After decades of futurists’ predictions, driverless cars are finally out on the streets—in limited commercial tests in San Francisco, Austin, Seattle, and Pittsburgh. At the moment, they’re still unreliable; for instance, a driverless Uber car in Pittsburgh took a shortcut the wrong way up a one-way street. And more than a few crashes have been caused by driverless cars’ poor guesses. But self-driving vehicles will get more reliable, and more refined, until—inevitably—your average driverless car will be a far, far safer driver than you or I could ever hope to be.
That’s why, in a decade—give or take—some courageous university professor will predictably write an op-ed for the New York Times asking, “When Will We Admit Humans Shouldn’t Be Allowed to Drive?”
“Look,” this op-ed will say, “I like driving as much as the next guy. I like the feel of the open road, the wind in my hair, Bruce Springsteen on the radio—but every time I turn on my car, I’m taking my life in my hands. What’s worse,” he will add, “I’m taking strangers’ lives in my hands. And strangers’ kids’ lives. And I’m forced to admit that I’m being selfish.
“Because I’m human and I make mistakes. Driverless cars are superhuman and don’t make mistakes. Every year, tens of thousands of Americans lose their lives in car accidents caused by driver error. To save tens of thousands of lives, I’m willing to give up my steering wheel and let never-sleepy, never-distracted, never-drunk, never-emotional computers take over.
“And that’s why I think it’s time for Congress to act: Our cars are required to have airbags, and catalytic converters, and seat belts, and insurance—it’s time they were required to have computers do the driving. Let’s grandfather-in the existing fleet of human-driven cars and ban new ones, beginning a process that will make our roads 100 percent driverless, and 10,000 percent safer, by 2035.”
Hundreds of pundits and public intellectuals will jump on the driverless bandwagon, quickly followed by trauma surgeons and statisticians, and then by a senator from California or Delaware or Vermont, who will give a press conference at which he will hold up the photos of teenagers killed by distracted drivers. Their mothers will stand on either side of the podium.
“Fifteen percent of road-going Americans already use driverless cars,” he’ll say, in a Chuck Schumery voice. “Let’s get that to 100 percent by 2035. And make sure no other parents have to lose their kids in entirely preventable car accidents.”
The social current will begin flowing towards a zeitgeist where supporting human-driven cars is as toxic as supporting handgun ownership. As improbable as that may sound to some of you, imagine how Chuck Schumer would have sounded to my grandfather, who plunked down his piggy-bank savings for his first .22 rimfire when he was 12 years old.
To begin with, there will be no outright ban on cars with human drivers. There will instead be city centers that are designated for driverless-cars only. Then there will be experimental stretches of highway, for research of course. But the findings of such research are as predictable as the legislation that will soon follow in Congress.
Of course, this is all still a long way off. All the more reason for it to be nipped in the bud while there’s still a bud to be nipped. We need to codify the right to drive our own cars, be in charge of our own travel, go exactly where we want, stop, start, and pull over, whenever we feel like, with the turn of a steering wheel and the press of a throttle or brake. We need to codify the right not to rely on centrally planned traffic patterns or computers that always follow all the traffic laws, all the time, and, I daresay, keep track of everywhere everyone goes. And we need to do it before any of that starts sounding absurd to liberal-arts undergraduates.
I’m no Luddite. I’ve written lots of pieces for lots of publications proposing more money in space, more nuclear reactors, a return to super-sonic flight, more and better statistical-analysis-driven algorithms for improving every part of our lives. I look forward to driverless trucks, and ships, all over the world. I look forward to driverless cars being available to anyone who wants one. But you can pry my steering wheel from my cold, dead hands.
We need a Second Amendment for cars. Before it’s too late.
Josh Gelernter is a writer in Connecticut.
