So, wow, imagine we get there: total autonomy. Manual driving is outlawed. Our cars are better drivers than we ever were. And not only that, they coordinate with one another in an elegant choreography, threading through traffic with inches to spare. Parking becomes parkland, because no cars ever stay still for long; they stop only to recharge themselves as needed. If you choose, you can just hang out at home and let the robocars bring you everything you need. But even if that future does arrive, it would come with a trunkful of nagging questions. What does it feel like to live in that world? And how does 21st-century society — which has been built, in ways large and small, around human drivers — change and reconfigure when they all become mere riders? In the pages that follow, we begin to wonder at some answers.

Cities Without Signs Street signage is the iconography of the automobile age. It’s like highly functional pop art: silhouettes of schoolchildren, white arrows, rectangular cries of WRONG WAY and, most central of all, the ubiquitous stoplight. The traffic light might be the first part of that iconographic world to be transformed, or vanish altogether, once we are fully in the age of autonomous cars. Robots, after all, won’t need signs to optimize the way they move through urban landscapes. Urban-transportation experts have been busily creating computer simulations to show how this might work. In one model, each crossroads would have an “intersection manager,” a computer that senses the approaching traffic and uses wireless communication to talk to the oncoming cars. When each self-driving car is perhaps 300 yards away, it sends a request to the intersection manager — to turn right, say, or to move on through. The intersection manager then does an on-the-fly calculation to route that vehicle most efficiently, like an omnipotent and tireless traffic cop. The result? A ballet of cars whizzing and weaving past one another in the intersection. Some slow down as they approach; others pass straight through. But crucially, compared with today’s intersections, many fewer cars come to a complete halt. This could significantly speed up traffic throughout an entire city. Peter Stone, a computer scientist at the University of Texas at Austin who works with one model, has found that the “delay” time at intersections shrinks remarkably. “Right now, it takes me an average of 20 minutes to get to work, but with autonomous-car intersections, it might be half that time,” he says. Safety would be enhanced, too: Forty-three percent of car crashes in the United States occur at intersections, and Stone predicts that robot vehicles would crash only if there was a mechanical error. Better yet, autonomous intersections could produce an estimated 20 to 50 percent less carbon dioxide, because there would be fewer idling cars and jack-rabbit starts. “That’s the most expensive and most polluting part of driving,” says Remi Tachet des Combes, a mathematician who created robot-intersection models while at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. For the human passenger, though, a robotized intersection could be mildly terrifying — like flying through a crowded asteroid belt, trusting the A.I. to find the right path. “At first I think it will be freaky,” Stone admits. “Some people will need the window darkened so they don’t freak out.” But in the long run, we’ll probably shrug, get used to it and barely look up from our games of Candy Crush as we zip through. And pedestrians? They would probably push a button at the intersection to request their turn — or even use a smartphone app. More subtly unsettling, however, might be the spectacle of a city devoid of stoplights. Indeed, devoid of all major street signs: no huge billboards across highways naming the exits, no complex merge instructions. Those signs are expensive to build and maintain. They’re designed for humans, and GPS-brained robots don’t need them to know where they’re going. Certainly, human pedestrians and cyclists will still need guideposts, but as Stone suspects, far fewer, and smaller, ones. A world with almost no street signs would feel strange. It could make a city less cluttered and more attractive. But it might also leave us feeling unmoored. Social critics worry that GPS has already eroded our knowledge of the city; some studies have found that the more we rely on devices, the less we deeply intuit where we are and how to navigate on our own. “We become more helpless,” as Greg Milner, the author of “Pinpoint,” a history of GPS, told me. If robots rule the roads, we might get where we’re going a lot more quickly — but end up not knowing precisely where we are. Clive Thompson is the author of “Smarter Than You Think: How Technology Is Changing Our Minds for the Better.” Developed by Marshall Brown, Lili Du, Laura Forlano, Jack Guthman, and Ron Henderson. Visual Design by Maryam Heidaripour

