next on american history tv, a historian discusses his book are we there yet? past,erican automobile present, and driverless. he argues against driverless car's. >> tonight we are joined by , historian and automated journalist dan albert. dan has spent a career writing and teaching about the history of culture and technology. his articles can be found in magazines, popular science, and the journal for the history of behavioral sciences. he holds a phd in history, where from the university of michigan where he also taught in , the college of engineering. dan also served as the curator of vehicle collections at the national museum of science and industry in london. he is the author of "are we there yet?: the american automobile past, present, and driverless."

ands available for sale signing at the conclusion of the program. so please, without further ado join me in welcoming him this , evening. [applause] dan: thank you so much. thank you, amanda. really generous and sweet introduction. thank everybody for being here, otherwise, i would be up here by myself. especially, amanda told me the smithsonian associate people have reminded me how engaged these audiences are. i really give you my a game to take that seriously. be a little intellectual, be a little heavy. there's a lot of material in the book.

look at that. it is right there. everything from teaching my daughter to drive to a freudian analysis of henry ford. i wanted to talk about the automobile and a little bit of this theory of how one understands that. to reason i am doing that is put us in the present moment, whereas some of you may have heard, driverless cars are on the horizon, but at the end of the day, i really want to talk about cars. i am both a lover and hater of cars for a variety of reasons. i am looking to hearing from you about your experiences with the automobile. so, without further ado, let's get started with close. -- with cars. [applause] yeah, i mean, well, i had

to show you this. how many people know this machine and have gone to see it? yeah? you want to see it? keep your hands up. listen to the entire soundtrack. how many of you went to the gift shop afterwards and bought the vinyl record and brought it home and played it? [laughter] dan: oh, well, yeah. these two, i know them. pretty much me. as long as we are raising hands, i was in brooklyn. cars?s going on about i realized halfway through it, how many of you own a car? i think three. can i get a quick show of hands. how many of you own a toyota? ah. how many of you own a mercedes? ah. how many of you own an american car? ah. how many of you don't own a car at all or rarely drive?

ok. diverse audience. that is exciting. we are not going to talk very much about trains. we are going to talk about cars. the museum of history and technology, national museum of american history as it was back in 1974. that is sort of me, just enthralled. we would come up all the time, anytime a detriment out of town, a relative, whatever, go to the museum. to maybe the capital building and see the airplanes, but mostly go to history and technology. because -- what else -- i hear there is some art museums? i don't know about that. that is sort of me. it's not actually me. i was much fatter back then. but this is a stock photo from the smithsonian collection. i want you to get a sense of it. because i want to talk to you

about how that exhibition has changed and talk a little bit about what that exhibition tells us about what we think about technology. the very hard part, as we face the prospect of driverless cars, is understanding the process by which they are coming to us, coming upon us, invoking them. the first thought is, well, that is like an encyclopedia, right? really saying anything about how technology develops. it has got a collection of objects and labels that typically say this guy invented it. this year, it had this performance characteristic. very straightforward. itt is the way i experienced as a kid. but as i studied further and further as i thought about , different ways of understanding technology, i

realized that this has actually got an implicit story behind it. and that story is a technological evolution. sometimes called technological determinism. technologies are invented, machines are invented, and they kind of ping-pong their way through our lives and change them. gutenberg invents the printing press, people learn to read. iphone is invented, i do not know what has happened to us. [laughter] dan: we don't think about the other way of doing things. that is very much our lived experience. right? a technology shows up we buy it. ,we do not really think about the story behind it. that also is reinforced here. this museum exhibition opened in 1964, we were in the cold war, and there is just an implicit understanding that technology is important that technology , advances and becomes more efficient over time. bigger cars, faster cars. i want to show you quickly, i

hope you can see things. c-span is making things bright. now, i can see little better. back at the back wall and you can see there is a highly later just -- hi gh-wheeler just poking out back there. then we are away from the right to the left. they get better, they get better they get better. , you can see from the far left corner all the way to the back, horse and wagon, horse and wagon, more advanced car, more advanced car, more advanced car. you can see gas pumps there to a little later one. and then of course the , centerpiece, the race car. right? so, the pinnacle of automotive capability, right? that is the ultimate machine. but we don't know much what it like to drive it, where was

it born, where did it live, how did people experience it? did people go to races? was it just something that happened on the side? as somebody might know, 2009, i think it is, america on the move exhibit. right? this is the general motors transportation hall. a couple of things that happened, the railroads -- the 1401 is in that hall. they are never moving that train again. [laughter] dan: right? a gorgeous train. do you want to go back and look at it? no, but also there is an , intention and purpose in putting trains, bicycles, and other vehicles all together, and that is to stop thinking about them and stop organizing them in terms of technical differences. there's no point in putting a four-cylinder engine over here and a six cylinder engine over there. that is not the point.

