All it takes is a brief moment of distraction and your world can change radically for the worse. When driving a car, a split-second difference can determine whether you ram into that car ahead of you, or maybe sideswipe an innocent bike rider, or hit the guardrail at the edge of the lane you are in. Any of those horrific moments can produce injuries or deaths for the driver and other unlucky people that perchance got snarled into the dreadful mess.
In spite of this reality, most drivers readily allow themselves to become distracted or actually take overt actions that indisputably are distracting and for which the driver knew or certainly should have known that it would be.
In the estimated 37,000 fatalities per year that occur in the United States due to car accidents, statistics by the NHTSA suggest that perhaps 16% were due to distracted driving aspects. Harshly stated, that is about 6,000 human beings killed in the U.S. each year as a result of a distracted driver (or, about 15 people per day). Meanwhile, there are about 6.3 million car crashes in the U.S. each year, which if we assume that maybe 16% of those are as a result of a distracted driver, this means that over 1 million car crashes annually or approximately 2,700 each day are taking place by the hands of a distracted driver.
You could say it is an epidemic or plague of distracted drivers.
Some hope that once we have autonomous cars, those days of death and injury from distracted human drivers will be behind us. Keep in mind though that this presumably would only occur once we had ditched all conventional human-driven cars and had only driverless cars on our roadways. Let’s be serious and acknowledge that won’t happen for many decades from now, if ever (there are 250 million conventional human-driven cars in America today, and they will last a long time).
On the path to driverless cars, distracted driving is going to worsen, ironically perhaps, and we are bound to experience even more injuries and deaths exacerbated by the journey to self-driving autonomous cars.
How Distracted Driving Arises
Let’s start this examination of distracted driving by analyzing how it arises.
You could assert that distracted driving is nothing new.
For those of you that have been driving prior to the prevalence of GPS systems, you certainly must recall those days of unfolding a paper-based map and having it draped all across your lap and the dashboard. That was distracting, and many movies and TV shows often made light of the matter, highlighting the driver swerving and trying to keep their eyes on the road while also scrutinizing the map.
By-and-large there are now GPS systems either built into the car console or that drivers use via their smartphones. This might have alleviated the folding and unfolding of a paper-based map, but it still involves a form of distraction, typically involving glancing at the screen to see what the directions indicate. Sure, most GPS systems also have turn-by-turn voice instructions, reducing the amount of eye time devoted to looking at a screen, yet you’d be hard pressed to claim that people never look at the GPS screen. They do.
We all might be somewhat sympathetic to distracted driving that involves an act that could be described as integral to driving the car, such as inspecting a map, though not much sympathy since it is a deadly choice, while those that are distracted by other comportments of discretionary actions are really just inexcusable. Eating a burger, not particularly essential to the driving task. Putting on your make-up or getting that early morning shave completed, it’s not helping you with the steering wheel or the brake pedal.
Some point to today’s society and suggest that the ease of drive-thru eateries for a quick meal while driving is a grand temptress for distracted driving. The advent of smartphones and the intense desire to keep-up with your emails is another inducement to distracted driving. Worse of all, some say, involves texting while driving. You convince yourself that a few pecks on your virtual keyboard of your smartphone could not possibly impact your driving efforts, plus the FOMO (Fear Of Missing Out) is so powerful of a primitive urge that it overrides your more deliberate realization of the magnitude associated with properly performing the driving task in an unfettered way.
Intexticide is being added to our lexicon as a mash-up by some as suggesting that texting while driving is a form of driving-induced suicide (a variant of the more “conventional” texticide).
Semi-Autonomous Cars Are Going To Amp-Up Distracted Driving
We can all agree that if there were no human drivers, there would not be any human distracted drivers (since we’re agreeing in this assumed use case that there aren’t any human drivers), and thus the belief logically follows that if we had only driverless cars there would no longer be distracted driving. My only hesitation with this notion is that in theory an autonomous car could also become “distracted” while driving, not due to eating a hamburger, but due to a potential overloading of sensory activity that could confound the AI system, though let’s set that aside for the moment as another matter for another day.
How can we seek to achieve autonomous cars?
Two major avenues:
• We could make semi-autonomous cars that require a human driver, and gradually extend the semi-autonomous capabilities over time, incrementally, year after year, until presumably the vehicle reaches a point of autonomy, no longer needing the human driver to co-share the driving task.
• Or, an alternative approach involves skipping past semi-autonomous cars and producing purely and truly self-driving cars (known as Level 5 autonomous cars).
Most of the automakers are pursuing the semi-autonomous car route, as per the emergence of Level 3 cars. These Level 3 cars have a slew of additional bells and whistle augmenting the ADAS (Advanced Driver-Assistance Systems), trying to make these vehicles become more astute for the driving task. Nonetheless, a human driver is still needed and expected to be actively engaged in the driving effort.
Here’s how the pain is going to get worse. Some or more likely many human drivers will become lulled into complacency and believe that they no longer need to concentrate on the driving task. At their own choosing, they will not just text, not just shave, not just do emails, they will decide to watch full-length video movies and get mentally immersed in other far reaching cognitive contortions that have nothing to do with the driving whatsoever.
Even if the automaker tells them they need to stay attune to driving, the temptation is now twofold, their false belief that they don’t need to remain engaged in driving, coupled with their desire to do something else (maybe even closing their eyes and catching a nap). Notably, their distracted driving is not merely about themselves, which some immediately claim, since if their semi-autonomous car goes awry, it can injure or kill others, those in nearby cars or pedestrians or motorcyclists, etc.
Conclusion
I’ll add another twist that few are yet considering.
Suppose we equip semi-autonomous cars with monitoring features that detect the distracted driver and alert them to get back into the game. This seems to solve the distracted driver problem. Not entirely, though, since another part of the equation is the complexity of the semi-autonomous systems and how they will be communicating with the human driver.
Think of it this way. Pretend that you had a front seat passenger that had a second set of driving controls in your car. You and your passenger are co-sharing the driving task. When your passenger is going to make a left turn, they tell you that a left turn is imminent. They also tell you they are leaning on the brakes to make the turn. They also tell you that there’s a pedestrian crossing the street and so it will be a wider swing of a turn. And so on.
You can become “distracted” by efforts integral to the driving task, really integral, and need to balance those while also deciding what you will be doing during the driving effort. Two heads are often said to be better than one, but not necessarily when you are trying to drive a car. Advances in semi-autonomous cars have the potential for a double whammy on distracted driving.
