March 29, 2017

On which road will our grand-grandchildren travel, on those with only driverless cars, with only human drivers, or in mingled ones?

Sir, I refer to Izabella Kaminska’s “Self-driving cars discover the limits of autonomy” March 29.

30 years from now there could be some roads where only driverless cars can travel, other in which only humans drive and some where both humans and driverless cars go. On which one will our grandchildren send their children to school?

As Kaminska hints at, the last one of these would probably be the one road “in which humans and autonomous vehicles will have to interact”.

But, for safety reasons, future parents will probably rather prefer to send their children on the driverless road, than trust the roads in which humans do their not always their best.

I would of course love for my descendants to keep their ability to drive cars. It is, or at least was such an enjoyment for me. But if I was nowadays told to take a horse drawn carriage down the road, I would not really know what to do, but neither I nor humanity would suffer too much from me lacking that piece of know-how.

Sir, as I recently wrote to you I visited a museum in Sweden that impacted me, the Blekinge Museum, not because it was not a museum of times gone by, it was a museum of my times gone by.

And much more dangerous than losing the ability to drive cars would, as I once also wrote you, be the “diminishing human fighting spirit” that the use of drones and robots could cause.

@PerKurowski