Just as your mobile is not really so much a “ phone ” anymore (it too is a machine User), the Google mobile apparatus should be understood less as a car than, as said, as a car-shaped end device within a larger Cloud platform. It is a robotic device that a person gets inside and which carries her around. From the perspective of The Stack, it is also a composite User, built of augmented human perception as well as the individuated profiles of the human “ passengers, ” the manifold addressable systems of the rolling device, as well as its changing inputs, states, and performances as it travels around from site to site. The same human profile may enter and exit this shell, just as the car device may incorporate many different human User profiles in the course of the day. But when in motion and hurtling next to other cars, the encapsulated actor may temporarily be seen as one User, for whom the whole system must optimize a uniquely ideal path. The real impact of autonomous vehicular Cloud devices does not appear until their movements can be coordinated not User-by- User but as components in a streaming swarm. <sup>58</sup> In theory, when synchronized by shared situational awareness and communication, whole herds of them may speed within inches of one another without worry of imminent collision. Should one brake suddenly a mile ahead, those behind would brake instantaneously instead of hurtling into the cascading pile-up. Cars going long distances could be clustered into long trains and fast-tracked away from local traffic. In this, many of the goals of PRT (personal rapid transit) systems (such as Aramis) might be realized by upgrading existing systems in this way. The systemic integration of vehicles would also have an impact on the economics of ownership, financing, and insurance that make car ownership more onerous today by shifting driving toward service-based platforms. Users may subscribe to a fleet of driverless cars available to them at a moment ’ s notice, and so can forgo the sunk costs of purchasing a machine they might use only a few minutes a day. For carbon-intensive products such as cars, a very large-scale shift toward using but not owning would at once save resources and offer greater end User convenience, not to mention the benefit to urban planners no longer having to waste valuable land on parking lots to store cars that will sit idle. <sup>59</sup> The mass medium of swirling textures of robotic computational exoskeletons would also suggest innovations in the phenotypical outer surfaces of the devices themselves. They can in principle touch, connect, and intersect with one another, switching from singular to plural according to circumstances, and so the rather rigid shell and chassis form we know today could give way to other flexible morphologies. At the very least, as we are shuttled here and there in the vast multitudes of such machines, how human Users are physically positioned and what we spend our time doing will certainly not be the same as it is now. <sup>60</sup> As discussed in the Interfaces chapter, as the “ car ” becomes a Cloud platform, it becomes available to an Apps economy, and to the extent that the Google Car is just a very large Android device with a very large, next generation Google Glass display, there is much for designers to work with.
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