Small Things about Self-Driving I look forward to

Living in 2025 means keeping a personal list of Things About Reality that seem absolutely insane. Most things on my list are what you would expect, and I feel in very good company. One, though, that drives (lol) me crazy in a way I don’t see many other people being driven crazy by is that we as a society aren’t excited about self-driving cars.

Here’s a list of things I hope I can experience in my lifetime that aren’t reasons to adopt self-driving cars, but would be very cool:

I want to go on a river trip without insane logistics

I love drifting down rivers in small craft or inner tubes (if it’s hot enough). Every time I’ve ever done this, though, the logistics of the enterprise have made it just not worth it. Imagine, though, having your car drop you off at a landing and then just… having it meet you downriver. You wouldn’t even have to decide how far you want to go—you could play it by ear.

I want to live in a parking garage

I’m not kidding about this. I want to live long enough (or have discourse move fast enough) to see a day when reserving space in cities for cars is recognized as less than ideal. And when that day comes, if it comes in a hurry and all of a sudden there’s a bunch of parking garages that we don’t need anymore because your car will now just drop you off and go mind its own business until you need it again, I volunteer as tribute to live in a converted parking garage. I’ll even live on the slanty part for reduced rent.

I want to get really drunk at a roadside bar and have my car drive me home

There are bars in rural Maine… not just Maine, everywhere really… that are just… not near anything, and so you have to drive to them. Which means you either need a designated driver or you need to not drink enough to be impaired when you’re there. Not much fun, IMO. How great would it be to go, drink as much as you want, and then have your car drive you home?

I want to tell my car to go to the Grand Canyon

Road trips are amazing. Driving cross-country, amazing. It will be amazing someday to watch the scenery with your feet up.

I want to explain to a young person what road rage was (and I hope I sound insane and 1,000 years old)

I don’t want to keep the stats for how many people die in car crashes in my head forever. But I hope to someday struggle to explain that there was a writer (Malcolm Gladwell) who…said that self-driving cars not running people over would be a Bug, not a Feature? And that there was literally term—road rage—for a specific kind of misery/rage/sometimes-violent-frustration that occurs specifically behind the wheel.

I have a lot of feelings and thoughts about this.

In a past life, I took acting classes. One thing you do in some acting classes is pretend you’re some sort of animal, and then you wander around a classroom/studio walking all funny and you see how it changes your mental state. It’s ridiculous, and feels ridiculous, but it’s also a real thing. How you move changes how you think.

When we strap ourselves into machines that weigh 10x as much as we do and go 5x as fast (my napkin math: 2,500 lbs for a car (conservatively), that’s 250 lbs for a person (generously) × 10. 25 mph is Usain Bolt. 25 × 5 is 125 mph. A very fast car, but then Usain Bolt is a very fast man), we are changing our brains. We are changing how we perceive space and time. That’s not necessarily a problem in itself, but it’s worth considering—especially when it tends to make us mad, and also makes sharing space with cars as a non-car very much no fun.