Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas - 109 | Jason Torchinsky on Our Self-Driving Future

Episode Date: August 10, 2020

It's easy to foresee that technological progress will change how we live; it's much harder to anticipate exactly how. Self-driving cars represent an enormous technological challenge, but one that is plausibly on the way to being solved. What will be the unanticipated consequences when autonomous vehicles become commonplace? Jason Torchinsky is a fan of technology, but also a fan of driving, and his recent book Robot, Take the Wheel examines how our relationship with cars is likely to change in the near future. Support Mindscape on Patreon. Jason Torchinsky is a senior editor at Jalopnik. His writing has also appeared in venues such as Boing Boing, Muck Rack, and Mother Jones. He is a producer and occasional guest star on Jay Leno's Garage, and has been the host of the YouTube series Jason Drives. Articles at Jalopnik Articles at Muck Rack Robot, Take the Wheel: The Road to Autonomous Cars and the Lost Art of Driving Twitter

Hello, everyone. Welcome to the Mindscape podcast. I'm your host, Sean Carroll. As long-time listeners know, we like to mix it up here at Mindscape. There's a lot of different topics we cover, but many of them are a little bit serious, academic, high-brow kind of things, but we also like to have some fun now and again. We'll talk about cooking or TV shows or whatever. Today is one of those podcasts. We're going to have a little bit of fun. Now, the topic, you wouldn't guess, is one of the weird ones because the topic is very mindscapey, autonomous, vehicles, the future of technology and self-driving cars. But it's not going to be about the technology itself. We're going to talk about the human side of what this means. What this means, what it will mean in the future, what it is meaning right now, to give up our control over our vehicles, from ourselves to the artificially intelligent robots. So our guest today is Jason Torchinsky. Jason is not a PhD at Stanford designing new radar systems for cars. He's a right. and illustrator, a good friend of mine that I've known for a long time, Jason actually did the illustrations for my book from eternity to here. But more than anything else, Jason is a car lover.

He's a writer for jalapnik.com, and his most recent book is called Robot Take the Wheel, the Road to Autonomous Cars and the Lost Art of Driving. So what we're talking about here in today's podcast is, what will it be like for us human beings to live in a world? where cars drive themselves. A lot of it won't even be driving ourselves. If you have autonomous cars, there's no reason to have a person in them at all. They'll be delivering things. At one point in the podcast, Jason fantasized about driving one of his cars that is liable to break down any moment,

but he has another car trailing behind him carrying spare parts. I should also warn, sensitive listeners, that this is another podcast where we have naughty language being used. Last week with Carl Bergstrom, it was right there in the title. We were talking about bullshit. Here it's just for colorful slice of life kind of purposes. So I think that you'll enjoy this one. It's both something that will make you think because the autonomous cars are coming,

but also something we can have fun with. And with that, let's go. Jason Turchinsky, welcome the Mindscape Podcast. Thanks for having me, Sean. I'm very excited. Well, you've written this wonderful book, full of profanity. I'm saying that right out loud so that we know, listener-wise, this is going to be rated explicit in the podcast listings, rather than a clean episode.

But, you know, not egregiously so, only one called for. So your book, Robot. Yeah, I'm a big fan. Yeah, exactly. But, it's a tool in the toolbox, right? Exactly. Robot Take the Wheel is about autonomous cars, but it's not either a book full of predictions or, although predictions are there, nor is it really a book mostly about the technology.

It's more, is it too much to say it's a book about our attitudes toward this oncoming thing that we're going to have to face pretty soon? Yeah, I think that's a lot closer. I mean, there already are books out there that covered the tech aspect of it. And that's changing so rapidly. The idea of writing a book about that just wasn't appealing to me,

and frankly, I'm just not that qualified, really. And as far as raw predictions go, they rarely turn out the way we think they will. And I feel like so many of the things that I see predicted are usually coming from the companies themselves that have a vested interest in these things, and I find them wildly optimistic.

And I think they tend to downplay how complex and interesting a problem this really is. So I just wanted to avoid all that and make something... People are hearing a lot about it. I wanted to give them some perspective and get them thinking about it in like a broader sense and not just in an automotive sense because they are robots.

This will be a mass deployment of robots into society like we've never had before. Yeah, yeah. No, and you make that point very clearly, and we will get there. But I think we have to do at least a little bit of predicting here. I mean, there are probably people who think that within 10 years, most cars will be essentially autonomous, and there's probably other people who think that within 100 years, they won't. So, you know, what is the landscape in your mind that you're using to sort of feel around

what the important questions are? What do you think it's going to be like 20 or 50 years from now? You know, I think actually the most important thing as far as that goes is before I get into 20 or 50 years, we have to talk about what people think right now at this moment because there's actually a lot happening right now that's extremely dangerous. And that is there's a lot of people right at this moment who do believe that autonomous cars are already out there and you can go buy one. And that I think is the biggest issue we have to overcome. even before their predictions. I think we're a ways away. We're probably a good decade away from these things becoming actually usable and safe enough to just generally have in the road,

and maybe 20 years away before they're actually common. And I think even then there's still going to be a lot of restrictions. But the biggest issue right now is that they don't exist at this moment, not really, not in the way everybody likes to think of them. And companies like Tesla is, I think, the big, biggest offender here are doing a lot to muddy the waters. You know, their autopilot set up, they have on their website. It says, you know, full self-driving.

That's an option you can check when you're buying yourself a new Tesla. And that's dangerously not the case. That's the label that they give it. Those are their words. Yeah. Those are labels they give it. I mean, it's called autopilot, which is a confusing name for most people. Autopilot, when people hear that, they think autopilot.

The car will drive itself. They think maybe about a plane autopilot or something like that. And, you know, the level of autonomy that a Tesla has, actually that any, you know, Volva has systems, GM has a system, Tesla has systems, Nissan. They've all got autonomous-like systems, but they're just level, what would be known as level two autonomy, which means the driver has to be aware and in control, or at least ready to take control at a moment's notice. It is not fully autonomous by any stretch. And that confusion is why you see news reports of people in Tesla's on the highway sleeping and reading or something like that. And there's a number of wrecks that have happened where these cars have been on autopilot and encountered a situation that they didn't know how to deal with that normally you would as a driver in the car should be ready to take over. but people believing these things were more than they are, you know, weren't able to.

Well, also, even at the best of times, I mean, that just sounds like a very difficult position to be in, to be in a car that is mostly driving itself, but you are nevertheless expected to stand ready to jump in. Like, that's harder than actually driving in some sense. A hundred. I absolutely agree. In fact, there's a whole chapter in my book I have about how semi-autonomy is stupid, which is by semi-autonomy, I'm referring to the level two systems that cars like Tesla and GM's super crews use right now. And I think it's fundamentally stupid because it's incompatible with how humans actually work.

Like if something's doing 80% of the work and there's a demand on the person who's in this system where a machine is doing 80% of the work to be alert and ready to take over at any moment, that's just not how humans operate. We don't work that way. If something's doing most of the work, once it shows us that it's probably basically okay, we relax, we turn off. That's why there are people reading or watching movies behind the Tesla

because it is on a clear open highway. It's doing about 80% of the work of driving, and that's kind of enough for an awful lot of highway driving. But crucially, it is not absolutely everything. and it is not enough to go on. And people just, we just don't work that way. And it is, I find it harder. Like when you're driving, like just driving,

you go into like kind of this state of where muscle memory takes over. It's something you've been doing for years. And, you know, so you react before even thinking about it. Like when you drive and something jumps in front of your car, you don't immediately have to do like math and process where it's going. Your body just does it. Your car is very much a prosthetic and that it's an extension of you.

