To absorb this in the proper spirit, it’s helpful to know that Keats, the wickedly droll author of WIRED’s Jargon Watch column (which I edit), has been described in a New Yorker profile as an “experimental philosopher.” He once sold real estate in the extra dimensions predicted by string theory and has copyrighted his mind to get a 70-year post-life extension. No one is better at tipping sacred cows.

So the particulars of how this Phase I prototype works, while delightful (more on that in a moment), probably shouldn’t be taken entirely at face value. But pay close attention to the trunkful of ideas Keats is sneaking across state lines. The Roadable Synapse is a sly and thought-provoking answer to a question we forgot to ask: What if driverless vehicles aren’t the future?

What We Want

There are reasons to wonder. For starters, it’s not a given that consumers will happily strap themselves into metal boxes hurtling through traffic with no control over their own fate. There’s also the looming, unresolved question of accident liability.

But more basic still, is it what we want? Personally, I like to drive. I’m not a car buff by any means, but I like to be the agent of my own locomotion. I enjoy the mild, power-assisted physicality of it, the sensation of steering the machine.

Sure, in the city I’ll take Lyft to avoid the Darwinian competition for parking—and someday that Lyft driver may well be a computer, if only so “ride-sharing” companies (new-model taxi services) can eliminate their labor issues. But out in the burbs, where I, like most Americans, live? Out where the highway swoops and rolls through open hills? Nah.

And judging from the depiction of driving in movies, videogames, and TV commercials (cue the techno soundtrack), I’m not alone in that sentiment. Thelma and Louise would have felt considerably less liberating with the protagonists sitting idly in the back seat. Which is to say, there’s more at stake here than transportation.

Frankly, there's something a bit quaint in the image of a driverless future. It’s sort of a Jetsons vision of what technology can do for us. Indeed, autonomous vehicles have been a staple of World’s Fairs going back to the Futurama exhibit of 1939. In the ’50s, GM and RCA tested a variety of “automated highway” systems, using radio-controlled steering, magnets in the pavement, and other ideas. Like the flying car, the self-driving car has always been just around the corner.

But Keats says our experience with personal tech suggests another path entirely. “As computers evolved into smartphones, they became a sort of cognitive and emotional extension of ourselves. They’ve become part of us—we get anxious when we’re separated from our devices. In the same way, our relationship with our cars might grow more intimate, not less, as their capabilities grow.”

That’s the vision behind the Roadable Synapse: The car as an extension of the driver’s body. Which, if you think about it, has always been a guiding design principle in Detroit—at least in an aspirational, ego-flattering way. Just look at the gleaming “land yachts” and muscle cars of the past century, or the race for ever-taller SUVs today.