Über, the Killer Car, and the Dying Pedestrian

When a self-driving car killed a pedestrian last month, the predictable outcry divided into two camps. On the one hand, reflexive distrust of innovation led to retreads of decades-old science fiction wheezers. It’s the rise of the machines, hashtag #Apocalypse! Cooler heads, though no less reactionary, began debating the innate relationship between humans and their creations. I suggest both positions are wrong, because they miss the underlying problem.

And that problem is cars.

The car which killed Elaine Herzberg in Tempe, Arizona, ran on software created by the  technology service Über and Tesla, the electric car company founded by tech innovator Elon Musk. Please note, neither company is a charity. Both run for-profit businesses which seek to sell customers something. As with most business deals, the physical item they want to sell us usually matters less than a philosophical premise under that item. We must pause and ask what that is.

Über uses a smartphone app to summon cars to our location and provide us rides, for a price. Tesla manufactures cars that supposedly consume less fuel and spew fewer atmospheric toxins. Both companies offer us access to enclosed, climate-controlled capsules which speed us from one location to another in maximum comfort in a timely manner. With a car (or access to a car), I can be in Kansas City in four hours, Denver in six.

In other words, cars offer us individual mastery over gaps in space and time.

So what’s wrong with that, I hear curious interlocutors already asking. If I need to make it to work through inclement weather, or go shopping while carrying an antsy baby, or just take my family on a well-deserved road trip, shouldn’t I have that autonomy? Well, perhaps. But after a century, we’ve witnessed the long-term effects cars impose on society. And many of those effects are less than salutary.

Elon Musk (stock photo)

Elon Musk’s technological vision has come under criticism for one important issue: it separates people into compartments. I don’t mean for old-fashioned Bull Connor-type violent discrimination, but the literal separation of people into tiny four-person cabs. Even when he talks about mass transit, like his proposed Hyperloop, he mainly wants to put cars in close proximity to one another and move them around quickly. His model organizes human society around cars.

Anybody who has lived in American suburbs since World War II knows it’s impossible to get anywhere without a car. Children may walk to school (though they often can’t because of distance), or to the corner store for candy and comic books. But generally, adults won’t walk or bike anywhere if the commute takes longer than twenty minutes. That means if they live over a mile from work, the grocery store, or social activities, into the car they go.

Urban designer Jeff Speck notes that, when people walk, they also talk. They meet new people, discuss ideas, even organize. Speck says he met his wife on a Washington, DC, sidewalk. Imagine all the new businesses, innovative technologies, and happy families that never happened because adults don’t walk anywhere. That’s the world fostered by Über and Tesla inventing ever-better ways to avoid walking, and thus avoid meeting new people.

I posit this isn’t accidental. Back in 2015, Elon Musk called several of his own employees “fucking soft” for working fewer than 90 hours per week and not coming in on Saturdays. Musk wants his highly skilled professional programmers ensconced in his climate-controlled, beige-colored technological sweatshop for as long as possible. Well-rounded people with families, community commitments, and commutes on foot or bicycle will never accept such conditions.

The individual mastery over space and time which I previously said cars offer is, is illusory. My dependence on my pickup truck, and my city’s reliance of feeder roads, means I drive to work at the same time every day, by the same route. I don’t see anything new, or meet new people, or have new experiences. I don’t take road trips, because I can’t afford the time or fuel. My car has arguably rendered me less autonomous than a poor villager in a developing nation.

But recently, an awkward circumstance left me carless in Lawrence, Kansas, a city I’ve previously called “my second home.” Walking back to my truck, approximately a six-mile journey, I saw things—businesses, houses, even an urban forest—I’d never seen before. I simply had freedom to look.

So there’s my problem with Über’s self-driving car. Not that it killed a pedestrian; but that it reveals we’re already dead.