You make a motion very quickly and instinctively. you turn the wheel, you hit the brake, and you move. If you're in a system where the car is expected to be handling most of that, and you're kind of, you have to have your hands on your wheel, but you're also not supposed to be steering. It's a weird space to be in. It's an unnatural state. And I've driven in these cars, and I hate it.

I hate being in this autopilot mode. If my hands have to be on the wheel and I have to be sitting and looking and paying attention, I may as well just drive the damn thing. I just fucking drive. Like you're already there. You don't get to sleep. just drive the damn car. And I bet that there is actually a neuroscientific explanation for this in terms of, you know,

both sort of system one versus system two are unconscious versus our conscious, but also the map in our heads of what constitutes our physical self that we can use to explore the world. Like there, like, I think it's more than just a metaphor when you say that we're in the car, we think of it as an extension of our body. Like we get sensory input from it and it reacts to us and so forth. If you break that connection, it's a different kind of interaction. It's much more cognitive, much more system two, and that's way harder to maintain over long periods of time. I think that's a really good point.

Yeah, because when you're just normally driving, I actually talk about car as a prosthetic, as a body extension in here a lot, because that's what driving does become. You wear a car in a sense. You are physically doing things, and they have direct actions. You push your foot down, you push down your right foot and you go faster. You push the brake or the clutch or the other foot and you feel something happened immediately. You move your arms. It's all and your body gets used to these reactions. And I think you're right.

You're not, it is much more of, you know, system one kind of thinking. You're just doing things and they happen and it's physical. Yeah, but the semi-autonomous space is a completely different thing. You're managing a system in a stepped back. way and it's you're not going to have the immediacy of reaction it doesn't feel natural and I don't think it's a good way to fundamentally pilot a moving thing so just so because I've never really followed up or followed these news reports very carefully I mean there are stories of people in teslas or other vehicles getting into trouble but on the other hand there are many stories that don't get published of people driving cars

getting into trouble right like is there some feeling for whether at the current state of the art these actually are safer or less safe than just driving a regular old car? Well, it's tricky because car driving is dangerous. No question about it. People get into accidents all the damn time, every bit of the time. I mean, I've met people, and I'm

incredibly surprised that people don't die even more often than they do. Like, the idea of just giving people a ton of metal moving at very fast speeds and hoping for the best is it's a little bit crazy if you didn't already have it established in the world. Oh, yeah. I mean, yeah, if you were to be completely

rat. One of the thing is, the reason I'm a car, an automotive journalist, and the reason I love cars is because they are fundamentally irrational things in every possible sense. If you were an alien and landed here, and you went to explain to this alien how

the personal transportation system works in the world, they would be stopping you after the first five minutes and go, well, whoa, whoa, whoa, what the hell are you guys doing? Why would you do it this way? I mean, I mean, if you think about the way we choose to buy cars makes no sense. The fact that cars, like, for example, I drive a car, my daily driver is this little weird

Japanese market Nissan Powell. It makes 53 horsepower. It's fine. I get everywhere I need to go just fine. I can go on the highway. I can do 75 miles an hour. But the audience, our audience needs to know that you are special in this particular way. Like, you are not representative of the car driving public in any way.

No, I am not. And that's going to be late to my point, which is that most cars today. have two to three, well, not even like three to ten times the power of this car. Like it is, we don't buy cars for rational reasons. We don't drive rational vehicles. If it all made sense, it was rational. They, you know, they would be like five different kinds of cars. Parts would be interchangeable.

They styling wouldn't matter, but cars aren't like that. There's something much more human about them. And they're closer in some ways to fashion than they are other things we buy. Like, you can have a refrigerator for 30 years. And when you get rid of it, you don't care, but pretty much everybody I know has either shed a tear or come close to shedding tears when they've gotten rid of a car they've had for a long time. I did. I did. I did.

I recently changed cars and it was a heartbreaking experience. Like, it's a lot of your life. Did you get rid of your jack? I did. Yeah. Yeah. Traded in for a little electric BMW I3, which is like the opposite end of car land from my V8 convertible Jaguar. But fun in its own way.

But either way, there's a strong emotional connection. Absolutely. And you also spend a lot of time in it. Like a lot of people half an hour or an hour commute either way. That's a lot of your life that is spent in that vehicle. Yeah. No, it's a big deal. And even people who claim they don't care about cars, there's plenty of people say,

oh, I don't care what I drive. I guarantee you, we can find a vehicle that they do not want to be seen in. Like, there's someone, if they say they don't care about cars and they say, okay, great, I'm going to loan you this Hummer with gold wheels that I'd like you to drive around for a day. They would go, I don't really want anyone to see me getting out of that thing. Like you say, it's much more like wearing clothes. It is definitely part of who you are, even if you disclaim that, yeah. You are making a statement about who you are with your vehicle.

And now I've kind of forgotten what we're trying to get to whether or not they really are safe right now compared to the terrible lack of safety in regular cars. Yeah, I mean, look, driving's not safe. Driving's never been 100% safe. It probably never will be 100% safe. You're moving a human body at speeds far beyond the warranty. Like we were never meant to do any of this crap. We were good at running in fields and chasing gazelle or whatever the hell we did. But this is all outside of the warranty.

So it's not safe. Now autonomous cars, the big argument that's always made and the hardcore Tesla stands and the people who get mad at you on Twitter whenever you say anything bad about Elon Musk, One of the things they always come back to is that he's saving lives. And if you're not 100% behind these autonomous vehicle plans, then you're killing people. But maybe that'll be true in the future. At this moment, that's not true at all. And even for all the miles that, I mean, we don't, there hasn't been a deployment of 100% autonomous vehicles on the road yet.

I mean, there have been tests and Google has fleets and things like that, but it's all under pretty controlled circumstances, really. There's people in there watching and guiding. And even though they may have millions of miles racked up, it doesn't even hold a candle to how many just person miles happen every day in the world of millions and millions of people driving cars everywhere. Yeah. And it's at this moment, we're not there yet. I mean, look, okay, you could argue somebody falling asleep at the wheel of a conventionally driven car, it's going to end badly no matter what. But it'll end badly quickly. You know, it will end badly, probably within minutes of them really falling asleep at the wheel.

You're not going to drive very far before you're going to run into something or hurt someone or hurt yourself. In something like a Tesla or another vehicle with level two autonomy on like an open highway, you can fall asleep and there's a chance you'll be okay. There's a chance you'll be okay. There's a chance you'll go two hours of driving before you wake up and realize, holy crap, I've been asleep. There's also a chance you could drive for a half hour and then run into a month. much bigger group of people. Like, at best, I think where we are right now, you have maybe a buffer. Maybe there's a bigger buffer of safety that you're allowed because there's some compensatory work that the vehicle is doing. But I don't know if we're really at the point where I can 100% say

you're absolutely safer because, look, it could be, you fall asleep at the wheel of your car. You run off the road almost immediately. It's done. You fall asleep at the wheel of a Tesla. you could end up going from an area of sparse population and traffic density into one that's higher, and then causing even more trouble. And people have been killed behind the wheel of cars that were, you know, like Tesla's driving themselves in Level 2. Like, it's happened. It's not like a hypothetical.

So it's a complex issue. It's complex. And right now I don't think we're at the point where we can 100% say the cars are doing a better job of not killing people. We're not there yet. They could, but not yet. A great way to keep extending your knowledge base is to look at courses from the Great Courses Plus. The Great Courses Plus is an extremely convenient streaming service, offering you very simple access to a wide variety of courses taught by professors at the Great Courses Plus.

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That's fair. I mean, the other thing is you have been using this phraseology level two. And I don't know if that's just your classification system or if that's universally accepted, but why don't you let us in on what the classification levels are?