the point is how we use them. i meant to get over there today. but i believe that is about a 55 -- someone will correct me later -- they have a 55 country squire wagon. it really oozes domesticity. that wouldn't peddling -- that wooden paneling. all of that is beautiful. but what else is there? right, there's people. there is content. i wonder if they are even moving. because the kid looked a little unhappy here. but you also have the girl with a bicycle. right? what is the bicycle about? learning, in a sense, to drive. by the same token, you look at the little red car. that's a kiddy car. kids like toy cars. there is no way it's genetic. but more to the point, children rehearsing what their parents do.

right? toy kitchen, toy car you learn , how to be an adult. that is right much part of american society and culture. is the way that automobile fits into our society. there's loads of these manikins in the exhibition. again old-school, this is a 1950 , buick. can correct me. i have not been over there, but i am pretty sure. you can tell by the grills. these grills are gorgeous. those on the side those are , classic buick symbols. theyill even notice here, do not even do anything, but you'll even notice them on modern buicks. so that's it. that's a gorgeous car. there's a lot of interesting things to say about it. notice how far in the wheels are

set and how far out of the vehicle body comes over those wheels. an effort to make it look heavier. this is a vehicle with very low-pressure tires, and you just float along. you undulate along. it's a magic carpet in a lot of ways. the problem is, of course you , have to go to a car dealer to buy it. and i feel terrible for these poor people here. for eternity going to be negotiating with a car salesman, and i hope -- any car salesman here? um, one of the most disruptive things about tesla is they have been able to avoid car dealership. i don't want to say -- it is actually an interesting history mechanics.ealers and leaving that aside, it's actually a very inconvenient and sort of 20th century to buy

something. you have, we don't -- a thought you touch your phone, , that thing arrives. why doesn't that happen with cars? some companies are trying to do that. for me, god forbid i see a lamborghini, i touch my phone, and next thing you know amazon , drops a box. but car dealerships, that's what they want to get. reallychase process is not in the system. it is a real problem for consumption of the automobile. so that is kind of the way i want to frame it. ok? i don't want to understand so much at the buick, although obviously, i do want to look at it a lot. i don't want to understand so much the buick except in the context of what it meant for people and how it interacted with people's lives. you know, how did the family use it?

what was it like when you taught your daughter or your son to drive in the buick? what was their first experience with it? what was it like to have three on the tree and a double clutch? all those things. what was it to like to buy it? what was it like to get it fixed? what was it like when it finally died? and all those things. and that goes to the way we think about the process of innovation. and the process of invention. so again, you say about driverless cars, ok they are , being invented. but in fact, they have been invented many times. by the same token, i will show you, the automobile has been invented many times in history. if i asked you, off the top of your head when would you say the , automobile was invented? 1900's? 1910's? 1898?

very specific years. you want to give me a month? there you go. there you go. i'm going to prove you all wrong. but anyway, so, the question is not birth, it's adoption. ok? because it's born many times. i will show you how that happens. the real questions i have are two. one, not why was it invented, but why was it adopted? why did the invention succeed when it did? and also what was it, really? ,what kind of thing, oh, automobile, it is a machine for getting places, a transportation device. obviously, when the driverless car, people think about it, that's what people are thinking of it. they are not thinking about how it sits in your driveway for kids to learn what it's like to be around an automobile. that's kind of a strange question. but what is an automobile?

