Home
/
RELIGION & LIBERTY ONLINE
/
The awesomely boring future of driverless cars
The awesomely boring future of driverless cars
Apr 26, 2025 12:40 AM

As fears loom about a future filled with robot overlords, innovation continues to accelerate at breakneck pace. When es to self-driving cars, for example, panies are making significant strides with the technology, even as the masses continue to fret over a handful of related accidents and the potential for human abuses.

With Waymo’s Chrysler Pacifica now plishing Level 4 autonomy, just how afraid should we be? Is a world of autonomous cars destined for apocalyptic catastrophe or dystopian indolence?

According to the Manhattan Institute’s Michael Hendrix, the reality is far less dramatic. “The near future of driverless cars is likely to be boring,” he writes in the latest National Review. “To spend a day in Waymo’s Chrysler Pacifica is to be chauffeured by the most methodical, cautious, and courteous driver on Planet Earth.”

Pioneering among a pack of some petitors, Waymo’s latest entry breaks new ground, and not just in the technology of the product. Thanks to an arrangement with Arizona governor Doug Ducey and mayor Jay Tibshraeny (both Republicans), Chrysler Pacificas are now operational on all public roads within 100 miles of Chandler, AZ, a prosperous suburb of Phoenix.

Despite the widespread fears, Ducey and Tibshraeny have taken a decidedly “hands-off” approach to regulation. Rather than making hasty, preemptive attempts to constrain and regulate their way to “safety” in an emerging industry (in which “safety” is an ultimate goal), they decided to take a different approach: ignore needless rules that might prove stifling and counterproductive, focusing first on what’s already working and where innovation might lead.

Ducey signed an executive order that put regulatory decisions in the hands of state agencies. In turn, Kevin Biesty, the deputy director of policy at the Arizona Department of Transportation (ADOT), has continued with Ducey’s adaptive approach, hosting an mittee and ongoing conversations to ensure that risk-aversion doesn’t stifle life-saving innovations.

As Hendrix explains:

That [oversight] body has formally met twice in the past year and suggested only one measure, on mercial trucking, prompting accusations that the state is asleep at the wheel.

Nonsense, says Biesty. “Believe it or not, there are things that happen outside of these [committee] meetings.” If we let bureaucracy and regulation weigh down this innovation, he argues, we’ll increase the time that these “life-saving technologies” will need to get out on the road. Instead, ADOT has chosen to treat driverless vehicles just like any other automobile. “We have plenty of regulations that direct how a motor vehicle should act on the roadways,” he adds. As long as a car like Waymo’s is registered and insured and operates within current statutes, he argues, it should be allowed to drive on Arizona’s roads.

Rather than legislating based on future fears, “we regulate as actual problems or e up,” Biesty says, reflecting Arizona’s permissionless attitude toward innovation. Lawmakers can identify needed regulations or legislation only by letting cars such as Waymo’s loose in the wild and by holding open, ongoing dialogue with the public panies. This also gives consumers time to ponder knotty questions, such as whether parents should be allowed to send their children alone in a driverless car to their grandparents’ house. In the meantime, says Biesty, “we’re here to facilitate the safe operation of business merce and foster an environment where people want to live, work, and play.”

If successful, autonomous cars might be nearer to the average consumer than we think, avoiding the need for “smart roads” and excessive regulation, and expediting cultural acceptance, in turn.

Regardless, the tensions and successes in Chandler illuminate the deeper struggle we face in balancing risk and security in pursuit of technological progress. Indeed, they remind us thathow we pursue such advancements matters not only for the success of the advancements themselves, but for the health of the culture in which we’ll enjoy them.

As ongoing modernization continues, we can either pursue a path of risk and struggle and reward, leading us to put life and wellbeing first, no matter fortable. Or, we can pursue a path of hyper-security and insulation, however temporary and artificial — leading us to delay a range of innovations and improvements, and subvert and dilute our destinies for more predictable, fortable” lives.

The paradox, of course, is that what appears at first to be the riskier move — dwelling in the uncertainty of spontaneous innovation and experimentation — will often lead to a more stable, permanent, and, yes, boringcultural e.

In the case of our robo-destiny with driverless cars, the future looks much brighter when risk and freedom take the driver’s seat. Take it from Tibshraeny. “I’m in the middle of it,” he says, “and sometimes I stop and say, ‘Wow, this is awesome.’”

Read Hendrix’s full article.