Sure. Yeah, so that's from the Society of Automotive Engineers is where this comes from. It's basically a five-level So yeah, this is a good thing to explain. So level one is a completely manual car. Like there's no, no autonomy features at all. Maybe level 1.5, you could say cruise control because the car is handling, you know, the throttle aspect, you know, a little bit.

And then dynamic cruise, we're probably edging on level two, where it keeps the same distance. Level two autonomy is the highest you can buy commercially right now. And that would be like Tesla autopilot, GM super cruise, that kind of thing where, you're The car can do things like it's basically a combination of lane keeping. It does some visual cognition where it has a camera feed. It reads lines. It can see if something's coming in front of it and it can slow down or stop. It does dynamic cruise or it keeps a set distance between another vehicle.

So it does some. But level two also means it can fail at any moment with zero warning. That's why it's in that weird space we were talking about where you have to be ready to take over at any moment. And that's why Tesla's require people to have their hands on the steering wheel while the system is active. Although people have done things like you can shove an orange in the wheel and that could override it. And somebody was actually selling this thing called an autopilot buddy that you just hung on the steering wheel. And it mimicked the weight of hands on the wheel. So there's all kinds of really stupid ways.

And GM is doing something different where they have a camera pointing at your face, where they watching your eyes. And if your eyes deviate from the road, then it sets off warnings and stuff. And I think also, I bet if they ever go to court, that they would use that in their favor or something like that, too. I don't even know. Are these supposed to be able to also park the car, stop the traffic lights and start and things like that? Level two could encompass stopping at traffic lights and things like that. Tesla just, I think the recent beta just allows for traffic light stopping. Although that's

And actually it's funny because It was they added in a thing for it to read stop signs and traffic lights and things like that And somebody had was recording where it was reading a Burger King sign as like a traffic slowdown thing and it was slowing down by this Burger King sign and then Burger King used that in some ad campaign So if you were in a Tesla and you could prove that your car automatically stopped at a Burger King that give you a whopper like that Very good And I was playing. So, and actually, like, the traffic sign recognition shows up on a lot more cars that even don't have these systems. There was, Mazda uses it, and then on their little heads-up display, if there's a stop sign, they'll show an icon of the sign that shows up.

And just with magic marker, I drew a sign that said slop, and it put it up, and it, you know, it fooled the system. So these are, there's all kinds of potential for shenanigans with this stuff, because it's very easy to fool these things. There are artificial intelligence is still pretty stupid when it comes to a lot of things. But can it also, and can it park? Can you, in principle, do the, like if you were just throwing caution to the wind, could I get into the car in my driveway, tell it to drive to someone else's driveway and not touch the wheel the whole time? Is that current technology? I don't think you can go driveway to driveway, but you can, there's a bunch of cars have self-parking systems where they can go into parallel parking spots or other spots. Tesla even has a summon mode where you can be in a parking lot, like a big parking lot in front of like a supermarket or something.

And you could summon the car to come out of the parking lot and then come to you, tracking you by your phone. Which actually, it kind of amazes me that this is allowed to be done at all because it's insane if you think about it. Oh, yeah. Because, okay, a parking lot is not technically on the road. This is just a beta system. And they're letting people do it. And when it came out, a number of mid last year, there are people putting all kinds of videos of these things going the wrong way down these sections. It's very impressive technology.

But at the same time, it's not really finished. And they're basically beta testing this in public live. Like if I had a 2,500 pound remote control car and I said, hey, I want to play with this in the parking lot of a target and just fuck around with it and see what would be fun, I would get arrested in. seconds. They wouldn't let me do that. But that's literally what you're doing with this Tesla summon mode. It's, it's not different. But somehow they do it. And it's, you know, no one's been killed or anything, but there've been plenty of close calls. And it's, it's a remote control car, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, yeah. Anyway, anyway, it's a full-sized car. So, so, what's level three?

What's that? Level three. So level three is very similar to level two. So, but it doesn't, it can fail safely. So level three means you can, it can basically drive on its own, but if it encounters a situation where it fails or it gets bad input or it can't deal, where level two would require the driver to immediately take over, level three will have some kind of system for it to fail over in an elegant way, either pull over carefully to the side or something similar. I don't think a bunch of companies have come pretty close to level three.

I know Volvo was playing with the system that they claimed could safely pull over. But if you're on a highway, this is still a difficult problem. If you're on a highway and you don't have a good shoulder, being able to fail over safely is still tricky. You can't just stop. So if something happens, like remember, because these things are relying on LIDAR sensor, well, I guess Tesla doesn't use LIDAR, but cameras and some of them are using LIDAR. if mud gets flung onto a camera lens and you can't see, where humans are pretty good at squinting through the wipers and kind of, you know, we have, you know,

millennia of evolution to make us good at figuring out what we're seeing. These things don't have that. And if, you know, they lose most of their vision, they don't have a lot of choice. They just kind of have to stop safely. So level three is like level two, but you don't have to take over. It can handle stopping without everyone ending up dead. And it recalls a couple of conversations we've had here on the podcast before about artificial intelligence and its struggles and shortcomings.

We don't have the ability yet to teach computers common sense or a feeling for the world around us that somehow takes into account what we all are born knowing about solid objects and how they behave. I remember seeing one demonstration of a machine learning program that was really, really good at telling us. difference between dogs and wolves. But it turns out that it wasn't even looking at the dogs in the wolves. It was just looking at the background. And, you know, the wolves are always in nature and in the snow and things like that.

And the dogs are in backyards. And so take a picture of a husky out there in the snow. And it's like, that's clearly a wolf. Sure, you put a wolf on a couch and it's going to say dog. Yeah. And that's a little bit worrisome. It is. Because a lot of these are black box kind of systems. We don't really know what's going on in those weird

brains in there. So it's, I Honestly, artificial intelligence is always a term I found questionable, because it's not really, it's not even artificial intelligence. It's more like mimicry of intelligence or something like that. It's, the processes are so different. And I think in driving, we get this even more because there's so many human aspects to driving, which we should talk, after I go through these levels, we should, we should talk about all those subtle things because I think it's, that's what makes it really fascinating.

And I think if you want to say like, okay, the first 20 years, of autonomous driving development got us to like 70%. This last 30 or 20% is where the really strange and subtle stuff is going to happen. And I think that's what's going to really take a while. Yeah, that's true with everything, but good. Okay, level four. Level four is it can basically do anything, drive just like a person you get in, say, go wherever I want to go, but it's in a geo-fenced area. Like you've basically established a corridor of a situation where you know you can kind of control the circumstances,

but the car in that circumstance can pretty much do anything. I've been in a system like this, a test system where they basically had a retirement community and these little golf cart like vehicles that were autonomous, but it was an extremely controlled situation. After we were in there, we took it out into, this was outside of Boston, we took it into Boston traffic, and the thing freaked out immediately at the first roundabout we went to because it's programmed to be extremely polite.

And part of driving involves taking. risks you don't know the output of like whenever you go on like in a roundabout there's always a point where a car is coming at you and you just have to decide i'm just going to go you just hit the gas and do it and you take a little bit of risk hopefully they can deal with it what's that hopefully they can deal with it the other driver exactly and you are relying on the other driver did not panic and all that stuff and most of the time it works fine occasionally it doesn't um but this system used to it's geofenced area in like a retirement community surrounded mostly by other vehicles like it that every that were friendly and polite. It got along there fine, but once it got in the real world, it freaked out.

It's like a kid who'd been homeschooled and then you throw them into like a brutal high school situation. And, you know, the first day is going to come home in tears. To be fair, I kind of freak out when I'm asked to drive in the Boston area also as someone who was there for many years. It's a little bit anomalous. Yeah, it's not easy. But I mean, there's plenty of cities like that. And then level five is the hypothetical platonic ideal of just the complete robotic car. You get in, say where you want to go, and it figures everything out.

