I’ve got a license…and now I can’t drive (anymore)

We’ve talked a lot about what our autonomous future looks like, at least from certain perspectives; it was even our cover story for the 2017 Automotive issue here at The Pulse, in fact. And in general, we’re in favor.

The near future will see much of what’s terrible about driving replaced with a space that actually benefits both drivers and society in general. Your commute will get shorter, faster, and greener when a network of cars is planning the route for maximum efficiency.

As for you, when you’re actually in your self-driving car, you won’t be driving through terrible, infuriating, stop-and-go traffic. You’ll be doing something—anything—else, whether it’s sleeping, watching a movie, chatting, or working. Or eating, probably. None of the other drivers will be doing anything obnoxious, either, because the cars will just be trundling along. It has amazing potential to lower our collective blood pressure.

Even as a professional lover of cars and driving them, I don’t mind giving up the tedious parts at all. But there are lots of people for whom cars are only appliances, for whom all the driving is tedious. It’s maybe even a majority of people, and the market doesn’t cater to the minority. So the driverless future isn’t going to be driverless cars just in the cities, it’s rapidly going to be everywhere.

There are lots of things that I, and I’m betting you, don’t do. I don’t know how to thresh nor even grind my own wheat. I have never churned butter, nor have I ever packed clay and straw together to make building materials, and I would bet good money that almost no Pulse readers have, either, unless there’s some huge medieval revival movement of which I am unaware.

Not because no one needs flour or butter or bricks, but because those jobs are largely mechanized. Automation doesn’t so much take jobs as skills. Autonomous cars won’t just take delivery and taxi jobs, they will eventually take the very skills of driving.

It will be gradual, at least at first, and not complete—you can drive over to the Folk School in Brasstown, NC, and take classes in making cane chairs, scrimshaw, or hammered dulcimers. But it will be pervasive and almost unavoidable: Even if you want to make your own forks, it might not be convenient to set up a coal forge in your condo.

Those activities are largely relegated to specialized facilities and very rural areas, which describes the race tracks and dirt roads where the few people still motivated to drive will congregate.

Will it be a loss? Maybe for a generation or two. I imagine the wagon drivers of 1908 thought something amazing was going away, and maybe it was. But we’re not wading through horse crap or getting our chests caved in by errant kicks on a daily basis, either.

The infrastructure and social bandwidth currently devoted to the mechanisms and trappings of driving ourselves around will rapidly be repurposed for whatever else we need more. DNA sequencing? The Hunt for Elves? Or Elvis? We essentially can’t know, because it’s on the other side of this little event horizon we’re in the middle of creating.

We go through those radical shifts every moment, where we end something and allow a new thing to be created in its place. Driving will go the way of fletching arrows, and we won’t miss it for very long at all.