select few that wanted to be as far away from the Circle services as possible in order to maintain their privacy and one of these people was Mercer, Mae’s ex- boyfriend. In an attempt to find him, the Circle employed a program that did indeed track him down and in an effort to escape the madness; he drove his car off of a cliff. He would rather be dead than have his privacy stolen from him as the Circle had done to so many. The moral of this part of the book in regards to autonomous driving is that people are going to reject the idea of autonomous driving and for different reasons. The residual formations might not want their infrastructure to be completely altered because they like living in the times they do. Or, more common people who live in the big, dominating cities will reject autonomous vehicles because they just simply like driving and do not want to revoke that control to a mediated form of travel. Something else to consider along with this control is what human experiences happen when someone is driving his or her own vehicle. Driving a car teaches people to be more aware of their surroundings, which can transfer into other situations in their lives. For example, there is probably a correlation between good drivers and good elementary school teachers. They have to be aware of 25 very active children all at once and if they are not efficient at scanning and analyzing what is going on then a child might get hurt or break something in the classroom. Also, when a person is driving, even with GPS on in their car, they can stop whenever they want. So if they are going through a really pretty area in the mountains, they can pull over randomly and enjoy the view without complications. It can be interpreted that if a fully autonomous vehicle is taking you somewhere, it will follow the GPS until the destination and not give as easy of access to changing the route or choosing to stop in an address-less location. This lack of control would lead to humans losing some of the most memorable experiences with nature that happen at the very random times. NPR conducted an interview that revealed what general messages society is currently expressing about full autonomous driving. The best way to explain the results is that most people are skeptical of having to give up control to a computer but that they are interested in at least semi-automated vehicles (npr.org). Many vehicles already have features that are forms of semi-automated driving like cruise control or blind spot detection to help with changing lanes but the person still technically has complete control of the car. A fully autonomous vehicle will not have a steering wheel or gas pedal, which freaks a lot of people out because that is giving up all control of driving. With the majority of people only wanting a partially autonomous car, is it feasible to expect everyone to eventually participate in autonomous driving? As mentioned with the laws and infrastructure, having people in autonomous vehicles will affect the entire country. At least other forms of mediated human activity, like texting or virtual reality, are not related to anyone else’s decisions. Companies working on this technology do not seem particularly concerned with this possible rejection of their product, which means they will not know how to handle this just as the Circle did not know how to properly deal with Mercer.