ok by the same token, you would , be surprised to learn that driverless cars have been invented many times. thought about technology in the 1930's, tested in the 1950's, and proven viable by governments testing in the 1990's. two things are important about that. again, we had them. why didn't we pursue them? it turns out, as you look at it a little more deeply, can say those are driverless cars, but they were very different from the driverless car's coming out. -- cars coming out. we will look a little bit at what those driverless cars were like and what driverless cars are like today. all right, so you are all wrong. the automobile was invented in 1672. [laughter] dan: right? this guy is --

i think he was a jesuit monk. he's a month. he was a missionary. went to china. went there to turn the emperor into a christian. bring him to christianity. bring him toto christianity. he made this car. it's kind of cool. you can see there is a ball. there is a hose. at the fire right below it. very simple. very straightforward. steam driven out of it spins a turbine. turbine drives a couple of wooden years. the wheels go, and off you go. the big wheel in the back here is for steering. and i don't quite see how that works from a drawing, but i am sure they had it figured out. this was actually only big but theo carry a rat, question is not -- ok. the question didn't work very well, but so what.

why did somebody look at it and go, that is a good start, let's do that some more? if, over thegine last 400 and something years, the chinese decided to pursue rat cars. we would have pretty good rat cars. right? we would have cars that carry lots of rats. we see that it was invented and we can't quite say that it didn't work, but we can say it wasn't adopted. this is a fascinating this is one. 1790. , hey named nathan read patented a steam-powered self-propelled road vehicle. a car. at the time, there was no u.s. patent office. which is hilarious. i think, actually, on the patent is george washington's signature. the patent office hasn't been invented yet. he has this idea, he got a patent, but what did he do with it? he didn't start selling steam

carriages in no capital 1790. available, no interest. let's look at a couple of others. this is another one of my favorites. i call this the first amphibious car. oliver evansnce -- very accomplished engineer, he , did a lot with process innovations in flour mills, in , bread mills, if you will. he was building for the city of wrench ahia a harbor , boat that goes out and digs up the mud. once they had this light steam engine in collecting capital for carbon, so rather than getting some guys in the wagon he says i'm going to put the wheels on it, and show it off. that is exactly what he did. maybe we will call that the first amphibious car.

no carsfive, -- 1805, yet. this is one of my favorites. this is 1853. steam wagon. two things are interesting about it. this is 1853. fire, but ined in a will show you a little bit, later on. the boiler sat in the middle, people sat on either side. it was essentially like a minibike. he ran a very successful business running people out to long island from new york city. did about 30 miles per hour. and for comparison, ford model t came out around 1909. 1908. it did 40. perfectly fast. perfectly viable. it's not about transportation. his reason for developing the

car is not about transportation, per se. he said he wanted to end the fearful misery of horses. this is something that is developing in this period, the sort of aspca sensibility toward animals. thinking of them not as machines to be abused but as creatures. just quickly here is another , version of it. this is 1856. -- 1866. i show it to you because it is in the smithsonian collection. right? it is not on display. where are the curators? it should be on display. it's just a great machine to look at. and it really does tell us something about road transport. and i understand. you know, i was a curator. it is not easy. now, here is my most interesting one. this is also in the collection. it's a little model, a patent model, so different times in history, you had to produce not

just a drawing, but a physical model of your machine. 1879, this is patented a guy named george. he's a patent attorney. upstate new york, i think rochester. he was very smart. describeshtweight -- everything we think of as the early automobile. lightweight, hydrocarbon engine. internal combustion engine, gasoline engine. able to deal with any reasonable incline. archives of other basic details that you think of for a car. 1879, the vehicle is not produced. because -- very smart patent attorney -- he kept filing amendments. there's different ways you can extend it. any patent attorneys in the room? it kind of extends. you have patent pending.

he waits until 1895, because in 1895, the automobile has arrived. the automobile has been born for hundreds of years and certainly was quite viable by the middle of the 19th century, by the 1870's, but it's not until the 1890's that it's picked up. about 1900.are, i know people want to know about electric cars. how many of you or own anlectric car electric car? tesla? uh-huh. ok. one of the big questions people always ask is why do we get gasoline cars and not electric cars? you can ask the same question about steam cars. if you look up the top, there

are 4000 vehicles in the country. as you can see steam and , electric outpaced the internal combustion car. early historians look at back, and they say, well, the internal combustion car is better. you really have to ask yourself a more complicated question. what do we mean by better? is a goldfish better than a pigeon? i don't know, a pigeon cannot weight. a goldfish -- i got that backwards. pigeons can't swim, goldfish can't fly. is a goldfish better than a pigeon? right? in fact, the electric vehicle had a very good business model. for urban very viable transportation, which is where the early automobiles were, and was also cleaner, quieter, more sensible. they would be last in at a time