And for even at level four, we could imagine, I mean, maybe one of the steps along the way is we have specialized highways that only autonomous vehicles are allowed to go on. And the speed limit is 250 miles an hour. And we don't expect them to sort of. stop at traffic lights or anything like that. But do you think that that's a reasonable stepping stone along the way to autonomous vehiclehood? I think that definitely could happen. I think it, you know, and I cover this in the book too kind of from a perspective of someone who wants to keep driving as a human because I feel like that's, that kind of compromise offers,

you know, that's the biggest threat to human driving in the sense like there may come a point where the tipping point is that more people would rather have their cars drive for them than drive themselves. And then all of a sudden, I could see human drivers getting forced out of highways that get turned into autonomous vehicle only highways, which are marked and designed for autonomous vehicle travel, relying on the car-to-car communications that would be happening. You could have very high speeds. I mean, in a lot of ways, it becomes something close to a mass transit system, really, just with independent pods or cars. because that's kind of what makes the most sense. For highway-like corridors, all these things should be ganging up together

and communicating with one another to form basically mass transit kind of setups. And then people still have individual ability to break off of the main group and then go their own separate ways. But that would necessitate no humans around. Yeah. Well, no humans controlling anything.

Yeah. And you also, you invented your own level six to this list of levels, right? Oh, yeah. Yeah, that's right. My level six, what was my level six? Level six was where the car decides where it wants to go. Oh, yeah. It's, yeah, where it actually decides where to take you. Right, where you don't even have, you don't even tell the destination anymore.

Level six is where you just trust the car for anything because you just assume it's going to know better than you where you should be going. And then you're done. We laugh, but that might be coming up. Who knows? Okay, I mean, I think also I do want to get into the human aspects of driving and interfacing maybe. Maybe even driving isn't the right word. But we should also share with the audience a little bit about the technology that enables these things. We mentioned AI. I mean, you mentioned the cars talking to each other.

I take it that is not part of most current systems. Not to the extent that a lot of people are saying it should be. They usually call this car to car or C to C sometimes. But the thinking is for this to work really well, there has to be. every like there has to be a constant web of communication between vehicles we do it to some degree now i mean turn signals are a version of this and even looking you know if you ever well you you're you live in l a so you know in l a lady has its own few unspoken rules about driving i remember when i lived in l.a um if i wanted to merge into like a line of slow moving traffic or whatever uh the trick was

you got if you made eye contact with the person in the car there was an unspoken rule and it worked 99% of the time the person would let you in in front of them. But sometimes they would really avoid eye contact because they didn't want to do it. But they knew once that eye contact was established, it happened. And I remember staring at one guy once, really wanting to get in. And he finally broke and made eye contact. And he made that kind of exasperated. God, I got to let you in.

But he let me in because he knows that's the rule. LA also has the rule of three people can turn left at a red light. You know about this, Sean? Well, I see, I've always heard it as two people. So you are trying to push the idea that three cars can go through a red light turning left after it burns red. I've always heard three. That was my, that's what I thought. But I mean, this is, it's a lot.

But I feel like I've consistent, I lived in L.A. like 20 years almost. And I feel like I consistently would see three going at the red. But it's not a rule that's written anywhere. It's just some degree of that rule, two or three, some degree that you allow some people to go through on the red is an understanding. spoken agreed upon rule among the drivers. That's part of what's going to be fascinating to teach autonomous vehicles because they they won't understand this. These folk laws that we have are things that they don't get, all the gestures that we make through windows and through, you know, when we look at each other while we're driving, which we do all the time, you know, all of those are things that

these cars won't get. And I know I'm getting away from the technology. But no, no, but this is, but it, relates immediately back to the technology because so if I if I push back a little bit and I play the role of the techno utopian now once the cars are talking to each other and we can let them all sort of do a little bit of deep learning on what happens as they go through the streets the cars will evolve their own ways of signaling and sort of implicit rules that are not written into the traffic code but nevertheless maybe make things more efficient that's I think that is true if you had a system where all the cars were talking to each other. We need, you know, agreed upon standards, which is tricky.

And that also leads, this is the thing I love about autonomous vehicles is that the more you dig, the more complexes gets because we're about to enter an even more sticky situation where if these cars are talking to each other and they're going to come up with their own set of criteria and rules to make for more efficient traffic flow, that means there needs to be an overarching set of rules and criteria. And, you know, these are, this is edging on Asimovian laws of robotics. Like, do the cars prioritize their own occupants or do they prioritize the good of the people around them? How do they make these value calls?

And there's been a lot of fascinating research done on all this stuff. You get into the trolley problem, you know, flip up what's trolley problem. Yeah, exactly. That's like, it comes up. I had to address it in the book because it always comes up, even though it's kind of absurd and you're very unlikely to have. to actually encounter it. I'm not sure what happened. I'm pretty sure that like 10 years ago,

no one had heard of the trolley problem, and now it's just part of pop culture. I'm not quite sure how it got there. I know it was in the good place, but it predates that. Oh, yeah, it predates that. I mean, I think autonomous cars did a lot to popularize it, because the rise of,

because that's the big thing where people start thinking about it. I mean, why would we have brought it up before then, really? Although the trolley problem is hilariously, it's kind of a hilarious thing to read about because the various levels of it, like there's one where they talk about pushing a fat guy into the tracks to stop the train. Yeah, that's right. Let me pause for a second to talk about the number one job site in the world, Indeed.com.

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credit to boost your job post, which means more quality candidates will see it fast. it out with free $75 credit at Indeed.com slash Mindscape. This is the best offer available anywhere. So go right now to Indeed.com slash Mindscape, offer valid through September 30. Terms and conditions apply. This is worth just saying out loud because I think it is kind of fascinating. I mean, the Tralee problem is not supposed to teach you something about ethics. It's just supposed to remind you that we have competing ethical instincts,

and it's not clear how to resolve this. them, right? And I think that it's almost, it's almost misapplied for self-driving cars because hopefully if a self-driving car has an option of killing one person or killing five people, it will kill one person. And this is probably hopefully very rare that it even has that choice. But if you read Asimov's stories about the robots, where the real tension comes, because all the stories are about how his laws of robotics don't work in some sense, right? There's some way in which they fail. So, you know, what if the completely autonomous vehicle sees a terrorist who's about to do something terrible? Like, does the autonomous vehicle have the positive responsibility of

taking out the terrorist to save a whole bunch of people rather than just letting the terrorists do the terrible things? That's where things get a little bit freaky, I think. Yeah, and actually, I address this directly in the book. Like, should we make them heroic? Like, here's a thought. Okay, And I go through this little thought experiment in the book. Okay, let's say we're at some point in the future where autonomous cars form a population of like they're 20% of the traffic of general life. And let's say, you know, there was that situation in like Toronto

where that guy drove like a rented U-Haul truck into a huge crowd of people. If that, what if you could sign up when you register your car and the same way you sign up as an organ donor now, you could check a box that says in certain situations, my car is allowed to be conscripted for the greater good. So if there could be something where they see a guy in a rented U-Haul is going to drive into a big crowd of people at a street fair or something,

if say like six cars are in between the path of that truck and the group of people, and one of them is yours, and you could have said, okay, what if your cars could be used to form a roadblock to keep that truck from getting to where it wants to go? That's a thing that we could do. If an ambulance is coming down the street, it could be sending a signal to all the autonomous vehicle traffic to either get out of the way or possibly even like a sheepdog heard other traffic out of the way to form a path for the ambulance so it can get to its location quicker. There's actually a lot of applications where heroism could be programmed into these vehicles. We just have to decide do we want to do it? Are people willing to potentially risk if it's a privately owned car?

you know, do we let them, you know, do they want to take that risk? Or do we mandate if a company runs a fleet of self-driving taxis that they all have to agree to be heroic in certain extreme situations? I think it's a fascinating concept. Well, and also it does, I think it's sort of psychologically illuminating because even without knowing what the answer is, when you say, I could imagine being in a self-driving car that is programmed to get out of the way for ambulances, that you think, oh, yeah, that's not so bad.