Picturing the Self-Driving City Marshall Brown, an associate professor of architecture at the Illinois Institute of Technology, recently traveled to Ann Arbor, Mich., to visit the Mcity Test Facility, the University of Michigan’s 32-acre testing ground for automated vehicles. Mcity, which looks like a soundstage of a midcentury suburb, is a simulator: It has no actual residents. Still, Brown found it “bizarre and frankly frightening” that it looked as though the track had been designed almost entirely by transportation experts, not urban planners or architects. He identified it as part of a larger problem: As technologists imagine the driverless world, they seem to be doing so with a distinct lack of imagination. Brown is a creator of the Driverless City Project, an interdisciplinary research initiative at I.I.T. that takes a playful, rigorous approach to envisioning the fully autonomous future. The project helps participants generate various situations for a city in order to determine how autonomous cars will fit into the picture. Central to the project is a “mind map” representing the group’s research, organized into four areas of impact: street space, parking space, commuter space and delivery space. The map, as well as other tools — including a set of large tokens for scenario building, like a tarot deck for urbanists — is meant to encourage others to be ambitious and creative about the world in which they want to live. “We should write the future,” Brown says, “rather than trying to predict it.” Brown has found two prevalent attitudes when it comes to self-driving vehicles: either an active but unimaginative approach, rushing to build robots to accommodate the world as it is now, or a totally passive approach, a sort of “wait and see.” The first, he says, is characteristic of the tech industry; the second, of the public sector. “I hear too much surrendering in the question about our future right now,” he adds. “Just surrendering to Google or Amazon, or surrendering to your phone, or surrendering to a driverless car. We should not surrender.” One way to stave off surrender, Brown believes, is to invite more diverse thinkers, like architects and urban planners, into the process of imagining and designing the autonomous future. (He also listed sociologists, fiction writers, Buddhist monks, poets and rabbis as useful stakeholders.) The current discourse around the future of autonomous vehicles is centered on “technologically deterministic fantasies,” Brown says. He’s concerned that technological values — like logic, predictability and efficiency — will be erroneously imposed upon the built environment, leading to urban spaces that fail to take into account delight, pleasure or human connection. “A society is cultural, and political, and aesthetic, and about desires — it’s not just how you solve problems,” he says. “They’re going to need more than just software engineers working on it.” As an architect, Brown is especially attuned to the unlocked aesthetic potential of urban environments. Today’s visual clutter, necessary for keeping human-driven cars as nonlethal as possible, could be eradicated. It is critical, in his view, to consider the beauty and quality of the world that self-driving cars could bring. It’s worth considering, then, where cars will go when people don’t need them. “What happens when a car can park itself anywhere?” Brown asks. He hypothesizes that parking, if performed robotically, could become “a negative externality, not unlike that of a trash dump,” should developers repurpose garages and parking lots for more lucrative uses. (Why look for parking in Greenwich Village if the car can park itself on the edge of New Jersey?) In the Midwest, he speculates, deindustrialized cities with waning property values could even be bought wholesale and transformed into vast, flat parking lots — a future that he deemed plausible, if “too dystopian,” in no small part because of the likelihood that it would be pushed upon lower-income communities. On the other hand, those same communities could benefit from increased mobility and access to employment. Brown is also considering the changes to storage: If robotic trucks constantly roam our landscape, will warehouses be abandoned? He’s focused on the changing needs and desires of a human driver. To accommodate an autonomous, cross-country route, truck cabs, he speculates, may need to expand according to a driver’s needs, perhaps going so far as to resemble a microapartment. An emphasis (or lack thereof) on efficiency also addresses the temporal dimension of cities: It favors — or facilitates — a working lifestyle in which there is never enough time. In a future of increased automation and accessibility, work culture may begin to shift; labor, and its attendant time constraints, may no longer be central to the urban experience. Brown envisions the possibility of a hands-free commute that opens up space for socializing — “an interior social world.” Riders could chat with people in adjacent cars or simply take the opportunity to watch the world go by. (A more cynical take on this, he says, is that the hands-free commute will simply increase the demands on workers, as the car becomes an extension of the home office — a WeWork on wheels.) Second-order effects of autonomous vehicles tend to get lost in the techno-utopian chatter, but