when gasoline automobiles could not really have glass. they shook and the glass would just crack, and so forth. the other thing was that the electric car had a business model that was very different than the business model we think last 100the years, ok, we will sell cards to people, and we will make our money. we will build more cars. the electric vehicle companies developed, and i want you to think about uber or lift. -- lyft. that is what they were. in 1899, they had a fleet of hundreds of taxicabs, most of them in new york city. and you could get basically a taxi ride, you could rent the vehicle for a week or month, or you could buy the vehicle. they were relatively expensive, but you could buy what they

one. found as they had a hard time buying taxi service. people were releasing them or holding them for a long periods of time. it was a viable business. so what killed it? there was a couple of things culturally, i will talk about in , a minute. in terms of growing concerns in , terms of a business, one of the things that killed it is an attack on monopoly. if you recall your history, theodore roosevelt, the trust this is 1890's. in particular, a guy who was a big supporter of the gasoline automobile referred to them as the lead trust. they were rapidly expanding. in fairness, just like uber or lyft you do need to have , a monopoly. you need to have a large enough network. what good is it if you only have three lyfts and you want to

arrive? the point is to have lots of them. they really were providing mobility as a service. they were not interested in selling you a vehicle. they were interested in selling you a ride. ok? so what killed them in terms of business, they sound familiar, they expanded rapidly. they kept increasing the capitalization. and then they got into a bit of a scandal where they had done a fraudulent loan and the stock enron kind of a thing. ok. talk about what the automobile is. when we get to the mid-1890's, 1893. ok? so you know, again we can talk , about what is the first automobile. there's a bunch of other ones. i took out an electric car because it was, you know complicated. ,but i will just show you two of them here. also in the museum's collection, the duryea motor

wagons. they had a real winning car. very lightweight, very straightforward. they won races and were very durable. they did hill climbs, long-distance runs. ok, so good car. stanley steamers those are not , the leading one, guys. those are the stanley twins. eh, aey, between 1905 -- little earlier. they sold 2000 of those vehicles . it was a very viable machine. it accelerated easily, was quiet, and all of these things. popular car. the problem is, those were not the first cars that really

captured the attention of the people who could afford cars. the people who could afford cars were the rothschilds, the the toplts, the asters, 10th of 1%. they intermarried with europeans and they would cruise back and forth to europe on the minors. france, 1873, look at this peugeot. on the top, notice it's got lights. it's got little gaslamps. that is a real car. in fact, they were producing them, and they were selling them. a place for your lunch basket right there. right? this is not just like a little tricycle. a four-wheel bicycle. this is a serious car in 1893. the french eat this up. but they don't eat it up in the sense of transportation. these are rich man's toys.

young men, especially with inherited wealth. if this -- i am sorry. that is not the peugeot. my text got messed up. this is maybe one of the most significant vehicles. ok, come on. ah, my friends. -- my french. notice that these vehicles have the motor located under the seat. this vehicle has the motor out here. seems simple enough. but as the motor gets bigger, there is no place for it back here. it isecomes the system -- why engines are out in front. once they are out in front, they can get bigger and bigger and bigger. this creates the modern

architecture, if you will, of the automobile. engines could get bigger, and also they were powerful and they were fast and they were fun. i think we have got some lights. we got a little more luxury. but mostly, we have a lot more power. and we have a quote. this is the new york times. "france has paid the most attention. andill make up lost ground then we will leave the world as we do in this and about all other things." "we are number one," right? the samer thing from article, reviewing the 1900 automobile show, the reporter from the times says "fortunately, none of these cars in america have adopted that foreign freak, the wheel. they are still excited about the

teller. -- tiller. meanwhile, over there, they've got steering wheels." it has a lot to do with the ackerman steering system. it really is a major advance, engineering advance. all right, let me keep moving. so a lot of things about the automobile i could talk about, why it comes in. in the it has to do with 1890's. demographics and the rising immigration. particularly immigration from places like southern italy, where you have a bunch of catholics coming in and jews coming in from eastern europe and so forth. not the good americans from 19 century,he but a bit of swarthy immigrants that start to hang around. i say that in the context of how the native born considered them back then. this is not commentary from me. there is an effort to get out of the city. the city is also becoming more congested, industrialization is

happening, you have this throng of new people. the idea of getting out of the city is a new and exciting thing. the automobile is going to let you do it. partly though before the , automobile, it would be the electrification of the streetcar. well into the 1850's, the city was basically as big as you could walk across. a couple of miles. about a half an hour, you could walk a radius. with the electric streetcar that begins to expand, the idea is the automobile will come and do that. i will focus on one of the many elements, and that is the bicycle. right? we think of the bicycle and automobile as enemies. certainly, they are. anybody who rides a bike on the street knows. in a lot of ways, the bicycle established the car culture. huge bike craze in the 1890's. you cannot even begin to imagine bike races got huge crowds.

