#61: Perpetual Loitering Machines
When I travel outside of major cities now, I find myself imagining how self-driving cars would fit into the landscape, if at all. I spent a few days last week in a series of thinly-populated Scottish islands that collectively boasted one ATM, three taxis, and almost no cellular service. In a hypothetical future scenario where self-driving cars have achieved a level of global adoption on par with credit cards or mobile phones, what would be happening in these remote places? Would there be five or six cars that busily moved everyone around each island, or would the low costs of operating the vehicles result in a more exuberant "loitering car cloud" that ensured nobody had to wait more than a few minutes for a ride? Well, the islands don't have ATMs or cell reception today, so there's little reason to assume they'd have any self-driving cars in such a scenario, even if most other places did. We often imagine that driverless cars will turn mobility into a hardware-dependent service with minimal marginal costs that is ubiquitously available, but mobility could also just become another version of cellular service, usually good enough everywhere but plagued by small geographic pockets of unavailability, even in large cities ("let me meet you down the block, I'm not getting any mobility right here").
The extended thought experiment that self-driving cars have precipitated has raised some fascinating questions about the urban space that cars waste and how we'd rather use that space. The most optimistic scenario is that much of that space (currently dedicated to parking, inefficient driving, and general road congestion) will become available for other activities once we don't drive or own our cars: Algorithmic driving will enable vehicles to use the road more economically, and we won't have to park where we live or work, thus freeing up central cities' excessive parking lot capacity for better uses. The loitering car cloud puts a dystopian twist on this scenario: Self-driving cars will still need to go somewhere after they drop us off. They might deadhead out to the parking lots of abandoned malls in the exurbs, or they might just circulate the streets aimlessly, depending on which happens to cost less in a given situation. "Traffic" and "parking," after all, are both just subsets of a broader category, the physical space that cars occupy. Self-driving cars will still occupy significant space—they are physical objects that have to be somewhere 24 hours a day, even if it's not prime urban real estate, and there will be a lot of them. Roads themselves might be as convenient a storage location as any, and rather than disappearing, parking might just decouple from its heretofore stationary nature and become another kind of traffic that hopefully locates itself wherever we're not.
The journalist John C. Keats wrote in 1959 that "the car gave the American the opportunity not to travel but to 'make himself more and more common.'" If that process has reached its saturation point, automating the act of driving might at least give us humans a rest while cars continue to make themselves more and more common. Chenoe Hart has speculated that "our future passenger experience might bear little resemblance to either driving or riding; we’ll inhabit a space that only coincidentally happens to be in motion," and while that describes our human perspective, it's also true for the cars, which might store themselves by parking, idling, driving, or a combination of all three. It won't matter what the cars do because we won't be with them. In the future Hart describes, we'll join our cars as perpetually nomadic creatures unmoored from the forces that previously held us all in place. Mobility, like cellular service, will become invisible as the distinction between traveling and sitting still becomes less relevant and our constant motion involves fewer actual arrivals and departures. Then, everything will be parking.
Reads:
Big Brother's Blind Spot: Joanne McNeil explores the shortcomings of algorithmic efforts to understand who we are.
Joi Ito on why Westerners fear robots and the Japanese don't.