there seems to be an increasing awareness that self-driving cars won’t just arrive in cities; they’ll change them too. Some tech companies are beginning to get into data-driven city-building, a movement largely galvanized by the seeming inevitability of autonomous vehicles. Last year, Y Combinator announced a research initiative, New Cities, that aimed to study how to build a metropolis entirely from scratch. In mid-October, Sidewalk Labs, an Alphabet subsidiary, announced that it will redevelop a 12-acre strip along Toronto’s waterfront, called Quayside, which will integrate technology across the human experience. The vehicles it is planning to accommodate will be shared, electric and self-driving. Power and control over autonomous-vehicle technology is already concentrated in the hands of a small few: If a company like Uber or Alphabet controls the dominant transportation infrastructure, you need not live in an intentional community like Quayside to feel as though your city is becoming a company town. Brown is wary of the smart-cities initiative, and he resents the efforts of technology companies to fully saturate the human — and urban — experience. “A city is not a problem to be solved,” he says. “A city is a cultural construct, even though it involves the deployment of technologies. A city is not science alone.” Anna Wiener is a writer based in San Francisco.

The Augmented-Reality Windshield For obvious reasons, our present-day cars are designed for keen observation of the outside world, offering a nearly panoramic view of the road and landscape through panels of glass. The parade of images flitting past a car’s windows can be exhilarating or can induce a kind of pleasurable trance. By virtue of being transparent and inert, however, windows are inherently limited. Although we have begun to augment the car’s field of vision with new layers of information — phones suction-cupped to the windshield, or GPS built into the dashboard — there is still so much useful knowledge just out of reach. Today’s windows allow you to scope out a parking spot or search for that tiny cafe with the faded sign, but they can’t help you find them. Nor can they show you exactly where that highway exit will lead or identify the odd building you just passed. Tomorrow’s could. Unlike Google Glass — which awkwardly placed screens where they didn’t need to be — a car already requires a membrane between passengers and their environment. Why not turn that typically passive barrier into a dynamic canvas? Ordinary windows could be replaced with holographic glass or an advanced semitranslucent liquid-crystal display. They could anticipate our needs and instantaneously display weather forecasts, reviews of nearby restaurants and hotels, details about popular tourist attractions — and warnings about miserable tourist traps. As the technology improves and people become more comfortable obscuring their surroundings, your windows could begin to overlay a vast digital diorama onto passing scenery. Passengers would no longer have to wonder about the identity of a landmark and scramble to look it up on their phones. Instead, the car itself, wired with artificial intelligence, plugged into sophisticated mapping technology and equipped with magic eyes, would instantaneously recognize, annotate and augment its surroundings. A mountain, desert or coastline could become an interactive infographic, peeling away the physical surface of the earth to reveal hidden layers of geology. A self-directed double-decker bus ambling through London could rearrange the city like a Lego set, refashioning streets and buildings to illuminate the capital’s rich history. Early television sets made the distant accessible; the self-driving car could reveal the invisible in the immediate. As exciting as such possibilities are, recent history suggests plenty of reasons to temper our optimism. When windows double as screens, we will have the opportunity to gaze at the world anew through richly animated portals. Alternatively — and perhaps more realistically — we could end up staring into larger versions of our phones, distracting ourselves with email, mindless games and the infinite bazaar of the internet. The potential of the autonomous vehicle is to help us interact with our environment in ways never before possible. The temptation is to turn ever more inward, exchanging the physical world for yet another simulation. Either way, self-driving cars with ubiquitous screens will inevitably bring all the familiar drawbacks of digital media onto the open road. Taxi TV in New York City is just a preview of the potential nightmare. What if the price for enchanted windows of the future is a nauseating kaleidoscope of advertisements, vapid movie reviews and contextless late-night jokes? Rather than learning about the hidden history of your surroundings, you may very well learn only about two-for-one cricket tacos in the food truck a lane over, homeowner’s insurance for the Anthropocene or the sale on microdrones at a nearby mall. Don’t want ads? No problem. You can upgrade to a premium account. Ferris Jabr is a writer based in Portland, Ore.