I could probably live with that. But then when you say, what if all the other cars in the road are self-driving and they are programmed to sheepdog me out of the way when an ambulance comes, suddenly you feel like your personal autonomy is being a bit threatened here. Yeah. And I mean, you would be giving up a little bit of autonomy with that. If your private property could be destroyed and the service of the greater good, I think most of us would probably say they'd be willing to do that. but you are giving up some degree of autonomy. And, you know, the idea of prioritizing the occupants, like, are we going to have one set of rules,

or is it going to be like each manufacturer gets to decide? Like, is it just going to be the kind of thing we know if you buy an expensive enough car, the people inside will be prioritized more than the people outside? Or can you make these settings on your own and, like, you know, a settings option panel in the dashboard or something like that? And how will it work if we allow people to make their own, you know, if we don't have a hard and fast set of rules for something like that?

It gets messy fast. We live in a country where people have trouble wearing masks in the middle of a global pandemic. So I'm not at all optimistic. They're going to turn over the autonomy of their cars to companies. I know. And when I wrote this book, you know, I wrote this book, I guess like year before last came out last year. But when I wrote it, we weren't in a pandemic. Yeah.

Nobody was talking about masks. And I think I was a little more optimistic. But yeah, seeing how. people react to masks is very disheartening. These are not the same, these are not the people who are going to prioritize the greater good when it comes to their car. If there's a setting for them to kill everyone around them to make sure they get out through okay, they will.

Anyway, and then there's, you know, fear. Yeah. LIDAR, cameras. How do these work? How do the cars know what's around them and who to hit and who not to hit? Okay, so a lot of different systems in these things. Right now the most common way is visual. There's cameras.

and almost every modern new car has a camera set up in it that could be used for some semi-autonomy. Every car that does lane keeping, for example, which is extremely common now. Almost every car maker, I think, makes a car lane-keeping. Basically, behind the rearview mirror on your windshield, there's a camera. It's looking at the street, and it's basically using visual processing algorithms to see where the lanes are. On an autonomous car, it's using similar kinds of AI to take images from the camera, identify what's likely to be a car, what's likely to be a person walking, lane markings, street signs, that kind of thing, and it uses that to help drive and steer the car. A lot of the

images of like cars and people are done kind of proportionally. Like cars tend to be a certain scale and a certain kind of proportion. And a guy walking or a woman walking is another basic, taller rectangle. Someone on a bike is a certain kind of rectangle, speed and distance. All these things are factored in. So there's a big visual component. And that's a lot of the hardware in the car. A lot of the image processing computing power is for this, for reading what the camera's sending. And yet I was surprised to read in your car that, you know, the cameras aren't that great. No, they're not. They're nowhere near as good as human eyeballs. And that seems like an obvious place for improvement. I don't know. Maybe it just is not worth the cost.

I mean, I think if like the quality is basically like from a webcam like, you know, 10 years ago, really. I think if they're doing 1024 by 768 resolution, I think that's even on the high side. I don't think they do much more than that really. It's the image quality isn't that great. And, you know, it's it doesn't, but it doesn't need that much detail really. Although there have been cases where these things get fooled. Like if you have a photograph. there was a study in the MIT did where they had a van with pictures of bicycles on it.

And that was very easy to fool these autonomous cars. They would immediately think these were bicycles on the car. That's just nefarious. Again, these are all things that humans would never be fooled by. Yeah, but they're trying hard. And like you said before, shenanigans, right? I mean, there are ways that people with not completely noble intentions could make life hard for these autonomous vehicles. Absolutely.

I mean, it's like having a very competent toddler driving some of these in a way. They can do it, but they're easy to fool at the same time. And then there's LIDAR. So LIDAR famously rejected by Elon Musk. He didn't want to use LIDAR. I think possibly for aesthetic reasons because it usually requires a funny looking dome on the top of the car. But it's like laser-based radar. It's basically it shoots lasers in like a 360-degree, you know, well, I guess a circle or dome,

around the car, and it's recording the time to bounce back. So LIDAR is very good for doing distance ranging and seeing things, even if the visual conditions aren't necessarily that great. So LIDAR gives a good overall view of everything around the car in a very three-dimensional way, and it would be working with camera input to, you know, to approximate, give the car a sense of where it is. And then you have things like ultrasonic sensors, which are mostly used for close quarters kind of thing. Parking, reading what's very close to you.

There's also radar, which is usually used for keeping the distance between the car and a vehicle in front of it. Usually those are just front-mounted radar emitters. That's most of the systems. And of course, there's all the computing power needed to run it. And ideally in the future, there probably will be communications equipment. I mean, there already are. There's GPS also. I mean, it is procking to satellites to know where it is and know where to go. GPS is crucial for this. And it can use GPS and preexisting data about the roads. So it kind of knows what's coming up and can predict certain things about the roads. And even that could be updated. If there's systems in place to give it like information and that changes rapidly, like there's construction here and it's down to one lane, that information hypothetically could be sent. to cars prior to them driving. I think Cadillac was using a system for a while where they were doing a sort of higher level

autonomy on roads that they had vetted, that they knew, and were in a database that was sent to the car so they could drive them with more confidence. But of course, that doesn't help for, you know, random things that could happen, other drivers, logs that fall on the road, you know, cattle trucks overturning, anything like that. I mean, these days, most of us are carrying around personal GPS devices that are in constant to communication with the rest of the world in the form of our phones. I could imagine very easily

hooking up the phone to a car and letting it share that info. You must have seen the guy who was carrying around a whole bunch of iPhones in a little toy wagon and then Google thought it was a traffic jam on that street because of all those

phones moving slowly down street. Yeah, that's right. Which is amazing. Yeah, that guy was awesome. Yeah, it's, so yeah, I mean, and the other thing is, some of these other things that don't seem to get thought about very often, though, even with all these sensors being really good, you have to keep them clean. We're really good as people at driving through hard rain and snow and icy conditions. Like most of us driving in cold weather ice, we scrape out a hole in the windshield and we're pretty much good to go. It's not necessarily the best way.

We're driving more carefully. we're maybe trying to be a little more aware, but a good ice storm will keep most autonomous vehicles from going anywhere unless they have systems in place to heat and melt ice off radar emitters and camera sensors and things like that. Like,

you're going to have to keep these things clean. Yeah, I know. That is going to be a thing. But so it sounds like a big part of the challenge then is just like human beings, the cars are multi-sensory, right? You have the LIDAR. And I mean, do you personally think

that LIDAR will be part? of future autonomous vehicles, or will Elon be right and you can get away with just cameras? Now, I think you're going to need LiDAR. LiDar does provide a lot more information than just a camera feed, just a better three-dimensional map of what's around you, elevation changes, things that are also confusing visually. LiDAR wouldn't get full. For example, one of the, there's been at least two fatal wrecks of people in Tesla's on autopilot where a it's basically been a down on open highway and bright, clear weather conditions,

but a white truck has been going perpendicular, like coming out of a gas station or across the road. And the camera wasn't able to discern the white truck, you know, body itself, you know, like a tractor trailer truck. Yeah. The trailer part, it wasn't able to discern it from the sky and the car just basically slammed right into it. LIDAR would have prevented something like that because it would have read it as a three, large three-dimensional object in the way. So I think the more systems you have, more sensory

systems you have acting as backups to one another is always going to be better. So what you're saying is future cars are all going to have laser domes on the top. That doesn't sound like a bad thing to me. I mean, that sounds like an improvement. I think that it'd be kind of cool. And I've seen they're getting smaller and

there have been some designs I've seen where they're incorporating them better. And if you don't have a central one at the top, they've been working on ones at each corner that do, you know, they just work together to form the full arc. They'll figure it out. I mean, make the styles work a little harder. They can figure out how to incorporate these things in there. They can do it. I mean, I think, I don't, so I completely appreciate the worries that you're mentioning with these, the difficulties with all these sensory modalities. But it does, I'm going to guess that these are solvable problems.

