I was thinking about the discussion we had in class on Thursday about machines and smart cars, and I had a few more thoughts.  We are trained to see driving a car as this activity of hyper-vigilance, and as well we should.  Every time we get into a car we are taking our lives into our hands and those of everyone else on the road.  However, in considering the intelligence of machines and how that can affect our own skills and adaptations, I think we might be idealizing our own frames of reference.  Yes, a car that parallel parks itself is disturbing because we think of parking as something intrinsic to the driving experience and therefore something that any driver should know how to do.  But is parallel parking really a necessary life skill?  No, it’s a skill we’ve invented to adapt to the limitations of the machine.  If every car could parallel park itself, we wouldn’t need to know how to do it.  The danger lies in the transition period between a feature being novel and becoming standard. 

My car turns its lights off automatically when the car is turned off, so I’ve become accustomed to not turning off the lights when I shut off the car.  I sometimes drive my sister-in-law’s car, which does not do that.  Over and over again, her car will beep at me when I open the door after I’ve shut off the car.  I’m confused for a second, and then I remember the lights.  I’m always a little disturbed, because before I drove the car I have now, I used to check the lights whenever I shut a car off.  Now, I’ve become used to not doing so, and it feels like a point of attention or a necessary driving skill that I’ve lost.  Both of these cars have features so that the driver does not have to remember the lights because it will either take care of it for you or remind you.  If I drive a car that doesn’t have that feature, then I am in danger of leaving the lights on and running down the battery.  If all cars either beeped when the lights were left on or turned their lights off automatically, then we wouldn’t have to worry about it, and probably one day (in the near future), all cars will be made so that their lights can’t be left on and checking the lights will cease to be part of the driving experience. 

I’m not saying that a car’s functions supplanting human abilities doesn’t disturb me, because in a lot of ways it does.  However, I think we need to remember that what we think of as the skills necessary to drive a car are constructed based on what a car has historically been able to do.  Is a car that can perform a lot of the tasks that we are used to doing, like accelerating and decelerating when necessary, really any crazier than the idea of driving a car at all?  Fundamentally, I don’t think so. 

In his book, Norman predicts that sometime this century cars will be able to drive themselves and people will simply be passengers.  It’s an intriguing and scary idea.  It’s bothersome to me now, but I suspect that is the result of the mindset I have based on what the cars I have encountered are capable of now.  As cars evolve to be able to accomplish more and more complex tasks, the idea of a car driving itself will probably seem natural.  However, I am still concerned about the inevitable intermediate periods when some cars can drive themselves and others still rely on some form of human operation, and when different features are added to luxury models but remain absent from other models.  As far as safety is concerned, what good is a nearly infallible automatically driving car if there is always the risk that another car, still relying on driver operation could veer off course and plow into it?  Will cars of the future have sophisticated defense mechanisms and robust engineering to prevent this or withstand the impact? 

This brings up all sorts of questions about class.  Who can afford the self-driving cars and are they the only ones who will benefit from improved safety standards?  Will old-style cars be banned, or will even older cars have developed enough that they can safely interact with luxury models that have even more features?  What about increasingly complicated questions of liability when accidents occur?  Will mechanical error become more common than human error in causing accidents and who is at fault?  Only time will tell, but I think it is important to consider what happens during the course of technological innovation, when some things have evolved well beyond others that are still in use.  I think that is where the real difficulties in adapting to new technologies will occur.

On another note, the idea of machines being socialized is also interesting, but I think part of the danger is that the more our cars can interact with us in a recognizably human way, the more they create the illusion that they are socialized, but really they’re still machines that don’t actually have the consciousness we tend to ascribe to them.  I don’t think adding sort of human features to cars is a particularly new idea.  Norman’s discussion of sound signals in different devices reminded me that my family used to have a Nissan from the mid-eighties that had the annoying feature of talking to you.  This female voice would remind you that “fuel level is low” or “right door is open,” and repeat these phrases over and over again until the problem was corrected.  There was nothing really smart about this.  The car wasn’t doing anything novel for you except reminding you of things that any reasonably attentive driver should notice—that the gas level is low (Can’t you look at the fuel gauge?) or that a door is ajar (again, a light should indicate this).  If, in addition to telling you the fuel level was low, the car had been able to say where the nearest gas station was, whether it was crowded, and what their prices were as compared to the average gas price that day, then it may have been a useful feature, but at the time we never imagined such a technology could exist.  These days, it doesn’t seem so far-fetched.  

They still put human voices in cars, but now they serve a much more sophisticated function—alerting you to more subtle things, helping you navigate, etc.  The old Nissan makers probably wanted to create the illusion that the car was a friendly human-like presence that was assisting you in its operation, but really it was just a nuisance.  It was like an annoying backseat driver who kept reminding you of things you already knew.  Now, those friendly voices are performing more complex functions, but some people are still annoyed by the navigation systems and other things that talk because they are not perfect and they sometimes offer unwanted advice or assistance.  Yet carmakers have not given up the idea that consumers want their cars to speak to them.  Personally, I would rather a car beep at me or turn on an unfamiliar light to alert me of something.  It may be less friendly, but it reminds me that the car is not something that can interact on a human level, and thus I will not be tempted to attribute more agency or other human characteristics to it than it actually has.  However, the way things are looking now, it seems much more likely that those human voices are going to become standard and our relationships to our cars may evolve accordingly, for better or worse.