The Seizure of Commuting Time One big question about the driverless car will be who gets to own our new wealth of free time. Will it remain with commuters — or will corporations expect them to tap into the office as their vehicles ferry them there? While the potential for hours of unplugged leisure exists, the way we currently fill our downtime leads me to believe that some form of digital immersion will take precedence, as bosses expect employees to work on their way to and from work. It wouldn’t be surprising to see the remaining minimum-wage positions in the rapidly automating food industry go to those who have access to driverless cars; use their cars for deliveries while they work, and you get two employees for the price of one. It’s tricky. On their surface, driverless cars will take some of the mess out of living, but they can also take the living where they don’t want to go, both psychologically and physically. Some car interiors might more closely resemble cubicles. Or cells. Will private employers surveil workers in order to control off-duty behavior? It’s also easy to conceive of a future where newly created infrastructure, explicitly dedicated to automated vehicles, will enable people with the means to own the cars to avoid the people without. We should be wary of any technology that allows those with power to distance themselves even further from society. Rahawa Haile is an Eritrean-American writer of short stories and essays.

Nonstop Teenage Party In a short essay published in 1970, the British architect David Greene suggested that his colleagues pay more attention to cars. “A traffic jam is a collection of rooms,” he explained, and “so is a car park — they are really instantly formed and constantly changing communities.” It was a memorable observation that nonetheless would surprise few teenagers, who long ago embraced the transformative notion that cars are not just rooms, but rooms they can control. Autonomous cars will once again transform teenage life. Anab Jain, a founder of the design studio Superflux, says the ritual requirements of teenage socializing will inspire “a new range of acts and services that help you obfuscate your car’s identity or your own data.” Instead of trying to roll back the odometer on the family car à la Ferris Bueller, teenagers hoping to roam the city, free from parental view, might trick it into recording destinations they didn’t really visit. “The whole notion of freedom will change,” Jain says, even as some of the destinations remain familiar. Dark streets or quiet state parks where GPS doesn’t reach would be the coolest sites of all. The question of when, exactly, the party has started will also become an intriguing one: After all, each car is a room unto itself. The Situationist International, a loose group of artists, political agitators and heavy drinkers who roamed the streets of Paris and other cities in the 1960s, treating them as arenas for detours and debauchery, offers some clues about how such rooms could be transformed. “I only ever hear self-driving cars talked about as a functional solution to the problem of getting from A to B,” says McKenzie Wark, the author of a history of the Situationists called “The Beach Beneath the Street.” (The title is a reference to the sand that was revealed when protesters picked up cobblestones from the Paris streets to throw at the police.) Wark imagines these machines rolling out of the factory with more radical settings hard-wired into their operating systems. “A hybrid of the self-driving car and, say, Grindr could bring a whole new meaning to the concept of cruising,” Wark suggests. “There should be a ‘scenic route’ setting, a ‘random’ setting, a ‘surprise me’ setting. Or maybe ‘mystery destination,’ which whisks you — and algorithmically chosen others — to an undisclosed location. Algorithmic chicken for teenage drivers, where you drive head-on toward another car — then magically swerve off at the last minute.” Unlike today’s cars, autonomous cars can also be made to swarm together, creating somewhat of a paradox: a moving traffic jam. Once the swarm is formed, proximity algorithms could mine social-media profiles to arrange like-minded clusters, while enabling “shuffle mode” might one day be the equivalent of texting a friend to rescue you from the boring guy in the corner. Aspiring D.J.s will rely on software to assemble self-driving cars into the ideal configuration for louder bass. Couples armed with GPS jammers — the future’s perfect Valentine’s Day gift — will quietly steer strangers away, creating a halo of romantic privacy around their makeout sessions. If all else fails, hit “skip” to be transported to an entirely new party. Hidden beneath the hormone haze of future block parties, new opportunities for cultural pranks and political protest will emerge. Rather than throw cobblestones, protesters could quickly jam the streets to show political solidarity or organize a strike. With the right programming skills, they might be able to shut down a whole city just by blocking a few crucial nodes. They could even open the streets back up to foot traffic, remaking them as a space for celebration. Then, of course, when it’s time to go home, all those dull factory presets, optimized for safety and efficiency, will finally come into their own — no designated driver necessary. Geoff Manaugh is the author of “A Burglar’s Guide to the City.”