A lot of technology. I mean, it might be cautionary for the time scale that it will take us to solve them. I guess what I wonder is, it sounds like a complicated problem. Are we, do we have like really smart programmers trying to write code that will help the car turn all this information into a map of its environment? Or are we sort of doing the deep learning thing where we just train it and it, the car, the AI system or whatever figures out for itself how to convert that data into a map? Do you know? I think, well, I think it's a combination of both. From what I've been able to see the way the industry is moving,

it seems to be a combination of both. There's definitely very clever programs working on these problems. But there's also an awful lot of importance put into the number of miles of training that these cars do. Tesla likes to talk about how many millions of miles their cars have racked up with their autopilot setup. Google and Waymo have been driving cars around constantly, mapping and trying and testing. And they're doing the deep learning kind of method. for that. So I think it's a combination. And I feel like right now the big players are putting a, it seems like they're putting more, at least more visible effort into the deep learning,

training, getting them to drive, just brute forcing as much data in there as possible. What could possibly go wrong? Yeah, I can't imagine. This could be terribly disastrous. And the other thing is, like we were talking about before, there's so many, I feel like there's a lot of things that aren't being addressed. Like, you've driven in New York, I imagine, like in New York City. I have not. I don't think I ever have. I've been in New York plenty of times.

But, like, you know, look, I drive in California. I'm a wimp when I move back to the East Coast where I'm from. Like, I leave that for other people. Well, driving in New York or any, there's a lot of big cities like this, it's a different kind of thing. If you're at an intersection with pedestrians around, which in like middle Manhattan is pretty much everywhere. there's an interesting process that happens.

So I haven't even noticed. I don't even know if it matters what the light is showing or the walk or not walk lights. And sometimes it just doesn't matter. But there's a dance where some mass of pedestrians will be going across. And if the driver has a green light, I guess. And if they feel like they want to go through, they kind of inch forward into the scrum of people. And they're basically driving into the crowd of people until there's some breaking point where people decide, okay, let's let the car through and they back off.

But for some period of time, you're driving into a crowd of people very, very slowly, but you're doing it. How do you program a car to do that? How do you program a car to say drive like you're going to run over a whole lot of people, but don't really mean it? And the way it works is, again, there's a lot of communication between driver and people through the windshield. You're looking at the eyes of the person in there. At some point, there's this kind of negotiation that happens within seconds, and then one or both goes through. So like the driver ends up going or then they pause and then the people go by. But there's a constant negotiation that's very human.

And there's communication there, human to human communication that I think is going to be really difficult to program into a car. And also when it comes to like people crossing streets, we immediately see like a mom with holding a little kid's hand at the corner of a street, like a crazy little toddler. And we know because we're people, that toddler could do something bonkers at any moment. Much less predictable. Or you see someone who's clearly crazy who's just like acting weird and all of a sudden we're like, be ready for someone to act weird. That's a lot to ask out of a computer learning system. And that's the part where I think things get dicey. I've also driven in India, which is completely bonkers.

And I have no idea how the hell that would work. I've been in places. I've been in, I mean, Paris and London are pretty bad, to be honest. We don't need to go to very exotic places. but I've been in Southeast Asia also. I've not been to India. But yeah, the local norms are all different. You know, LA and San Francisco have different local norms for driving.

And it does matter a lot. India is basically brownie in motion somehow. It's just if you think of the cars and molecules flowing and things, it's somehow not everyone's dead. It works. But I've driven India and I've been driven in India. And it's terrifying. Like people will drive into oncoming traffic in the other lane

because the road is smoother on that side. and they won't even move over until you can, like, read the watch of the guy coming towards you. And then, I mean, I was on this off-road rally there. And it's the only time in my life, I've been driving in, like, driving this Mahindrathar, which is like a Jeep in, like, these sand dune kind of conditions. That was actually very tricky to drive. And then there were brief stretches of road. It's the only time where I've ever gotten off a paved road onto dirt and rocks and thought, oh, thank God. Now I can relax.

But it's all because those are not our local conditions. I had a friend in Boston who's like, it's all the tourists who make it dangerous here because they drive at the speed limit and try to obey rules. And it's just not what everyone else is doing. They're fish out of water. Exactly. But anyway, I think I do want to get to the fun part of your book because it's sort of, there's a couple of not very hidden agendas there. And one of them is to think about the design, you know, the fact that once you have a truly autonomous vehicle, it's not a car anymore. And we're being held back by this idea that we're thinking of autonomous cars as basically cars, but they're going to drive themselves.

And what you're saying is, once you're not driving it, there's a whole new universe of possibilities for what to do that opens up. Yeah, it's a robot. I mean, that's the thing we have to really, we have to stop thinking about them as cars. Once we get to these level four or five vehicles that don't even have provisions for a human to drive, it's something completely different. It's no longer a car. It's a transportation robot. and really what people want has very little to do with how cars are designed now. Like if you think about it, the way we design cars now, it's like a set of bleachers,

two rows, and they're both facing forward. Why would you want that if you're not driving? Like, we want a little room, really. Yeah. You want a little room on wheels and you want to be able to do anything in that little room. Like you'll want to be able to sometimes have it open windows and sometimes you'll want complete privacy because you're doing filthy things in there because people, will because it's going to be your own private space. You're not going to want to sit facing forward.

You will want, you know, like couches or people facing each other. Maybe you're going to want to sleep in that thing. You're going to work, do whatever. It's just, it's no longer a car. It's a mobile room that's a robot that takes you where you want to be. I was definitely surprised to learn in your book that Honda has already made a love car. Yeah. Oh, yeah. I love that car. The Honda, And what's amazing is that it was the SMX. And it was actually so, and you have to understand the circumstances of the Japanese market to really get it. When was it was it was marketed. It was a K class car, which is a special class of small car that you don't have to pay the same taxes on in Japan.

So it's designed to be sold in dense cities like Tokyo. Privacy is a precious commodity in a city like Tokyo. Especially if you're a young person who's not quite out on your own. Let's say you're 18 to 22 or something like that. You have a girlfriend, but you still live at home. The idea of a small volume of space that is just yours is extremely valuable for all the filthy reasons you're probably thinking of. And Honda knew this and they actually advertised this car with like love-based terms. And it was all like tongue and cheek.

Everything like it would fold flat into like a very nice little double bed with all the seats folded down. And they knew exactly what they were doing. and all the advertising was basically mobile love hotel, unashamedly. When was this made? What's that? When was this made? It was made in the, I think this was in the, recently. Like this is a late 90s, early 2000s vehicle.

It sounds so 70s to me, but, um, what's that? It sounds so 70s to me, but I guess, okay, it could be more recent than that. I mean, we had that in the 70s too. The big van, the custom van craze of the 70s with the shag carpet. That was basically the American version. of the same same thing. But the love car was like a, it was a regular car with seats, but then the seats you would basically fold into a bed.

