The Future Is … Soon: ‘Autonomy’ and the Future of Autonomous Vehicle Literature
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An unprovable claim: 95 percent of the existing literature on driverless cars is written in the future tense. Soon cars will do X, passengers will do Y, and so on. For some, I imagine this stylistic tic generates excitement—look at all the cool stuff that will happen! As a tech skeptic with a nine-year-old laptop, I can’t help reading chapters full of future tense and hearing a robotic, monotonous tone: “We will be with you shortly.” The future tense lends itself to these tonal interpretations, usually because the focus is on possibilities instead of outcomes. Reading autonomous vehicle literature is like watching clouds: You see a unicorn, I see a tank; neither of us is wrong, necessarily.
Except, why are we out in some field looking at clouds? Don’t we have work? Class? Kids? According to the existing autonomous vehicle (AV) literature, the answer is: What are those? A quick survey of the field reveals less about the underlying technology of AV and more about how the AV industry views the available time and resources of the average consumer.
Take 2016’s Driverless: Intelligent Cars and the Road Ahead, which offers several hundred “exciting” futuristic scenarios, almost and theorize that the “crude, poorly designed in-car infotainment systems of today’s vehicles will no longer exist,” and whereas I envisioned the total eradication of this strange, possibly meaningless thing called “infotainment,” the authors quickly assured me that in driverless vehicles, the infotainment systems will not be eliminated but improved upon. Later, Lipson and Kurman envision a driverless taxi that will feature “a 200-page click-through license” wherein the passenger waives the right to sue; to me, this sounded like a dystopian Disney ride for lawyers, yet the tone in their future-focused paragraph is oddly rosy.
