The death-wish naiveté of the digimaniac kid

by David Benjamin

“A car doesn’t understand why it’s driving anywhere.”

— Bart Selman, computer science professor, Cornell University

MADISON, Wis. — My mom drove a ’61 Fairlane until the day it more or less exploded in the left lane of Interstate 90 just north of Wisconsin Dells. I was driving, both hands on the wheel. At first I was fascinated, then troubled, by the grinding, crunching and clanking from under the hood as oily smoke obscured my view of the road and a piercing odor caused my sister Peg, in the back seat, to say, “Ew! What’s that stink?”

At that juncture, a car that my friends referred to affectionately as the Brown Bomb lived up to its nickname. Long before I pulled over to the shoulder that day — where Mom, Peg, Bill and I hurriedly exited — I’d seen this moment coming. I had long waged a literal cold war with the Bomb, which Mom expected me to “warm up” every morning before I shlepped down Simpson Street to wait for the school bus. If the mercury dipped below zero, the Bomb felt no duty to turn over and purr throatily beneath her hood. I resorted to various wily tactics, involving gas pedal, carburetor, spark, starter, a crescent wrench and profanity, in hopes of rousing the Ford. Sometimes, I beat the Bomb. Sometimes, the Bomb beat me.

But I learned from my frigid morning skirmishes a philosophical truth previously revealed by visionary thinkers like Ned Ludd, Philip K. Dick, Arthur C. Clarke and Jean Shepherd’s old man:

“Never trust a machine.”

My relationship with the Brown Bomb came roaring back when my wife, Hotlips, one of the world’s foremost technology journalists, treated me to a short video (http://youtu.be/VS5zQKXHdpM), which starred a teenager and a Tesla. (Tesla is a car.) The teenager was demonstrating the Tesla’s dazzling talent for “driving” itself without assistance from any carbon-based life form. 

The teenager — let’s call him Poindexter — proceeded to create a little nest in the back seat. Filmed by his frighteningly permissive mom, Poindexter next steered the family Tesla out onto a six-lane freeway and fired up its “autopilot” function. He then pretended to fall blissfully asleep in both the front and back seats, while his mother watched, filmed and cooed in loving ignorance.

(Flashback to circa 1966. I’m a teenager. I’m driving on Simpson Street, with Mom riding shotgun. We’re nearing 15 miles an hour. As we approach the unmarked intersection with Hoboken Road, Mom — in a 200-decibel High C that could have gotten her cast as a voice-double in an American/International creature feature — shrieks my name and wails, “Stop! STOP!” I cruise to a gentle halt, look both ways — at nothing — and ask, “Jeez, mom. What?” Mom calms slightly and says, “There might’ve been a car coming, You were going TOO FAST!”)

Back to Poindexter, who’s bundled in a blanket beside his mother, pretending to doze. No one’s in the front seat. The Tesla, in the middle lane, is overtaking human-driven cars going 70-odd mph. Poindexter is mugging for the camera and blithely pledging his adolescent faith in a speeding steel shell whose only control is a twitchy stream of ones and zeroes fed through a web of semiconductors that might go “Zzzt! Poof!” if the car’s right front Michelin hits a pothole deeper than a dogfood bowl. 

The infallible Tesla, it is presumed, will alert Poindexter and Mom to the pothole mishap and grant them ten seconds — before they die — to crawl out of “bed,” climb back to the front seat, squeeze in behind the steering wheel, fumble around for the autopilot switch, turn it off and wrench the car manually away from the approaching bridge abutment that is, by now, six feet from the front bumper. 

(Flashback to 1 March 2019, when — reported by Michael Coren of Quartz — a Model 3 Tesla, “slammed into a tractor-trailer attempting to cross a Florida highway traveling around 68 miles per hour… The impact sheared the roof off of the car, killing the driver, 50-year-old Jeremy Beren Banner. Investigators say Banner had engaged Autopilot about ten seconds before the crash, and did not have his hands on the wheel for up to eight seconds beforehand.”)

According to investigators, it was later judged that the car’s “sensors” (an unintentionally ironic term) thought the side of the 50-ton truck was “the sky.”

Up, up and away.

Because Hotlips’ beat includes coverage of “autonomous driving,” I’ve learned quite a bit. I can explain, with moderate accuracy, the differences among the five levels of so-called autonomy. I won’t bother here, except to note that Poindexter and his mother were attempting a Level 5 trick in a Level 2 car. According to most automotive experts, it’ll be at least 15 years before anyone will be able to nestle down in the rear parlor of a L5 Escalade and drift off to Dreamland while re-reading Remembrance of Things Past. 

As I’ve accumulated a lot of unwelcome “AV” knowhow, I’m yet to find an answer to this technology’s big mystery, which is: “Who asked for it?”

Granted that Poindexter is a certifiable digimaniac who thinks a “self-driving” car (does a machine have a “self”?) is way cool. But he’s the exception who seems to prove the rule — the rule being, “Who cares?” I’ve struggled to find a broad consensus — or even a person — who favors filling our streets and roads with cars that tool around all by their lonesome, some empty, none of them licensed to drive, and every one educated by algorithms that were written by non-driving nerds.

If people wanted autonomous cars, buses, trucks and mopeds, they would say “Whoa, gimme one of them.” In the tech biz — or any biz — this urge is called “consumer push.” The opposite force, which applies to self-doing cars that nobody asked for, is “technology push,” which is inaccurate.

The right term is “marketing push.” Elon Musk is the founder of Tesla. He’s a formidable inventor and a middling businessman. But his best thing is marketing. Elon could sell pogo sticks to paraplegics. He’s heir to a long line of techno-mountebanks who depend on gadget reporters and business shills in the trade press to swallow whole any high-tech pitch that takes place on a convention-center stage with a blizzard of Power Points, three giant video screens and a headache-inducing soundtrack. Hand Elon a laser wand and a microphone and he could convince an entire auditorium full of wide-eyed high-tech “influencers” that he can make a thousand tiny robotic chorus girls with huge boobs dance the Varsity Drag on the head of a stickpin. And he’ll have video to back it up.

Poindexter survived his ride on the wild side. I can only pray that his dad has since burned Poindexter’s driver’s license, snapped his joystick and sent Mom to her room. If he hasn’t, he should, because — despite Elon — autonomous driving is still in its infancy. At this stage, it’s fraught with scary what-abouts — one of which is that only an adolescent naif with a death wish and a mom named Jocasta would crawl into the back seat on a four-lane highway at 75 mph and expect this contraption to jockey down the road ass-by-teakettle with eighteen-wheelers driven by Benzedrine cowboys who haven’t slept for three days.

Philip Koopman, an auto safety expert who teaches at Carnegie-Mellon, once said to Hotlips: “Don’t tell me your autonomous vehicle is safe when you haven’t done the engineering legwork to determine whether it is safe or if you aren’t sure.”

Besides which, most of us — despite the known danger of putting a steering wheel in the hands of fallible human beings — don’t want to let go of it. Many of us don’t even like driving. But we heed the lesson of the Brown Bomb, stinking and smoking beside I-90, her passengers unscathed because one of them had hold of the wheel and understood:

“Never trust a machine, especially if the tires are bald and the shocks are shot.”