At the Front Lines, Commandeered by Autonomous Vehicles

(A dispatch from a recovering alcoholic narcissist…)

I’m reporting from the front lines of the driverless car ‘frontier’, commandeered in San Francisco by two companies—Waymo and Cruise—who have set free a fleet of what are also known as autonomous vehicles on the streets of this city, including the streets of Golden Gate Park. Think of Ichabod Crane, the headless horseman in Washington Irving’s short story, “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” written the early 19th century but a fair assessment of the dangers and risks posed by a runaway vehicle with a ghost at its help. Nobody from Cruise or Waymo asked me to speak up, having been inundated in recent weeks by the vehicles of driverless automakers constantly going up and down our streets, a resident who’s begun counting the ever-increasing number driverless cars in my neighborhood and the other neighborhoods I frequent. It’s true I don’t smell the gas or taste the fumes, but something is wounded in me, a kind of violation; it’s like I’m living in a kind of unhappy hunting grounds where I may become prey, the next victim, gored by driverless car and then quietly eaten by a pack of ravenous wolves, picking over my bones. I’ve seen some vicious driverless behaviors already, as if the Second Law of Thermodynamics is in full flower and the entropy of isolated systems is made manifest in otherwise uncontrollable circumstances. What’s next? Pilotless airplanes? The First Annual Autonomous Car Rally down Market St? A handout from the CPUC explaining this politely as a mild totalitarian version of corporate behavior while storming noiselessly into town while passing out free donuts and coffee? Or worse, not explaining this behavior at all!

It seems we’re locking ourselves into a future that’s being created without our consent, just for us, permitting a faceless, and therefore soulless, badge-wearing bunch of remote-control addicts to invade our territory ad hoc, perforce, and then throw away the keys as if they never existed, so that they’re hidden to those of us who may prefer actually driving a car with our own two hands. It seems these driverless contraptions really have come out of nowhere, and so suddenly, a sort of new fangled consumerism whether we choose to be consumers or not.

btw, I’ve written my Supervisor, Myrna Melgar, 7th District, SF (melgarstaff@sfgov.org) about the matter.

I’m also buttering up the good side of whatever critical instincs I might still possess by congratulating the Ohio folks who helped engineer a massive defeat of a measure there that could have enshrined abortion rights in the state constitution, just in time for all of us who thought we were living in Voodooville.

Cruise, sans driving driver, meets Lexus, con driver and girlfriend, Sunset District, San Francisco, August 6, 2023.