'The latest autonomous vehicle prototype by Toyota Research Institute (TRI) will have two steering wheels to prevent robot joyriding' (Sept 2017) apparently.
The article does not say why a self driving car needs even one steering wheel. We are meant to know that all current cars have one steering wheel and for current legal reasons the public road testing has to occur with a human driver who could take over. However, cars without steering wheels are planned. The term ‘joyride’ is used to jokingly consider the possibility that the car (robot) might take pleasure in driving and seek its own route, map its own future and find full automobility.
There is clearly the philosophy/AI argument here about whether machines can really think. My point it to consider the pleasure of driving and I’m going to crash the philosophy discourse and ignore whether machines can or can’t think and declare they are a long way off having emotions. But we do.
In my PhD I regularly compared the demonised joyrider with the ‘normal’ driver (a narcissistically small difference?). Both got pleasure from driving. I admit to my own pleasure in mastering car driving and was moved to quote poetry:
My horse he spurres with sharp desire my hart:
He sits me fast, how ever I do sturre;
And now hath made me his hand so right,
That in the Manage myseffe takes delight.
(Sir Philip Sydney 1554-1586, Sonnet 49 Astrophil and Stella)
This quote focusses on the pleasures of riding a horse well. Those pleasures have not diminished but remain class-based, which might explain the response of the authorities to the apparent increase reported in the Guardian (13 June 1997) of horse riding by young people In a working class estate near Cardiff. Gwent police are considering using the Town Police Causes Act 1847 against furious riding'. The headline is "Neighbours rein In joyriders of the Wild West of Wales" and PC Ewan Jones is reported as saying,
A lot of these riders don't even have a saddle for their horses. We have clamped down on motor cycle riding and this is the result of that. Some, youths worked out that you don't need tax or documents for these animals.
What will be do when cars have no steering wheels and we can’t expect the pleasure of driving them. We don’t expect to be able to drive a train or fly a plane but much modern masculinity and the structures of wider society do expect we drive our own cars. I can’t imagine how early, and still some modern, motorists dealt with having a chauffeur drive them. Self-driving cars place all users in this apparently privileged but passive (feminised) position. Wired suggested You Won't Need a Driver's License by 2040 nor traffic lights etc.
In this article Google is said to be demonstrating their self-driving system to Senators by giving them ‘joyrides’. This usage takes us back to the earlier usage of the term simply to mean a pleasurable non-utilitarian journey.
Meanwhile we find UK motorists caught at ‘extreme speeds’ on quiet lockdown roads. That is using their own cars in which to joyride. You won’t be able to speed in self-driving cars. It is this loss of control (manhood/autonomy) that many drivers fear as owner and non-owner drivers seek many the same things.
Self-driving cars should also be more difficult to steal and would require cyber skills.
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