Your Autonomous Dealer Drug dealers tend to choose cars at the extremes — on the one hand a cocaine-white G-Wagen, on the other a ’98 Toyota Tercel. Each suggests a kind of shady guarantee that the self-driving car isn’t likely to sustain. Like most new stuff from Silicon Valley, the autonomous car is bound to be cute — a gumdrop whip fit for a Pixar protagonist. Hardly what you dream of when you’re trying to score. If drugs are still cool, they’ll have stayed that way in part because of their illicitness and the mild supply-line chaos that brute fact engenders: the inconsistent product, unreliable hookups and hours spent waiting for the dealer to arrive. Self-driving cars will succeed only by reducing and avoiding such chaos as much as possible. If these two industries are ever to play nice, then the success of one will come at the cost of the cool-guy reputation of the other. In the self-driving future, a weed transaction will begin the same as always — by texting your dealer in search of “tree,” or by casually asking if he wants to “hang out.” En route to another customer’s house, he will text back immediately, freed from the imposition of two hands on the wheel. Memories of waiting impatiently on a flaky dealer will recede as his car appears on your app, predicting arrival time down to the minute. Watch as his vehicle weaves around school zones, or is maybe flagged and pulled over by the police. The new possibilities for surveillance are endless. In any case, if he makes it to your house, it is likely that he will emerge from his self-driving pod in a sweatshirt for a company with a name like TōkTaxi or Gangl.ly or Lyft’d. As weed begins to trend toward legality, we’ve already seen such standing-desk branding start to creep into the stoner vernacular. A scan down PC Magazine’s “15 Blazing Hot Weed Tech Companies to Watch” reveals Tokken (a blockchain system for dealers), MassRoots (a stoner social network) and Eaze (the obligatory “Uber for weed”). In this new age of cannabis, the only thing that moves faster than the tech is the rate at which smoking itself becomes corny. But cringe-worthy orthography is not the only thing that this self-driven industry will inherit from Silicon Valley. In the age of semiautonomous cars, dealers will be forced to file 1099s, sharing their profits as lowly subcontractors. As in the time when dealers drove themselves, this fleet of buddies-for-hire will offer five to 10 minutes of humanity-affirming chitchat. Unlike preautonomous dealers, they will plead that you tweet their referral codes in order to receive a complimentary edible. This, of course, is one good reason to strive for fully autonomous drugmobiles. The driverless vehicle eliminates small talk, supplying your fix directly from the glove box with a personalized passcode, à la Amazon Locker. With no human body attached to the cargo, suppliers will seek to move harder drugs, in bigger quantities, potentially unleashing a new set of problems. The narc, a liability throughout all of human history, isn’t likely to go anywhere soon. Self-driving cars will scan for hazards in the street but will also pickup telltale signs of an informant: nervous twitches, too-enthusiastic slang. A customer might even be asked to answer a question like, “Are you a cop?” (Because, as all drug dealers know, a real cop has to say yes, even to an A.I.) It is likely that a database of narcs will be compiled, and inevitably, this database of narcs will be hacked. Millions of Americans will be exposed as poseurs — a social problem tragically immune to disruption. Jamie Lauren Keiles is a writer in New York.

