This article was first published in the November 2015 issue of WIRED magazine. Be the first to read WIRED's articles in print before they're posted online, and get your hands on loads of additional content by subscribing online.
This article was taken from the preview of The WIRED World in 2016. In November, WIRED publishes its fourth annual trends report, a standalone magazine in which our network of expert writers and influencers predicts what's coming next. Here's a small selection of what to expect.
Sometimes, when you get the numbers, things are quite obviously mad. In 2013, in London alone, 187 children were killed or seriously injured in traffic accidents. Four hundred and eighty-nine cyclists died or were badly hurt. Thousands were slightly injured, or nearly missed, or just plain scared. And that's just in one city. Even though it's a huge improvement on 20 years ago, in 2013 there were still 1,713 people killed on British roads.
We all rely on cars, trucks and buses. From personal commutes and school runs to the final truck-and-van stages of the international supply chain, our society has made a trade-off: there's a certain amount of blood and mourning we'll accept if it means continuing our way of life.
But that's because there's never been a choice. Vehicles have always been controlled by fallible amateurs. Today, we're starting to see the legalisation and roll-out of self-driving vehicles. At the time of writing, the Google self-driving car, for example, has been trialled over nearly three million kilometres of public road, and although it has been involved in 14 accidents, precisely none of them were its fault. In every one, the other car -- a human-driven one -- drove into it.
Of course, self-driving cars aren't a guaranteed success. People like driving. But self-driving trucks? Those are a different matter.
In the inner city, a human-driven truck is an unintended cyclist-killing device. Once self-driving trucks arrive, however, the situation changes entirely. Even a handful of fewer deaths a year, say, and we'll have a statistically provable moral argument. Humans shouldn't be allowed to drive trucks. They will be banned from doing so and 2016 will be the year in which public opinion will begin to sway in this direction.
The shift from radical innovation to societally mandated usage will be swift. First the robot trucks will be a novelty, and we'll be nervous of them. Then we'll marvel at the precision of their driving, and perhaps be unnerved by their law abidance. A few months later, we'll hear of people who were almost, but not, hit by one -- telling stories of pedestrian error we've never heard before, because the protagonist was usually killed. Human-driven trucks will start to appear erratic and, given laws demanding drivers stop and rest and eat and such, noticeably more expensive. And then the numbers will come out, and the AI will have been much safer.
From there, it's easy to save 1,000 lives. We'll mandate that only self-driving trucks are allowed in city centres, perhaps with dedicated lanes on the major roads. That will allow for the AIs to go faster than humans safely can, and sky lanes above for local delivery drones. Cyclists can share the streets without worry, AI-flown quadcopter fleets can operate without fear of falling on someone, and the driving of a car can slowly become a fetish activity. It's the future, it's inevitable, and it will save lives.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
