Ok, so we all accept that electric cars are ‘the future’. Not a nice future, not a very fast, noisy, V8-rumbly future, but ‘a’ future. And if they’re going to be electric, they might as well be driverless because the whole point of driving is for fun and electric cars are as much fun to drive as spending a night at the opera, so its going to be dull. Therefore: driverless.

And if they’re driverless, you won’t actually need to own one. There’s no point. We’ll all belong to ‘schemes’ and ‘clubs’ and stuff and when we need a car we’ll just ‘app’ one and it’ll arrive in 3 minutes. Unlike Uber, it won’t have Mo in it, it’ll be empty. Take you where you need to get and then sit there waiting for its next call. When you want to go home you just call another.

You won’t need taxis either, at such a time. So expect more demonstrations and road-blocks from Hackney Carriages some time soon. No-one will ever say ‘ere, guess who I had in my driverless car today; you won’t believe it…’ because there’ll be no-one to say it.

The future. Not too distant either as everyone is working on driverless, electric cars, and they are among us already. In some form. Samsung will probably make one too. It’ll come with a very large fire extinguisher on the roof.

So; you’re driving your (proper, driven, peopled) car down the road, 40mph, listening to Bob Dylan because he’s a nobel laureate, and suddenly a woman pushes her baby buggy into the road 20 yards ahead. In that way some do, just, kind’a, push the baby out, as a tester, so he can see if there’s a 40 ton truck bearing down, or whether its safe for her to cross.

And you slam on the breaks and have about 1.3 seconds before inevitable impact with the buggy. Or, you can veer onto the other side of the road where a school bus is heading towards you at 35mph.

You do a calculation; pretty quick one, obviously, and your maths is really not that great. Yet doesn’t need to be. We’re hard-wired with a sense of preservation and a sense of morality. Well, I am. But to kill a baby? Or kill lots of other kids, and probably yourself too?? What if that bus was filled with Arsenal fans??

There’s no answer, no ‘right and wrong’, you’d do what you would do, same as I would. Who fucking knows; we just hope we never have to.

But driverless cars don’t have fretting, panicking, morality-cursed humans at the wheel. They have no wheel. They have… Google! Which is not ‘AI’, nothing like. It can’t think. Nor react, it is pre-programmed.

So some motherfucker has to create a program which will tell the driverless car how to cope with such dilemmas. Whether to always save the passenger first, as Mercedes claim for theirs, or whether to use a ‘least number of deaths/injured’ option. Kill the one to save the 5, kind’a thing. And computers calculate much much MUCH quicker than you do so they can work it out.

That’s cold. Very cold.

Happy driverless, murdering Friday

A xxxx