Image: Closer Than We Think (Public Domain)

Comments
Welcome to mreligion comments! Please keep conversations courteous and on-topic. To fosterproductive and respectful conversations, you may see comments from our Community Managers.
Sign up to post
Sort by
Show More Comments
RELIGION & LIBERTY ONLINE
Lord Acton and the Power of the Historian
Looking through my back stacks of periodicals the other day I ran across a review in Books & Culture by David Bebbington, “Macaulay in the Dock,” of a recent biography of Thomas Babington Macaulay. The essay takes its point of departure in Lord Acton’s characterization of Macaulay as “one of the greatest of all writers and masters, although I think him utterly base, contemptible and odious.” As Bebbington writes, “Acton, a towering intellectual of the later 19th century, was at...
How to Love Liberty More Than a Libertarian Economist
I have a deep and abiding love for liberty—which is why I find myself so often in disagreement with libertarians. Libertarians love liberty too, of course, but they tend to love liberty a bit differently. I love liberty in an earthy, elemental way. I love liberty because I need it—like I need air and food—for human flourishing. In contrast, the libertarians I’ve encountered tend to love liberty primarily as an abstraction. Indeed, the most ideologically consistent libertarians I know seem...
Reagan, Whittaker Chambers, and the Threat to Freedom
Over at the Liberty Law Blog, there is an excellent post titled “Ronald Reagan, Whittaker Chambers, and the Dialogue of Liberty” by Alan Snyder. Snyder delves into the influence Chambers had on Reagan and how their worldviews differed as well. Many conservatives and scholars felt Chambers’ prediction that the West was on the losing side of history in the battle against Marxism collapsed after the fall of the Iron Curtain and the Soviet Union. For many, the ideas of Chambers...
Obamacare’s Religious Rubes
The White House has a plan to mobilize prayer vigils in front of the Supreme Court in defense of Obamacare. It was reported that the administration met with leaders at non-profit organizations and religious officials who support the new health care law. The court takes up the constitutional test of the health care mandate in a couple of weeks. The mandate has now been challenged in 26 states. Cue the same stale big government religious prophets who confuse statism and...
Integral Human Development
The Journal of Markets & Morality is planning a theme issue for the Spring of 2013: “Integral Human Development,” i.e. the synthesis of human freedom and responsibility necessary for the material and spiritual enrichment of human life. According to Pope Benedict XVI, Integral human development presupposes the responsible freedom of the individual and of peoples: no structure can guarantee this development over and above human responsibility. (Caritas in Veritate 17) There is a delicate balance between the material and the...
Italy’s Tax Man Takes Aim at the Vatican
Kishore Jayabalan, the Acton Institute’s Rome office director, was interviewed by the Zenit news agency in an article titled, “Is Taxing the Church a Real Solution for Italy?” In the article, Jayabalan discusses the history of the Italian state and its imposition of property taxes on the Roman Catholic Church’s land holdings, residences and non-profit businesses. Sometimes in the past, particularly under Napoleonic rule and before the Lateran Pacts, the institution of property tax was often a subject of state...
Let’s Change Hearts and Minds (and Laws, Too)
Few clichés are so widespread within the evangelical subculture, says Matthew Lee Anderson, as the notion that our witness must be one of “changing hearts and minds.” In careful hands, the idea is at best ambiguous. At worst it reinforces the sort of interior-oriented individualism that allows for and perpetuates a blissful naivete about how institutions and structures shape our dispositions and thoughts. In less than careful hands, the phrase drives a wedge between law and culture by attempting to...
How to Steal a Bike in New York City
Edmund Burke didn’t really say it, but it still rings true: All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. In a test of this maxim, filmmaker Casey Neistat tries to steal his own bike in several locations around New York City and finds that most people do nothing about it—even when it’s done right in front of a police station. I recently spent a couple of days conducting a bike theft experiment, which...
Constitutional Cases and the Four Cardinal Virtues
Should virtue be a consideration in judicial decisionmaking? Indiana Law Professor R. George Wright makes an intriguing argument for why the four cardinal virtues could be useful in interpreting constitutional cases: Judges typically decide constitutional cases by referring to one or more legal precedents, rules, tests, principles, doctrines, or policies. This Article mends supplementing this standard approach with fully legitimate and appropriate attention to what many cultures have long recognized as the four basic cardinal virtues of practical wisdom or...
Is Work a Curse?
Is work a curse, a result of mankind’s fall from grace? Not according to the Book of Genesis. As Hugh Whelchel, Executive Director of the Institute for Faith, Work & Economics, explains, what Adam was called to do in the garden is what we are still called to do in our work today: Humanity was created by God to cultivate and keep God’s creation, which included developing it and protecting it. You see, we were created to be stewards of...
Related Classification
Copyright 2023-2025 - www.mreligion.com All Rights Reserved