One of the most interesting things in the UK chancellor’s Budget in March was the announcement of an extra £100million of funding for research into driverless cars. Coming on the back of several similar initiatives globally (like Intel’s $100million Connected Car Fund and the well-known Google self-driving car programme), it seems like the driverless car is well on its way to becoming a reality in the 21st century. But what are the implications of driverless cars?

One putative implication became clear in the aftermath of the Budget, when leading taxi app Hailo launched a campaign called ‘Face to Faceless’, which consists of a series of portraits of taxi drivers projected on to London landmarks. It is meant to highlight the role of the driver and ‘remind the city that cabbies are part of its DNA’. Now, whatever your attitude towards London cabbies (and, yes, we all know about those ones that deliberately choose congested routes in order to up the journey fare and thus deserve every bit of the kicking a service like Uber is giving them), this reaction is important because it shows that one implication of driverless cars is their potential to disrupt – disrupt the labour market; disrupt the insurance industry; and disrupt our urban landscapes. New technologies and technological progress always disorient us and pose a threat to existing practices. New technologies introduce uncertainty. We know from historical experience that the benefits and perceived deficits of a new technology are never distributed equally and that it is impossible to anticipate all the outcomes of the technology’s introduction. Some lose, some gain. The blacksmiths sung the praises of the coming of the automobile, but not many survived its ascendancy. Today’s cabbies might very well be the equivalent of nineteenth-century horse-and-cart men, blacksmiths and all the other related trades that were swept aside as the automobile conquered the world. The arrival of the driverless car does appear to represent such a moment, if not for society as a whole, then certainly for those parts of society that rely upon present-day transport arrangements.

Cabbies are not the only ones to raise concerns about driverless cars. Academics, philosophers, sociologists and policymakers have also raised important questions about the ethical and moral dimensions of autonomous cars: will these vehicles be programmed to act ethically, and whose ethics will they have? Indeed, some have asked if machines are capable of ‘having’ moral agency. Such concerns have led the UK’s leading robotics labs to get together and, with £1.4million of public funding from the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council, embark on a four-year project to lay down ground rules to ensure autonomous systems act reliably, safely and ethically when they interact with people. And the motorcar industry is teaming up with philosophy departments in universities across the world to bring an ethical framework to artificial-intelligence systems. Enabling a complex machine like a car to act autonomously, and navigate a complicated infrastructure without human intervention, is an incredible feat. The convergence of sensor technologies with connected-vehicle communications for collision avoidance and traffic management, underpinned by faster and faster computing power, is a shining testimony to human ingenuity and ambition.

But just because such technology exists, or appears to exist, that doesn’t mean we should stop questioning the driverless car and its implications for the future. A legitimate starting point is to ask: what problem is it trying to solve? A ‘solution for all seasons’?

Academics, the motor industry, technology companies like Google and Intel, and professional services businesses have all celebrated this new technology. As they see it, driverless cars will solve a huge number of intractable social problems: they will reduce the high cost of traffic crashes, which not only result in needless and meaningless deaths but also put pressure on creaking health services; they would decrease the need for the building and maintenance of transportation infrastructure, as we would no longer need existing traffic controls or lighting; they would reduce the millions of hours wasted in traffic jams, increasing productivity, and reduce stress and petrol consumption; and they would allow us to cut significantly the waste of urban space given over to parking lots – this would allow us to design our emerging megacities to be more efficient and pleasant environments in which to live and work. There is no denying that these are real issues. According to research from the American Automobile Association (AAA), traffic crashes cost the US $300 billion annually, while it spends $75 billion annually on roads, highways, bridges, and other infrastructure designed to accommodate the imprecise and often unpredictable behaviour of human-driven vehicles. Self-driving vehicles, with the ability to ‘platoon’ – perhaps in special express lanes – would, it is suggested, bring an end to battles over the need for (and cost of) high-speed trains like HS2. Traffic congestion costs Americans 4.8 billion hours of travel delay each year – the equivalent of more than $100 billion annually in delays and needless fuel consumption, $23 billion of which can apparently be attributed to congestion caused by truck journeys.

If all of these claims are to be believed, the only problems the driverless car is not going to solve are the common cold, cancer and world peace. It appears that this ‘technology for all seasons’ has the potential to help solve some of the more intractable social and economic problems of the 21st century. But is this really the case? Historical experience tells us to be sceptical about these claims. Technologies have an unerring tendency never to perform as their initial architects envisaged. But there is a more fundamental reason to stop and think: when all these claims are examined, they reveal one worrying underlying common assumption – namely, that human error and weakness are the real problems that need fixing.

People are seen as highly unpredictable and potentially dangerous. They drink and drive, they lose concentration, they show off, they compete, they get stressed, and, as a result of all these failings, and more, they are massively error-prone. To make the case for the driverless car, its advocates point to the fact that of the six million crashes each year, 93 per cent are attributable to human error. The costly infrastructure developed to accommodate these far-from-perfect drivers, they contend, results in high costs, wasteful petrol consumption and congestion. What they are really saying is that if we can solve the problem of human fallibility (that is, replace human drivers in cars with computers), then the environment will flourish, productivity will rise, the economy will prosper, and, therefore, society as a whole will benefit. When discussed in these terms, the quest for the driverless car stops appearing quite so fantastically ambitious. In fact, it shows itself to be very much in step with contemporary misanthropy, a product of the culture of limits. It shows that far from representing a bold and progressive future-oriented vision, the driverless car is very much stuck in the present, as an attempt to automate what exists. This represents a diminishing of what it means to be human, a closing down, rather than a liberation, of society’s technological imagination.

Presentism and going back to the future A major issue with driverless cars, which few advocates interrogate, is that the category is an historical misnomer. The evolution of the car is the story of the remarkable interaction between human agency and technical wizardry. The car was never built nor envisaged without its human driver. Both man and car evolved and, in so doing, created modern society as we know it. Just as it was not possible to see what impact the car would have a century later, we should not project our present-day knowledge and imaginations on to the future, as if we already know what the future will be like. The uncritical acceptance of the category of the ‘driverless car’ shows that our imaginations remain within the limits of contemporary society.

The question that needs posing is: if we remove the driver from the car, is it still a car? Yes, we will have a ‘carriage’ of some sort, which will be mobile. But this is no longer a car in the historical sense of the term. It avoids the history of the car and society and, more importantly, blinds us to what could be possible in the future. By projecting the category of a ‘driverless car’ into the future, we freeze the present and assume that all we can ever have is a slightly altered form of what we have today. With fantastic communications and sensor technology at our command, surely we can envisage a transport system, a mobile on-demand system of movement, that goes way beyond the car and how we travel today? A critique of presentism is crucial to the discussion of the driverless car. The loss of an historical perspective is important because without it, without grasping what the car used to mean, we have no way of judging the meaning of the driverless car today. Presentism prevents us from posing the right questions. Surely, for instance, by removing human beings from the driver’s seat, we are changing not just the car but transport and moral agency, too? And surely this represents an unprecedented questioning of what it means to be human?

The speed of progress The car exemplified everything that was progressive and flawed about industrialisation and free-market capitalism. A marvel of the coalescence of numerous inventions and technological developments, it literally placed mankind in the driving seat. The car, which was always conceived of as an extension of human agency, became a mobile monument to human autonomy, invention and freedom. It reshaped the city and urbanisation. Arterial motorway systems became the superhighways of free will, unfettered commerce and enterprise. Just as today’s younger generations embrace information and communication technologies to gain greater freedom, autonomy and identity, so the postwar generation embraced the car. They customised them, creating identities and forging their escape from the tyranny of smalltown parochialism and the gaze of their parents.