Policing With No Tickets The temptation is the greatest on nights when the evening rush seems to congeal around the car, and she just wants to be home. She waits until she has left downtown (too many traffic towers), and then, with a few taps to a screen, she goes for it. Chinese software hacks come well recommended, and it’s soon clear why: The car picks up speed and begins to weave through the slower traffic — pleasingly aggressive but more sure in its lines, with less lurching, than the typical Russian black-market goods. She returns to her movie, but before long she hears a chime and a grating alert: “Traffic ticket assessed.” She spots a police car speeding past, a quad drone fixed to the roof, as her own vehicle reverts to its factory settings and rejoins the docile march of the lemmings. In the coming world of ubiquitous self-driving, it will just be you, the open road and the vast apparatus of the nanny state. Cars won’t readily violate traffic laws and may well be legally required to report on their owners. Ignore that burned-out headlight for too long, and the overnight software update may include a virtual boot. Traffic tickets bring in billions of dollars annually, so all those well-behaved cars will have an economic impact. Governments that have historically viewed traffic citations as an extractive industry (Ferguson, Mo., say, or the State of California) will have no choice but to find alternatives. Far more consequential, for both the police and their communities, will be the death of the routine traffic stop. The Supreme Court has ruled that law enforcement may stop any car, whatever its true motive, as long as an infraction is observed. Human drivers can’t get far without breaking the letter of the traffic law, so the pretexts come easy. If officers then spot a dozen laptops stacked on the back seat, they can ask questions. Yet this broad, virtually unchecked power to stop has led to charges of racial profiling. (A recent linguistic analysis of bodycam footage from Oakland, Calif., for example, concluded that officers spoke “with consistently less respect toward black versus white community members.”) With pretexts largely automated away, these kinds of interactions will be rare. “The self-driving car,” says Elizabeth Joh, a professor at the U.C. Davis School of Law, “will come to be seen as a civil rights issue.” The police will have lost an important investigative tool, but the government will have gained new surveillance possibilities. Cars will sweep up vast amounts of data about their surroundings and their occupants, including 24/7 GPS trails. (An important Fourth Amendment case being heard this fall, Carpenter v. United States, will decide whether the government needs a warrant to gain access to cellphone locational data, setting a precedent that could apply to cars.) Another potential target is the pedestrian. In the first part of the 20th century, manufacturers lobbied to make “jaywalking” a crime, so the new horseless carriages could cruise along urban streets relatively unimpeded. The pedestrians of the future, emboldened by the fact that self-driving cars are sure to stop, could cause havoc. No worries, though: Facial-recognition technology is coming along nicely, and the automotive industry will be, if anything, even more powerful. Look for today’s complaints about speeding tickets to be replaced by stories of “jaywalking traps” and pitiless fines for a second offense. Gareth Cook is a contributing writer for the magazine. His last article was about cancer.

The Rise and Fall of Aquacars Looking back at the decades when the autonomous car was developed, you may find it hard to believe that its engineers imagined that it would stay landbound. All along, sea levels continued to rise, gradually overwhelming the sea walls that many coastal cities built as protection and flooding the (now absurdly named) ground floor of apartment and office buildings. Rather than simply abandon these buildings, though, many residents chose to stay — fueling a demand for autonomous aquacars and, as that technology improved, for mobile aquahomes. This became especially true after the successful completion of the SeaOrbiter, a floating laboratory originally designed for oceanography research. Elegant and semisubmersible, the SeaOrbiter acted as a kind of prototype for local offshore living — and the rise of aerial drone delivery, originally pioneered by Amazon, made the challenge of resupplying straightforward. Unfortunately, hackers quickly figured out how to hijack the aquahomes’ navigation system — first by disabling it and then with programs that directed vessels to floating “chop shops” run by roving gangs of ship-breakers. Piracy rates dropped only after huge kelp growth, driven by a mix of ocean warming and overfishing, rendered the submerged communities as unnavigable by aquacars as they had been by roadbound ones. Jennifer Kahn last wrote for the magazine about the YouTube series “Primitive Technology.”

