No One at the Wheel
Driverless Cars and the Road of the Future
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- $17.99
Publisher Description
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.
Our time at the wheel is done. Driving will become illegal, as human drivers will be demonstrably more dangerous than cars that pilot themselves. Is this an impossible future, or a revolution just around the corner?
Sam Schwartz, America's most celebrated transportation guru, describes in this book the revolution in self-driving cars. The ramifications will be dramatic, and the transition will be far from seamless. It will overturn the job market for the one in seven Americans who work in the trucking industry. 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. And, like every other computer-controlled device, it can be vulnerable to hacking.
Right now, every major car maker here and abroad is working on bringing autonomous vehicles to consumers. 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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The bold opening prediction that autonomous vehicles, or AVs, will be the "most disruptive technology... since the advent of the motorcar" is amply and insightfully supported by Schwartz (Street Smart: The Rise of Cities and the Fall of Cars), former New York City traffic commissioner and the New York Daily News's "Gridlock Sam" columnist. He clearly illuminates both the promise and the peril of driverless vehicles, which will affect "family and work life, business, politics, ethics, the environment, travel, health, and yes, our happiness." Before the expected expansion of the AV industry in the coming decades into a "multitrillion-dollar business bigger than Amazon and Walmart combined as they exist today," Schwartz hopes that both policymakers and average citizens will think carefully; while AVs could make streets safer, they could also create an even more sedentary and unhealthy society. He contextualizes the current transportation revolution through a history of the rise and impact of motor vehicles, noting that commercial interests led to changes that defaulted in favor of the car and its driver, rather than the pedestrian, a history that he hopes won't be repeated with AVs. This is an essential treatise on a technology whose development and regulation will have an impact on "the future health of people, economies, cities, and more."
