AUTONOMOUS VEHICLES SAMUEL SCHWARTZ DRIVERS

This book explores both futures, as well as the shades of gray between them, and offers a recipe for the best outcome.Īt the 1939 New York World’s Fair, General Motors sponsored a “Futurama” exhibit called “Highways and Horizons.” Visitors rode for a third of a mile in audio-equipped chairs through the 35,738-square-foot scale model of an imagined world of 1960, complete with automated highways connecting gleaming cities, sprawling suburbs, vast rural areas, and modern, efficient industrial districts. With it could come either better and safer lives or a lifestyle change for the worse. Nearly a century later, that effort is finally coming to fruition. I N THE SECOND DECADE AFTER H ENRY F ORD’S M ODEL T FIRST rolled off the assembly line, inventors were working to eliminate the weakest link in the chain-the driver. The fleets are getting ready to roll and nothing will ever be the same, and this book shows us what the future has in store. Right now, every major car maker here and abroad is working on bringing autonomous vehicles to consumers. And, like every other computer-controlled device, it can be vulnerable to hacking. It will cause us to grapple with new ethical dilemmas-if a car will hit a person or a building, endangering the lives of its passengers, who will decide what it does? It will further erode our privacy, since the vehicle can relay our location at any moment. It will overturn the job market for the one in seven Americans who work in the trucking industry. The ramifications will be dramatic, and the transition will be far from seamless. Sam Schwartz, America’s most celebrated transportation guru, describes in this book the revolution in self-driving cars. Is this an impossible future, or a revolution just around the corner?

AUTONOMOUS VEHICLES SAMUEL SCHWARTZ DRIVERS

Driving will become illegal, as human drivers will be demonstrably more dangerous than cars that pilot themselves. The country’s leading transport expert describes how the driverless vehicle revolution will transform highways, cities, workplaces and laws not just here, but across the globe.

Autonomous vehicles samuel schwartz