by MAJUMDER SAKRASHUMINDERATHER, Alternate Reality News Service Education Writer
Your driverless car approaches an intersection in which a tractor-trailer, whose side is too white to register on your car’s sensors as a vehicle in your way, is turning. In the seconds before impact, do you:
a) phone your brother Schlomo Schlemiel and yell at him for convincing you to buy a driverless car in the first place?
b) shrug and watch a few more seconds of Independence Day IV: Independencer Day on your tablet before impact?
c) duck?
If you answered “Grab the steering wheel and desperately turn it in hopes of avoiding a collision,” you don’t seem to know how multiple choice questions work. On the other hand, you may have done the one thing that could save your life, so, on balance, not giving in to the tyranny of multiple choices questions was probably a good call.
The introduction of driverless cars was supposed to allow people to get from Point A to Point B without taking their eyes off the cute armadillo video their friend sent them a link to. Since they were going to try watching the cute armadillo video even if they were driving, it was argued that taking the steering wheel out of the hands of human drivers would make getting from Point A to Point B safer.
Unfortunately, people who were going from Point A to Point W sometimes took emergency control of the wheel in order to satisfy their sudden craving for charred bovine flesh and carbonated sugar water, while people going from Point A to Point Orangutan sometimes took emergency control of their vehicles to step on the accelerator because they were late for their stress management class. At best, the car shook and shuddered like it was an actor in a silent film that was dropping frames. At worst, you would see coverage of the ensuing multiple car freeway pileup on your local news station.
As with most mechanical systems, human beings have been the weakness.
Driverless ed is believed to be the cure.
Some jurisdictions are making it mandatory to take an intensive three week course on how to be safely behind the wheel of a driverless car before one is allowed to be unsafely behind the wheel of a driverless car. Lessons include: “Leaving the Steering Wheel Alone,” “Advanced Leaving the Steering Wheel Alone” and “You Just Couldn’t Leave The Damn Steering Wheel Alone, Could You?” There is also a practical component where an instructor marks the person in the seat formerly known as “driver’s” on such things as how they place their hands off the steering wheel, how long they can go without trying to hit the gas and how little attention they pay to what is going on on the road around them.
“It may seem counterintuitive,” said Johnson “Ripper” Freejax, President of Driverless You, To Drink, North America’s third largest driverless education school (their motto: “We’re third, so we try moderately as hard as those ahead of us.”), “but more accidents are caused by people in the seat formerly known as “driver’s” than by the cars themselves, and, between you and me, the cars have been known to drive into oncoming traffic, lakes and mime schools, so that should tell you how bad the human element is!”
Elon Musk started to protest, but I told him that that was not the focus of this article and, anyway, who could take anything that a man who was named after a personal grooming product said seriously? Elon Musk really started to protest that, but the logic had not changed, so I effortlessly slipped into the next paragraph…
American courts have given mixed signals (in the non-traffic sense) on the value of driverless education. In her decision in Delaware v. Crimson Chin, Justice Moira Aghastly wrote: “The fact that the defendant took a driverless education course probably mitigated the damage done in the horrific highway accident at the heart of this case.” On the other hand, in her decision in Montana v. V., Justice Elemental Fandango wrote: “The fact that the defendant took a driverless education course should have mitigated the damage done in the horrific highway accident at the heart of this case…but I see no evidence of that.”
You pays your lawyer and takes your chances.
One question plaguing driverless education is how to reach the demographic known to be most at risk for horrific highway accidentary: teenage boys with stern fathers who started down the road to alcoholism when they broke into the liquor cabinet when they were seven and hate humanity, but themselves most of all. “Our guides come with big pictures,” Freejax stated. “Really big and colourful pictures. And, really, what more do people planning on riding in two tons of metal and fine Corinthian leather need?”