The upshots of self-driving cars for consumers are obvious: safety and convenience. Benefits for corporations aren’t hard to figure out, either. Being able to study and influence travel behavior will be great for business, and hey, here’s a new captive audience for content and ads. So is every car trip going to become a brainrot binge? Or is there something worthwhile we’ll be able to do with this newfound “freedom?”
This year, more than ever, I feel like I’ve been living under a siege of posts about the glorious era of automation we’re hurtling towards. Just today, The New York Times ran a story about the driverless semi-trucks being unleashed on American highways. In one of the first paragraphs, the author describes the scene inside one of those rigs’ cabs: “In the back seat of the truck’s sun-drenched cabin, a middle-aged man watched YouTube videos on his phone.”
Of course. Why be alone with your thoughts when you can watch Mr. Beast’s latest capitalist olympics?
Meanwhile, drivers in China are getting fed advertisements through their infotainment screens, and surely some version of that is inevitable in America, too.
The exchange riled up a memory of something Doug DeMuro said to me years ago. He told me he couldn’t wait for driverless cars, so he’d have more time to do emails. I don’t know if he still feels that way or if he even remembers that conversation, but it’s lived in my head rent-free because I find it deeply depressing.
The thing about emails, that those of you who don’t have office jobs may not know, is that there is no end to emails. You could spend your whole commute answering emails, and when you make it to your computer, guess what, there will still be more emails to do.
Now, fair play, if your work day starts at 9 a.m., and you can get in the car at 9 a.m. to head to the office, that’s a win for productivity. Though it’s a little hard to figure we’ll have true full self-driving cars before evolving beyond cubicles.
The only activity I’d really be interested in giving up driving for is sleep. I live about a two-hour drive from my closest big airport, and when I come off a long flight at 11 p.m., I’d love it if my vehicle could convey me, unsupervised, to my little base in the boondocks.
So, all this to ask those of you who scrolled this far: How, exactly, do you see yourself spending newfound “free time” in a car you don’t get to control? As my colleague Byron Hurd asked a few years ago, in trying to save lives with technology, will we die of boredom?
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