If you fall into the trap of thinking that technology-driven change is about the technology, you risk missing something important. No new technology arrives in a pristine environment, there are always complex interactions with the existing social, political, cultural, economic, environmental and no doubt other contexts. This post is a polemic challenging the inevitability – and practicality – of self-driving cars, drawing very much on that perspective.
The result is something which is interesting and entertaining in its own right, but which also makes a wider point. Just as it’s not technology that’s disrupting our jobs, it’s not technology which determines how self-driving cars disrupt our travel patterns and land use. And over and over again, the hard bit of predicting the future is not the technology but the sociology,