If you’ve walked around a major city in the last year, chances are you’ve crossed paths with a self-driving vehicle. San Francisco, Phoenix, Nashville, and my hometown of Austin are just some of the places where robotaxis are taking off.
But are they taking off with our autonomy?
Lately, it seems like for every company that pumps the brakes (such as GM Cruise suspending operations after one of its vehicles struck and dragged a woman for 20 feet), another two companies announce their presence. This trend continues in spite of the fact that as one company implodes, consumer skepticism grows.
In fact, the current self-driving vehicle trend is a head scratcher for the most devout of free market economists, technologists, and pragmatists. At the very least, it demands the attention of freedom-loving Americans—whose very autonomy is at stake.
First, and most alarmingly, the presence of this technology is growing commensurate with consumer skepticism. That means that while companies like Google quadruple down on it autonomous vehicle system, Waymo, consumer demand shrinks. As my research concludes, there is a seeming inverse relationship between robotaxi market growth and consumer trust. Public perception only worsens as this technology matures.
Second, leading researchers and automotive executives increasingly conclude that self-driving vehicles as a concept will only work if we all give up our steering wheels and individual autonomy. In a recent study, researchers concluded that “the only case where a reduction in [automobile] congestion was obtained is when all the traffic is autonomous (100% AVs). When the non-AV percentage in traffic increases, congestion will occur, and could well be worse than that of all-non-AV traffic.”
You don’t have to be a luddite donning a tin foil cap to see how this can be used as a bludgeon to strip us of the ability to drive our cars when and where we want to. We’ve seen this playbook and how much personal autonomy Americans relinquished for “safety” in the name of stopping the spread of Covid-19. Even the progenitor of self-driving vehicles himself, Elon Musk, agrees that this is a very legitimate concern.
Then there are the motives of the companies driving this technology forward despite misaligned incentives. As was previously mentioned, Google is all-in on the push to eliminate steering wheels and gas pedals. This is of supreme importance, given that Google executives see humanity as a barrier to innovation. No, seriously. Google executive Larry Page has made emphatic his vision that “machines surpassing humans in intelligence [is] the next stage of evolution” and that anyone who favors humanity over transhumanistic, technocratic ideals stands in the way of innovation and is “specist.”
A top executive influencing the strategy of Google’s self-driving vehicle fleet thinks putting human beings before technology is contra to the destiny of the human species and is a mission worthy of a pejorative. If the same company that punishes conservative content on YouTube, rejiggers their search engine results to display Republican candidates as morally bankrupt and democrat ones as saintlike, and pushes “eco-friendly” routes on their maps app, who’s to say their self-driving vehicle software and fleets won’t keep up their trend of disadvantaging consumers who don’t vote or look like them? If Google wins the self-driving vehicle software race as it intends to, what would be our recourse if it prevented us from hailing a ride to the local shooting range or taking a faster route deemed “ecologically unsustainable”?
Finally, there are the big data components. In fact, so much personal and transportation data is generated by self-driving vehicles daily that the mere storage and processing power required has yet to be solved. This has implications for personal privacy as well as national security.
Initially, “data such as speed, energy consumption, engine performance, location, driving habits, and objects detected in its surroundings will be processed, stored, and shared with different parties for various purposes, including driver profiling, traffic planning, [and] safety improvement.” And you can bet your monthly car payment that this information is being sold to insurance companies to calculate premiums based on your reaction times, time of day you drive, and even whether you come to a complete stop at that stop sign.
Researchers found that, even in lieu of all the new sensors and data vectors that will come with increasingly sophisticated self-driving technology, 100% of major car brands violate data minimization standards and collect more personal information than is necessary, 84% share or sell consumer data to outside parties, and 92% give consumers no rights over their own personal data.
As much as this is an enumeration of some of the negatives transpiring from this technology, I am not anti-self-driving vehicles. But speaking as a pro-humanity, “specist” opponent to Google’s Larry Page, we need guardrails to ensure this technology isn’t rolled out in a way that steamrolls human autonomy and strips us of our right to drive.
One Texas lawmaker had a bill last session that would have established a constitutional right recognizing a person’s right to travel in a vehicle using human decision-making. With the erosion of human autonomy in other areas and the outsized role technocrats play in colonizes every facet of our lives, it’s high time states affirm the rights of Americans to get in their own cars, turn the ignition, and drive where they want to, when they want to.
David Dunmoyer is the campaign director for Better Tech for Tomorrow and water policy at the Texas Public Policy Foundation.
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