bicycle fashion, bicycle advertising. you know, playing cards, right, with the bicycle on the back? that is from that period and that is what it is about. just to show you a couple of examples, this i love. this is a very sociable bicycle. there are all kinds of different you can't see well here, but i ones. don't think she even has a wheel under there. i think it is sort of like a sidecar, it's kind of balanced. i have to look into that. right? but you can take a wife, have her there. bang --who has written ridden h&m, they often get -- ridden a tendem, they often get no view. this is a guy named major taylor, a new book out. number one racer in the country.

obviously, african-american at a time when african-americans racing against white wasn't typically done. so the fact that he made a career in the business is incredible. when theyer hand, travel, he had to go to certain hotels and so forth. but here's what i want to touch on real quickly. so there are a lot of these women's clubs, women's biking clubs, and they were part of the suffragettes. and women's in power men in the period. one of the things you will notice is they are wearing long skirts. those have bike chains. anybody bite -- with a lot -- biked with a monster? -- with a long skirt? even with mike pence on. i'm always stuffing it into my -- my pants on. i'm always stuffing it into my sock. then you get to the office and finally at lunch someone points it out. let's see if we can tell you what they do. let's see.

yeah. bloomers. women start wearing bloomers. oh my god, look. you can see their ankles. they should cover that up. this is a pretty big deal. people have moral panics about these kinds of things. you know, rock 'n roll, oh my god. they have a moral panic about bloomers. they have a moral panic about women being on bicycles. women out by themselves. on bicycles. ok? gives you see this, the context. back in the day, now you get i doall cards and gum -- not even know if they give you the gum anymore. it was never any good. cigarette packs, cigar packs, they would come with a card and people collect them. let's look at what this one has. wayup in the corner here -- - up in the corner here, you can see a lady on a bicycle. obviously, this lady has a

bicycle. but then look at all these legs showing, right? wow. what are they saying? if women are going to start dressing like that what is next? , they are going to start smoking cigars. can you imagine women smoking cigars? that manly thing, they are turning into men! it really is this moral panic. there is also this period of women's empowerment. let me show you a little bit more about the bicycle culture and connect it to the car culture. it's about the sex appeal, but it's also about empowerment. i think i have another slide i am going to show you. danger and speed. so here are bikes that are not your typical with a chain. these are called high wielders. penny farthings, if you are in england. the bigger the wheel, the faster you go. simple physics. the higher your wheel, the faster you go.

by the time europe, five feet in the air, you are going pretty fast. but now, you look like someone on a horse coming at people. they refer to them as scorchers, speeders racing through town. that is on a track, so that is ok. 1901, speed and danger. is henryy ford -- this ford racing alexander. the idea that henry ford, who is pretty much a failed businessman at this point, beat the best racer with the biggest car company in the country, was a huge deal. his car sputtered in the race. he lost. but people went wild. i love this line. "one man threw his hat up in the air. when it came down he stomped on it. another man was so excited, he hit his wife on the head to keep her from flying off the handle."

met this friction i don't know. you know the thing with the -- that description, i do not know. anyway, another cyclist. celebrity cyclist, much like major taylor. henry ford got him to do his next racer. this was a few years later. it's called the 999, 1902. just a year later. he saw his other car. mrs. insane. -- this is insane. he sitting in what amounts to a drawing room seat. the probably pulled the legs off, took it out of clara d's dining room. he steering with a flat bar with two handles on it. the engine is huge. five gallons of air with every stroke. huge amounts of air huge amounts , of horsepower, did 90 miles per hour. ok, there is no seatbelt.

