A Self-Driving Auto Dystopia

Bad solarpunk me, but true child of the western US, I like to drive.  And I don’t mean to the grocery store, but to beautiful places, especially ones I’ve never been to before.  What could be better than the freedom of the open road and all the wonders my car can take me to see? 

Yet, having lived nearly half my life now in Europe, I've spent a lot of time on buses, streetcars, and subways, and know the joy of travel by train.  You can’t get everywhere on public transportation, but—admittedly more ideally than in actual practice, since they tend to be running late and (especially with the trains) are so often so crammed with people, there’s barely even anyplace left to stand—you can kick back in your seat, go sweetly to sleep, and wake up in a whole new place (hopefully one that comes before your stop, not after). 

Add those two things together—all of the freedom without the hassle of having to do the driving yourself—and you get utopian dreams of self-driving cars.  We wouldn’t even need to own one.  In fact, owning one wouldn’t even make any sense, when we could just hail one through our phone or our watch or the chip in our brain, or wherever it is that the technology has gotten us to by then.  Up it would roll and in we would go, buckle up, and we’d be off in peace, quiet, comfort, and security.  The most strenuous thing we’d have to do is figure out how best to pass the time between us and our destination, especially if we’re not feeling sleepy.

I’m no futurist, but I think I have that all pretty much right. It’s not hard, really.  It would be just like being a passenger in a car, except with a more sociable seating layout and without the stress of our best friend’s impatient husband’s road ragey driving.  Except that last week reality came crashing like a drunken dystopian moose into my sweet dreams of self-driving cars.  

I don’t know why it wasn’t front page news.  It barely even got mentioned by the news sites I peruse, and only on some of them at that.  Never mind the autos of the future, the cars of today are already a privacy nightmare.  As in, if your biggest fear of a self–driving car future is of the hacker who takes over and crashes the car you’re riding in, guess again.  Our biggest fear should be of the car companies themselves and the future they're aiming to create for us. And the present they've already got us corralled in.

Here's the news you probably didn’t catch: On September 6, 2023, the Mozilla Foundation released a study of privacy and security issues in cars. All 25 major brands of automobile that they surveyed failed to pass muster, making cars, as they point out, by far the worst case they have ever examined.  In short, your car knows everything about you that your smartphone does (because you’ve let them talk to each other) about who you are, where you live, where you go, where you shop, what you buy, who you associate with, who you’re having an affair with, what music you’re listening to, what your sexuality is, and what genetic tests you’ve taken.  Plus, your car collects data about how you drive—how fast, how often, how far, how aggressively, etc.  The car companies feed all these data into an algorithm, crank the wheel, and out pops answers (accurate or not) about how smart you are, what abilities you have, and what interests you.  The vast majority of the car companies sell their data on you to other companies and some would be happy to pass it on to the government after nothing more formal than an informal request (i.e., they see no need to require a warrant before handing over the information they’ve got on you).  Meanwhile, only two of the brands surveyed (Renault and Dacia) give car owners the right to have their personal data deleted.  To make matters worse, it doesn’t even appear that the personal data the car companies hold about you from your car is stored securely.

That's a pretty bad present. But even before I got to the end of the Mozilla Foundation’s report, I got hit by a horribly dystopian vision of the future of self-driving cars as created by the car companies.  We won’t just hail a car, get in, buckle up, and off we go in peace, harmony, comfort, ease, and privacy.  Instead, the experience will be as ruined as the internet (itself also once a non–capitalistic utopian dream of a level playing field and the free flow of information between people).  We’ll have to lock ourselves into a subscription service that, thinking it knows everything about each of us, will bombard us with personalized advertisements repeatedly throughout our journeys.  It’s like what Amazon, Google, and the company formerly known as Twitter are also trying to do... be the behemoth that makes all the money because they’re the one stop shop we’re locked into for everything from banking to shopping to healthcare to entertainment.  That subscription service to the self–driving cars that behave like they know everything about each of us won’t just be about what make and model of self-driving car we have access to and which driving style mode/level of passenger safety we can deploy, but which music streaming and entertainment services we’ll be able to access and, in the worst case, which brick–and–mortar stores the self–driving car will be willing to drive us to.  Prices per mile will clearly vary, not just for where we are and where we want to go and when we want to get there, but also for which route we take (shorter and fast will definitely cost a premium), and for who we are as a person (if they can get away with that kind of discrimination) and how desperately we need to get there (the greater the need it has calculated for us, the higher the price the service can charge; supply and demand, after all).  And, oh, I don’t even want to think about how hard they could make it for some of us to get driven to—or leave!—a march or demonstration.

In other words, if we just sit idly by and let the self–driving car future happen to us exactly as the car companies are creating it now, we’ll end up living in a self-driving auto dystopia... instead of merely the privacy nightmare most of us don’t realize we’re already mired in.  Worse, once self–driving cars become enormously safer than people–driven cars and it becomes illegal for a person to drive a car, we will have little choice but to participate in this system stacked so strongly against our own interests. 

Unless, of course, there is plentiful useful public transportation and/or regulations preventing such monopoly power and abuse of our privacy by car (or any other) companies.

Maybe it’s not very solarpunk to be shouting about this self–driving auto dystopia.  Solarpunk is all about envisioning futures we’d like to live in and I would most certainly not like to live in a future like that one.  But solarpunk also shouldn’t stick its head in the sand.  We are traveling fast down the road toward the self–driving auto dystopia of my nightmares and its worth facing that fact... so that we can start working to prevent that outcome. 

Super easy step one would be to sign the petition at the bottom of the page on the Mozilla Foundation article. 

Step two could be to clamor for an expansion of your local public transportation network by showing up at local planning meetings and otherwise making your views clear to the local elected representatives who control how much of the budget flows toward buses, trains, streetcars, subways, light rail, and expanding those services. 

Step three would be to demand that our governments step up their protection of the privacy of citizens, like Europe is starting to do with things like GDPR.

Step four, I suppose, is running for actual office to work on all of these issues. 

Because it would be so much nicer to live in a world where the transportation we take isn’t spying on us so it can blast us with ads, lock us into subscription services, and, if we stray too far into the grey, turn us over to the police or give the government or hackers the information they need to blackmail us or entrap us.