I recently heard Joi Ito, director of the MIT Media Lab say, “ Google didn ’ t just design a self-driving car. They designed a driver. ” This focuses attention on the hardware-data-Cloud path dynamic that comes into play as the car navigates the City layer, partially or fully autonomous from human passenger intention. Among the most interesting features of what we call today the “ driverless car ” ( “ horseless carriage ” ) is how it decenters the agency and authority of the human pilot from the cockpit and disperses it into ambient networks operating at multiple scales. For some, this is a welcome innovation, and for others, it will prove an unacceptable emasculation or even dehumanization and will be met with violent resistance, and various forms of human-centric identity politics. Should driverless systems become commonplace at some point in the near future (uncertain at this point), we might expect considerable policy interest in preventing legacy human-driven cars from hazarding public roads and killing tens of thousands of people per year due to human driver error. One can expect pushback as fervent as it is irrational. There are some affinities with technologies, however fictitious or bizarre, that are thought to embody the essence of human mastery. Guns and cars are among these. They are seen to amplify the human, not contaminate it by mediation and hybridization. I would go so far as to predict that there will be a movement to identify human-driven automobiles as a type of “ arms ” and that the Second Amendment to the United States Constitution, now used to shield gun owners from obvious liabilities and to protect their sense of personal dominion, will be flown to keep human beings behind steering wheels. <sup>80</sup> Your life may be ended by someone encased in a two-ton steel box careening down the asphalt vista trying to prove a point about how technology will never capture his natural humanity. <sup>81</sup>
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The Stack to Come