there is no airbag. there is no dashboard. the case israel open, the crankcase is donna -- the crank case is open. the crank case is down at the bottom. it is drenched in oil. the oil just sprayed everywhere. we are going to make it as light as possible. here is the beauty of it, he had no idea how to drive. they just said, you are a bike racer. he is like yeah, i will try it. part of the reason i think there is this instead of this is he did not work the steering will. he didn't know. that's all very exciting. people rushed out these races. 1896, cosmopolitan magazine threw a race in new york. crowds were so thick, the police had to come and everything. people loved it. what people didn't love was when the rich folk started tearing through cities. and they were killing children and they were basically colonizing the streets, driving

people out of the way. you could hear the policemen even dodging the road. this, by the way is called the theusade -- is it? -- crusade of the 500. i am sorry. the charge of the 400. so back in the day, there was a socialite list, and everyone was listed on it. so that's the joke there. vanderbilt ii, william k. vanderbilt ii was the most notorious one of these guys. the ones who really got into it were young men of inherited wealth. scions, right? and fathers had made a fortune. they did not really need any money. vanderbilt told a reporter, he kind of may be thought he was an analyst, but he said, you know wealth is a certain ambition as to- as certain a death

ambition as cocaine is to morality. he had nothing to excite him in life. life was too easy. and so the automobile shows up , and off he goes. ,there is also an interesting op-ed. vanderbilt wanted to build a -- and some of his buddies -- build a raceway on long island. private raceway. no other cars. no other people on it. the times editorialized and said they don't want that. because the fun of racing for them was to see how close they could get to pedestrians without killing them. [laughter] dan: ok. so let me turn now to how we deal with this problem. problem in the city. um, we begin to try to control the chaos of traffic.

ex-choa-ordo. order from chaos, we need to bring order from chaos. i'm going to show you the pretty remarkable scene. it is 1906, four days before the san francisco earthquake, a company that did these films on the front of the streetcar, cubicle, cranking away on the camera. you will see the people turn and look at them. it is a pretty amazing thing. just riding down market street, watching the traffic. what i want you to do is look at the traffic. there is no sound in the original. but some some historians thought it would be nice, and they did a very sympathetic and thoughtful job of adding sound you do get, , i hope, a sense of the way that sounds. we will does look at a few minutes of it. you can see him running right down the track.

[street sounds] [horse whinnying] ll tolling]

[chatter] ♪ dan: ok. that will be our stop. it is funny. this quickly. you see a bunch of cars in there. i have looked at it closely. they are the same cars. you can see the license tags. so i am pretty sure he hired these cars to drive through. there were not that many cars driving through san francisco at the time. it does give you a sense of what is happening. a little bit crazier, they weave in and out. as you can see, there's no rules of the road. it's chaos. it does work. i mean, there's certainly accident. people are certainly run down by streetcars, stomped on, or kicked by horses, but it does work. it is a functional space. and it is a multifunctional

space. you will see, not on market street, but on lots of streets, kids playing. pushcarts. the street is a multifunctional space. over time as the automobile , comes in, there is a concern. sorry, one sack. there develops --- one sec. there develops a concern about traffic crashes. this is a little bit early. i'm going to jump ahead for just a second. much a pivotal year for a couple of reasons. one is, there was a spike in automobile traffic deaths. if you look at a public health breath, you will see that the number of deaths per million miles traveled just keeps going up and really spikes in the middle of the depression. also, an article came out in 1935. it essentially said, you are saving a few minutes and risking your life. in other words slow down, drive

, carefully. what was different -- which of course, right. you have heard that. what was different was nobody had done a full on blood and gore story. he talks about, you know, skin. he visits actual accidents right after they have happened. he talks about bones sticking out. he talks about a woman's face just so full of blood, all you hole in the the middle of it where a mouth was. gruesome stuff. it does have an impact. it shocks people out of the complacency of hearing about death statistics. it does have an impact. it does not make people drive safer. but it makes people go, oh my god. another moral panic. gallup polls show people want more policing of drivers. they do not mean them. they mean the bad drivers.

so right in this period, it is interesting the aaa comes out , 1935, with a driver's ed pamphlet. 1936, the insurance industry comes out with its first driver's ed textbook. traffic engineers, traffic police, and a group called the traffic psychologist. actually psycho technologist. ,and this is the 1930's. we are in a period where inenical thinking is science, where science generally is on the ascendant. the expectation is that science can solve problems. let's look at how that plays out. i'm going to talk about fixing the driver, fixing the road, and fixing the car, but mostly i am going to leave fixing the car out of the picture. for those of you familiar with it ralph nader wasn't just a , presidential candidate, he wrote on the face -- from the 1960's, we got

