Down a bloody road to a marvellous 'future'

Recent news reports have sounded like they tumbled out of the future. German automaker Daimler has tested a truck that drives itself. Driverless cars might be set loose on the roads in the Canadian province of Ontario next year. Singapore is said to be keen on the concept, too, given its limited space and transport infrastructure and a stretched supply of drivers. YouTube has mouth-watering videos of cars that guide themselves.

Are we rolling toward the future, or are driverless vehicles simply long overdue? There are a few facts to consider.

Man landed on the moon decades ago, using essentially robotic or computerised guidance systems. Missiles have long been able to fly across continents with great precision without humans on board. Military drones are zigzagging behind enemy lines with the kind of mobility that puts old sci-fi movies to shame. Commercial airlines rely more on auto-pilot mode than we’d care to know. Even the cars we drive now are made largely by machines from start to finish.

We can get excited by Daimler’s news or we can bemoan the brutal truth that public interest is always secondary to military advancement. We can also argue that the technological wonders we enjoy nowadays owe a great deal to humans’ urge to kill one another. Much of what makes life easier is, in fact, a leftover from the battlefield.

But, for all that, this is where we’ve arrived. If the planet is not inflicted with another devastating world war, driverless cars should be roaming our streets soon. And imagine that the ability to drive a car might one day be a rare skill.

It’s believed that self-driven cars will encourage car-sharing, thus reducing the number of vehicles on the road, and the urge to own a car will fade. To begin with, the first generation of self-driven cars would likely involve a human-driven “lead car” with a robotic convoy following it. Beyond that, though, progress should move in leaps and bounds.

The Singapore-MIT Alliance for Research and Technology (Smart) and a unit of the Agency for Science, Technology and Research (A*Star) are planning tests on a six-kilometre stretch of road in the second half of 2016.

In Germany, a Daimler truck has steered itself along a test motorway for the first time. Though crew support was needed, the vehicle performed satisfactorily, laying solid groundwork for safe and sustainable road-freight transport in the future. Daimler’s next step is to start testing autonomous trucks in real traffic to prepare the technology for mass-marketing.

In Canada, Ontario is set to become the first province to allow private firms to test their self-driving vehicles so that the technology can be further developed and fine-tuned. Several British cities have experimented with low-speed, self-driving shuttles on streets fairly close to regular traffic. In America, several states have passed laws allowing driverless cars on the road and more are ready to follow suit.

Massive job loss will be one of the big concerns. Auto manufacturers will be hit severely by these winds of change, as will dealers. There will be legal headaches pertaining to liability damage, and the spectre arises around the human urge to forfeit control of rogue computerised cars.

Still, humans have gone through major transport transitions before.

No one’s guessing how long it will take for self-driven cars to conquer the streets. Warfare has far fewer legal, economic and humanitarian obstacles to overcome, so self-guided missiles become realities much more quickly. But at the end of the day, when we’re sitting comfortably in a car that’s driving itself, we’ll know which aspect of humanity to thank, no matter how much we hate it.