This is just what I think is amazing. And maybe I'm surprised it didn't catch on. Yeah. I don't know. Yeah. I think they sold a lot of these. I mean, and the fundamental design is still popular for this class of car in Japan, which is, they call them tall boys.

They're basically like little cubes. They have like set restrictions for the length and width of this class of a car. So they basically just maximize that volume. You just drive these little cubicle cars, and they hold a surprising amount of space inside. The volume and the interior is great. So I'm sure they were used for this purpose long before Honda just thought, screw it. Let's just make a car specifically for it. But this is an inspiration when we're thinking about, you know, how things are going to change if you don't need to worry about driving the car.

I mean, I presume that for the love car, the idea was you would park. But now you're saying that, you know, the whole idea of engine in front, forward-facing passenger compartment, then trunk in the back, you don't need to think in those terms anymore. You can be much more open about what do you want the space inside to be like. Exactly.

And I think flexibility is going to be crucial. I mean, if you are actually, okay, I mean, there's a lot of people who believe that autonomous vehicles will be something that people don't own. They'll all be like Uber's or something like that. I think in certain areas,

that's probably true. But I think that's more true for places, where car ownership is rare now. Big cities like New York, London, you know, Paris, that kind of thing. But I think in places like L.A., having your own car is, it's different. Like, it's your own, like, people store stuff in their cars. It's like a locker. It's, you know, if you work, you know, far from home, like, and you, you may take a break in your car because it's like your own space. I think people will still desire their own private, personal car. If you have kids, you know that this is

true because there's so much crap that's associated, especially when they're really little, that you just have to keep with you. And it's not feasible, the idea of lugging all this crap and kid seats and stuff to put in an Uber. You want your own car. So in that sense, I think there will still be private ownership of autonomous vehicles. I think there'll be very flexible, boxy things exterior-wise. They're going to, because that's just the easiest way to encapsulate the most volume in a given area. So, and I think the interiors will fold on and do all kinds of different things. All kinds of crash protection is going to have to be figured out.

Volvo's already working on prone seat belts. So, like, you know, restraint systems for when you're laying in a bed. Maybe we'll decide at some point these things are safe enough. We don't have to worry about that anymore. Maybe we'll just have more advanced, you know, supplemental systems like airbag systems to just flood the interior with a foam. So you're not going to move something. But people want, they're going to want flexibility.

They're going to want to maximize the time in the car. and they're not even going to want to think about it in terms of traveling. It's a room. Whatever you may do in a room, you're going to want to be able to do while you're in motion. And I don't really see the point of any other way. Also, the idea of performance changes. Like, why doesn't, like, the idea, like, performance cars that we know about now, we drive partially because we get a visceral feeling of enjoyment from driving the car.

And there's a statement that says, I can handle this amount of power, or a car that handles like this. If you're not driving, who cares? That's not a thing anymore. So I think status will always be a thing when it comes to how they're styled, but I think the interior space will become arguably more important than the exterior.

The exterior will still be important because people still like to convey things with their cars, but these are going to be vehicles designed from the inside out, as opposed to today where, while the inside is important, And, you know, the variants of exterior design are huge right now. I think we're going to be entering an era of vans, frankly. An era of vans. Well, I think the most basic sort of psychological change is the idea that the front row seats can be facing backwards, right?

I mean, and maybe put a little table in there and, you know, you can enjoy your coffee along the way and do the crossword, whatever it is. We've seen this before in some things. Yeah, anything. And you know, work surfaces, tables, eating, whatever, you're going to want to do it. Like, why wouldn't you? If you're not driving, there's just no point in staring and sitting facing forward. I mean, the reason we do it in things like trains and buses is just because of, you know, a amount of people you can cram into a given area in airplanes.

I mean, if we, you know, if we had our way and if space wasn't such a big issue, you would be able to, you know, move around and do whatever. And, you know, like, when it came time to move from Los Angeles and I moved my family to North Carolina. So for that move, to make it a little more fun, I bought an RV in L.A. I got bought like a $5,000 RV, and it was in actually beautiful shape. And it had like a kitchen and a bathroom with a bathtub and a toilet. And, you know, and I put in a little flat screen TV and hooked up a Wii and all this stuff. And so we drove across country.

And I ended up driving like 99% of the time. But my wife and kid were just lounging in the back like it was. little room. And that's the closest I can think of. Like in this instance, they had an autonomous vehicle. I was the computer and the cameras were my eyes, but I was basically that. And they just had the best

time hanging out back there, making pizza rolls in the oven and using the bat. When it comes to a luxury vehicle, there is no greater luxury than taking a comfortable, satisfying dump wherever you feel like it in your own car. That's far better than any Rolls-Royce. And it's

you see the appeal of it. Like, A room on wheels is the way these things are going to go. But I'm also interested in how design will reflect the fact if we do have something like the all-autonomous Uber's model, where you don't, I mean, maybe some people will own their cars for various reasons, both romantic and practical. But one of the huge weird things about cars right now is there's an enormous number of four-seater cars driven by one person at a time, right? And if it's just, you know, a set of autonomous vehicles that are basically like ubers or taxis and you can call them, then probably is going to be a lot of one-person vehicles and a lot of special purpose vehicles that you can call for whatever reason. Is that a sensible economically feasible model, you think? I think so because I think, I mean, it's even worse now if you think about it because not only are there like four seat cars. There's usually by and large four-seat SUVs, which is even crazier if you think of it.

about one person in a, you know, 5,500 pound off-road vehicle with gigantic tires. Like, it's wildly inefficient, really. So I think the idea that there would be, like, one or two-person little podlet kind of things that are Uber style that take you place to place. That's very reasonable. And chances are most of these vehicles will be electric, which means that, you know, from a technical standpoint, most electric cars right now are being built in this kind of skateboard idea, meaning all the batteries are flat in the bottom. The motors are actually really

small and can just be basically in line with the wheels, either at the front or the rear, and they're very easy to make modular. Almost every major auto manufacturer right now is developing a modular skateboard-type chassis for their vehicles. Volkswagen's, for example, is called N-EB, and they have basically one fundamental electric platform that's going to be everything from two-door golf to the new microbus, the electric microbus that they're planning. So this is how it's going to be. So the idea that making a small two-passenger car or a four, even six-passenger car for like, you know, like bus replacement kind of things or more, they're all modular type systems. It will make a lot of sense for them to do that. And I think you'll certainly see a lot of that. And I think a lot of

the dispersion of how many of each size of the car will depend on the particular market. Like some markets are going to be more communal group type of, you know, like buses or subscale buses kind of thing. and some places are going to be more one or two passenger thing. I think a one passenger one is unlikely. I think two is about as small as they'll get because by the time you're building for one, it's easy enough to just add a second seat in there, and people are as likely to travel in pairs as they are singly. So I think you'll have like two, two, four, six, eight,

and then, you know, bus-sized things. And I think it'll be easy enough to build those in whatever quantities make sense. Well, and also zero-person things. This is something you talked about, which I, I, I embarrassingly had never really thought of, but there's going to be a lot of autonomous delivery vehicles with no people in them at all. Yeah. Yeah, and I think actually that's going to be, I think that could actually come even quicker than human carrying vehicles. And I think this is actually, in a lot of ways, a lot better.

