Ghosts, asleep at the wheel

Technology is already rendering human selfhood superfluous and perhaps obsolete.

Almost 80 years ago, W.H. Auden wrote a poem called "The Age of Anxiety" and Leonard Bernstein composed a symphony with the same title. According to Wikipedia, that phrase "deals with man's quest to find substance and identity in a shifting and increasingly industrialized world.”

Ancient dinosaurs have been reduced to modern pigeons, and now psychic widgets are our new gods.

Abrogation of selfhood is nothing new. It has been a long time coming. Dehumanization, loss of individuality and subjugation to mechanical wizardry just suggest we've reinvented ourselves.

Welcome to Waymo, a subsidiary of Google's parent company. Its self-driven car is among the latest Frankenstein monsters that have migrated from science fiction to the grim new reality of human toys. They could be the spawn of Batman, James Bond or Star Trek. 

Given the genius of invention and the temerity of government, cars now have more autonomy than people do.

Whether eyes on/hands on, eyes on/hands off, eyes off/hands off, or totally driverless, these cars know where they're going, but do the prophets of progress and diminishing human dominance know and care where we're headed?

What are the risks and benefits?

Unlike many people on whom the Department of Motor Vehicles confers a license to drive, these autonomous vehicles can be programmed to observe the rules of the road, or at least not willfully flout them. When they injure or kill pedestrians, their indifference to human life will at least not be instinctual or personal, but merely a hapless accident of a conscienceless machine. 

Will human beings be punished for the sins of artificial intelligence? Will "under the influence of A.I. become the new "insanity defense"?

Seven years ago, a pedestrian was killed by an Uber test vehicle, but the corporation was not prosecuted, and its human backup driver didn't even pay a fine. It's hard to make an accusation of robotic negligence stick.

Natural Svengalian brilliance, in the form of deviant human criminality, can make artificial intelligence do its bidding. Hackers can steal and misuse passenger information, and the driverless vehicles are susceptible to espionage and illegitimate data collection.

With their proliferation, car service workers will lose their livelihoods at a time when the government, striving to make the resilience and self-sufficiency of the Wild West frontiersmen great again, is not offering retraining or alternate job opportunities. 

Eight Waymos are being tested in downtown Brooklyn and parts of Manhattan. Were they sensitized to jaywalkers, panhandlers, potholes, icy roads, squirrels dashing from under parked cars, construction sites, stragglers and innocent folks in flight from federal immigration officers?  

The wheel has been reinvented. It won't be long before we have driverless cars at NASCAR and autonomous races down our urban boulevards. Those "gotcha" speed cameras will be "mentally" unprepared and need therapy.

In New York, at least for the present, the driverless car will still have a person behind the wheel, just in case of an emergency. Some states have largely dispensed with safeguards. In California, the wheel will be turned by an invisible hand.

New York State hasn't as yet authorized ghosts to drive. Perhaps the legislators are doing their due diligence finding out when ghosts reach maturity. Already they are allowed alcoholic seltzer.

Waymo's ride-hailing service will soon lend their metaphorical plaque to the already clogged arteries of roads in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Atlanta, Miami, Austin, Phoenix and Washington, D.C. Maybe there'll be a reality show, with spin-offs, about carjackings among driverless cars in our nation's capital.

The Washington Post reported that robotaxis have driven through emergency yellow tape, blocked firehouses and sped, crashed and stalled on highways in merge lanes. There is another account of a vehicle that navigated into oncoming traffic because it had "encountered inconsistent construction signage.”

To compete with Uber and Lyft, Waymo (which has in recent years paid over $630,000 in lobbying fees) will have to slash their prices. Eventually we will take driverless vehicles for granted and regard the casualties they inflict as incidental to the greater good of progress. 

If we can survive a rudderless ship of state and the auto-piloting of the nation, we can get used to Waymo. But who will we curse at when they cut us off on the road?

Fernando Mateo, of the New York State Federation of Taxi Drivers, points out that the valuation of taxi medallions has nosedived from around $1.2 million 10 years ago to barely $100,000 now. Of around 84,000 for-hire vehicles on the road last year, fewer than 14,000 were medallioned. Their drivers went catastrophically into debt and several committed suicide, because of competition from Uber and Lyft, and now those companies stand to lose out to Waymo. In San Francisco, Waymo already has a larger percentage of the ride-share market than Lyft has.

Does "what goes around, comes around" apply to this example of the haunting by-products of progress?

The zombie car revolution will become another blip on New Yorkers' radar screen, just like congestion pricing and the NYC Department of Health and Mental Hygiene's restaurant inspection letter-grades posted in windows festooned with menus and adverts for community events. 

When they began during the reign of former Mayor Michael Bloomberg, it made restaurant owners paranoid about the flypaper police showing up and looking possibly for bribes or otherwise any excuse to shut them down. They feared a poor grade would repel customers. Instead, it soon piqued their curiosity instead. The inspection reports of 27,000 NYC restaurant reports are posted online, and the site is probably still awaiting its first click.

A restaurant's volume of business is determined by customer loyalty, not government schemes to generate revenue. 

The proprietor of a popular bistro told me that because of rodent droppings, his establishment racked up more points than the highest scorer of the NBA, but business has never been better, because he gifts his customers a free slice of cake on their birthday.

Although the NYCHMH inspectors continue to make their rounds, they have defanged the serpent of surprise. Instead of popping by,  they now email two prior notifications: one between one and five months beforehand, and the second one between three and six weeks prior. This "Small Business Forward 2.0" initiative is designed to cut "red tape," limit disruptions, save money for businesses and ensure that their owners "have predictability when interacting with city agencies."

Will preemptive self-inspection lead to self-grading and a quick digital sign-off powered by the "honor system"? That doesn't even work at West Point anymore.

If the relaxed system of inspections results in fewer violations and fines while meeting the goal of avoiding dangers to public health, will the inquisitors from the Municipal Bureaucracy of Hecklers be appeased? 

Nothing stays the same. Change is perpetual. 

Only two immutable prohibitions remain:  do not step on Elvis's blue suede shoes, and don't mess with Google's immunity to antitrust laws.