33 Driving
The first few minutes of the journey are always slightly anxious. Leaving the spot where the car was parked without colliding with other vehicles, then joining the stream of traffic and making sure the destination is entered correctly. Only with these checks completed does Heather shift to self-drive. Other people just punch in the destination and let the car take over right away, but cars are not people. Their sensors detect but do not interpret the data in quite the same way as a human brain. Even the most sophisticated AI is still artificial.
Now that the car is settled in to the journey, she can relax a little. She smiles as she thinks about how her father talks about the ‘old days’ (actually, not that long ago in reality) when people did all the work of driving. “But even then, I’d mentally switch to ‘auto pilot’,” he says, “turning right out of the street without thinking because that was the way to work and your mother yelling at me that I should have gone left because we were going to the supermarket!” Then he laughs at the memory and Heather laughs with him remembering those days, and how it was when her mother was alive.
Lots of manufacturers were working on self-driving cars then, with varying levels of success, with self-parking being the first functionality to be released. Her mother bought a self-parking car as early as possible, but her father made a point of not buying one, complaining that he could not even get one without a camera at the back. “I know how to park a car better than any damned computer!” he would say.
By the time Heather came to learn to drive, however, self-driving cars were definitely a Thing, although not yet universal. A lot of accidents from that time were caused by human drivers not taking account of the AI of other vehicles. For example, an AI would never speed up when the traffic lights were on amber in an attempt to miss a red light, leading to an increase in collisions when human drivers did. In those early days, the AI would keep to the maximum speed limit without seeing any need to change lanes, which could cause chaos on rush-hour motorways.
The bugs were dealt with over time, however, and more and more self-drive vehicles appeared on the roads. What Heather found most unsettling were the increasing number of delivery vehicles with nobody in the cab, and they still gave her a funny feeling when she saw one. Now most travelled by night to avoid scaring the humans in private vehicles. Taxis and public transport were unexpected casualties of self-driving cars; apparently people were quite happy to trust the AI in their own vehicles, but not someone else’s.
Of course some people in charge of self-drive vehicles, even bus drivers, do not keep their eyes on the road during the journey. Heather makes a point of it but a glance to either side shows her that the couple on the right are engaged in an argument, whilst the man on the left is actually asleep. If there was an incident that required any of them to override the AI, they would be unaware of it until it was too late, endangering themselves and everyone else on the road.
Taking a couple of deep breaths as her virtual meditation teacher showed her, she lets go of the anxiety created by their irresponsible behaviour. At least it is just her in the car these days, but the vehicle in front has two children in the back. Neither is paying any attention to their surroundings, both fully engrossed in whatever is showing on the visors they are wearing.
The programmed alarm pings to indicate that she is fifteen minutes away from home, bringing her attention back to her own car, and she takes back control. Most accidents still occur within a very small radius of people’s homes and she likes to end the journey as she began it with her hands on the steering wheel. She takes the turning off the motorway, following the familiar route through the local streets, until she finally pulls up outside her own house. Strangely, she never uses the self-parking functionality, either.