Because if you think about it, all of the, well, many of the errands we make, if you have, if an autonomous vehicle is taking you there, you really would start to wonder, why do I even have to go at all? It might even be better to have an autonomous car that you can't get in just for quality of life. There's no reason why if you had an autonomous vehicle that was basically the size of a pickup truck bed, it was like small and it had remote opening compartments and you could just tell it to go place. Like you basically go to the website of a grocery store, you put in what you want from your grocery list, and then you send your car over and the grocery store already has a system in place. When your stuff's ready, the car gets summoned. they put it in, you maybe get a camera that automatically takes a picture of what's in there and sends it to your phone so you can confirm, you hit okay, it comes home. Like you have to go out for tampons at 2 a.m. You shouldn't have to do that. You just send the car out with some instructions. It goes to the CVS automated pod area. It picks them up and it comes back home. There's no reason why this can't happen. It's the exact same technology. The engineering is even easier because you don't have to worry about the people inside. These things would be small, relatively cheap.

I've even, in the book, I even talk about how I would love to have one as someone who has a bunch of old cars. You know, I've got an old 73 beetle that I drive around a lot. And it's getting old enough that, you know, on trips, it would be great if I could have this thing follow me with spare parts in it if I want to take a long trip and even to tow me out of situations if I just get stuck somewhere. Like, it could be a huge boon to people with classic cars. These would just be literal errand robots. Yeah. And I think there's all kinds of reasons why these make a ton of sense. Maybe even, I'm almost more excited for those than I would be, just because I like to drive.

But there's plenty of times I just don't feel like, like if I want to drive, and that's the other thing. Like when autonomous cars come, if there's human driven cars still, they're going to be fun human driven cars because all of the mundane driving, you can hand off to a machine, either an unmanned errand bot or your commuting machine to go to work. But I feel like the only companies that might survive making human driven cars are ones where it's enjoyable. Lotus, perversely, may still be around or Morgan or these companies that make cars that are all about the visceral enjoyment of driving. I think it'll be niche, but it'll still be there because I think that's still something people will want. Well, you make the wonderful point that the design of actual human-driven automobiles over the last few decades has become more and more aggressive-looking. You know, people want their cars to seem threatening and intimidating. And for sort of ex post facto obvious reasons, designers of fully autonomous vehicles make them just look adorable and cute because they don't want them to seem threatening.

Yeah, and I think this is this whole, this has fascinated me for a long time. I'm personally, I'm just someone who unashamedly loves cute cars. I have no, no shame or guilt about this whatsoever. That's why I always love Beatles, the little Nissan pow I drive is adorable. And I've always liked that. I've never felt like, I don't know, there's people who get insecure about that thing, but not me. I love it. And it's always been a little baffling.

Just everything now gets an aggressive face. And they claim there's been focus groups that study this, although I feel like psychologically, it's got to take a toll. Everything, every, almost every modern car now, unless it's based on a retro design, like the Fiat 500 or New Beetle or something like that, has a face that looks like it wants to murder you. It looks like an angry vacuum clean. that just wants to gut you and suck up your entrails. And they keep making things like this. But when Google made their autonomous car, it looks like a koala bear. They made it look like this adorable koala bear things.

It's like a freaking cartoon. Big round eyes. But it's, but they had to do it because once these things are driving themselves, do you really want a 4,000 pound robot driving around that looks like a murder bot? And I think people would be unsettled by that. I mean, it's true. Even the recent models of the Prius were styled to look more and more aggressive and threatening looking. And as a previous owner of an older version, Prius, I'm like, what is the point of this?

No one is fooled. No one is threatened by this. Honestly, Toyota's design recently has it. I actually called, I came up with a name for it with a Cy Baroque because it's like there's so much going on. There's like folds and things, but it has like a mean, angry fish face. That just looks like a cruel piranha. I hate you. But, okay, I mean, that's a good segue into, I think, you know, the final topic here,

which is, I think, one of the not-so-secret agendas behind your book, which is that safety and efficiency and visions of the utopian future aside, there are people out there, including yourself, who love driving for its own sake. And some crazy people even love tinkering with their cars. I don't really get that, but there are people like that. And how can we carve out a space for that? Or is it just impossible?

I mean, probably there were people who loved riding horses a hundred and fifty years ago and too bad for them. Yeah, and the thing is, the horse model is something I don't want to have happen. I don't want car people to become like horse people because it's difficult to keep a horse. It's extremely exclusive and I'm going to miss driving. And I talk about, like one of the things I think I'm going to miss most. I call it like the death of the journey in here, because in an autonomous car, you get in at your start location,

you tell the robot where you want to go, and then you do whatever the hell you want for however long it takes, and then you get out at your destination. It's like flying in that sense, or teleportation hypothetically could be, in that there's no middle. There's just two endpoints and some amount of time in between that it doesn't really relate to the,

process. When you drive, though, you go on a six-hour road trip, you're engaged with your journey the whole time. You're engaged with the environment the whole time. You see the city fade out into farmland. You see the environment change. You see the landscape change. You see things on the side of the road. You have chance encounters places. You are literally, it's analog. You're taking in every bit of that journey incrementally until you get to your destination. If you, You had an autonomous car. You would be on your phone or reading or doing whatever the hell you wanted, masturbating or eating in that space of time.

And it would just be point to point. And I think there's something that's lost there. The idea of a journey as an actual journey that you experience has value and will always have value. And there's no place for that in an autonomous future. And I think about, I talk about ways to like, I think we've all just driven sometimes without a destination. And how do you do that in an autonomous car? The first question, when you sit down an autonomous vehicle is, where do you want to go? Right.

But I think I don't know anybody who owns a car who hasn't at some point in their life just thought, ah, let's just get in and drive and see what we see, see where we end up. Or you can go in with like a vague idea of like, I've never been to Solvang, California. Let's just drive out there and see what we see. But how do you do that in an autonomous vehicle that demands a destination the very first thing you do? And you could probably program in artificial ways around it. You could probably tell it, you know, computer wander. And then it could wander somewhere.

But cynically, I feel like companies would sell bits of their wandering algorithms to put you in places where you'd see certain restaurants or you'd end up in the parking lot of a Best Buy or some crap like that. And I don't want to see that happen either. And, you know, I also think about, you know, potential things for autonomous cars. you can download road trips and like curated road trips from people. And all these things are cool, but it's still not the same. You know, the process of just driving is also meditative. And it's the last place we have in society where people will leave you alone. In an autonomous car, if you know you're on a six-hour trip, somebody will be asking you to do something in those six hours.

But when you're driving, you're engaged just enough to not have the burden of productivity. productivity on you, and yet you still have enough of your mind free to wander to listen to music or a book on tape or a podcast or whatever, but you're still can't, nobody can expect you to do anything other than just driving that car. And we will lose all of that if we lose human driving. And I feel like we don't appreciate how important those things still are. So basically what you're saying is the danger, the real danger of autonomous cars is not that they will fail the trolley problem and kill people, but that we'll be expected. to be checking our emails and doom scrolling on Twitter the entire time that we're commuting. Exactly. Is there any context where you can imagine that that's not going to happen? I mean, if people know you have an hour-long commute and they know you're not driving, of course they're going to expect you to be working.

Yeah, those should be productive hours. Yeah, they should be. And I don't think we need, you know, we still need refuges from productivity. Like, we're productive an awful lot. Like, and driving is that perfect mix. of there's you're doing enough with your hands in your body but enough of that higher part of your brain is still free that's why people it's like you know how people say they come up with great ideas in the shower or something like that i think the driving a car is very similar enough of your mind is freed that you can explore ideas i do some

of my best thinking while driving in a car oh yeah i agree i don't want to get that up you know yeah yeah absolutely well i think regardless of what the predictions are for what the real future is going to be i think these are important considerations to keep in mind in the sense that hopefully we have some influence over the future and we can choose to do things. And I do, like you, hope that there is some space carved out for just driving even in our autonomous future.

I totally agree. And Jason Torshinsky, thanks so much for being on the Mindscape podcast. Thanks, John. This was a lot of fun. I really appreciate it.