seatbelts, airbags, crumple zone, all of the things we sort of now live with in the automotive cocoon we now drive. in the 1930's, following publication of -- and sudden theh, as it was called -- auto industry did get involved at least in the rhetoric of driver safety. and they actually began to advertise their vehicles, the safety components. they would say we have better breaks. or we have a turtle top. a safer roof that won't crush. when you roll over. companiesow, the auto -- the american auto companies were the worst. gm was the worst. lead safety glass, seatbelts, airbags, every turn. we can talk about that if you want. there really was, in the 1930's, research into crash survival, and some of that research made

its way -- particularly to studebaker, a guy named paul austin. he turned that over to the automotive safety foundation. so that's different than the 1960's solution. ok, so what are we going to do to fix the drivers? this is 1903 on the right. if this is the first set of traffic rules set up in new york city. a little guy named william. patrician,ard, very he recalled, in getting caught 1867, in a blockade. this is just horses and wagons. he was a very healthy guy. another scion of a rich family. he never drove. he did not like the chaos of the streets. this blockade, and he was like a child at the time, there's already like 12 wagons here. this is nuts. as he got older, he convinced the police department to institute a set of rules, and

there it is. they posted these placards. then there are things we take for granted. stay to the right. turning left, the other car has the right-of-way. those kind of things. that spread. various state and local agents come together, particularly in the 1920's, and begin to create a uniform code. one of the problems is you could be driving from mississippi to alabama and the rules change. right? and also on the left is a traffic light. now, this is fascinating to me. you come to an intersection, there is a traffic light. you have to stop. running a red light is one of the most dangerous things that happens. red light cameras are supposed to stop that. but a rotary, which we see going in, i am not talking about dupont circle, i am talking about a modern traffic rotary, has anyone been in a rotary?

have you noticed them showing up? there is going to be more and more of them. there are going to be more of them. you are going to be safer. you're not going to die must you do something crazy. but the traffic light is the solution in this time, and it is focused on let's behave, let's make sure people behave. if people don't behave, we have a problem. what do we do if we have a problem? it is called the current policing. policing.nt police are out there surveilling, keeping an eye on everything. you may recognize, especially if you have younger kids -- what is it called? the book. the hate you give. it centers around the shooting of a young black man, unarmed black man by a police man. on the right is the shooting of solano castille -- philando castile. he was unarmed.

i have gone through the whole transcript. i wrote an article recently about it. was it justifiable? was it not? we can argue about that, but to me, that is not the story. he was pulled over something like 40 times in the previous six months to a year. statistics show that african-american men are not necessarily shot more than other people who were pulled over, it's just they are just pulled over more. they are searched way more. all right? encounters with police often and -- end badly. the reality is, we are breaking the rules all the time. right? good.you are you are all good drivers. i know. and you always signal. right? and you never roll through a stop sign.

and you never have a brake light out. but of course, we all do. i have done it. i am the best driver. so what we really have is a set of rules now -- and it starts in 1903. and it expands. it allows the police, no matter what they really think i'm a pretext role traffic stop. maybe they think you are a gang member. you're in the wrong part of cap. you failed the signal, they can pull you over. they can even arrest you. making even haul you into jail. in all states. that's weird. i like to say we talk about , driving while black, because of the way we have decided to improve the safety of motor vehicle traffic, we are all driving while black. we are all susceptible to the general warrant. police have utter discretion. excerptan at third --

in the 1990's. the supreme court decided checkpoints were constitutional. so what happened? mothers against drunk driving got ahold of president reagan's ear and said our children are being killed by these dastardly drunk drivers. you have got to check and get them off the road. a lot of problems with that. the methods they wanted to use were ineffectual. most children who die in drunk driving accidents are actually riding with the drunk or inebriated driver. , you know, asued a fourth amendment, illegal search and seizure. there are 25,000 people a year being killed by drunk drivers, and therefore this is ok. ,very strange decision. there were not 25,000 people a year being killed, and that, to

me, is one of the most interesting things. completely separate, this the to six we used to talk about this. another element. very strange. this is the 1930's. i did some dissertation work. detroit reporters court psychopathic when it. ok -- clinic. ok? if you had a few too many tickets or did something the judge thought was weird in the courtroom, he would send you to the psychologist. they would do a full workup, eye tests, attitude tests, intelligence test, and these, this is the react-o-graph. this was the famous psychiatrist. he thought this was so important. he was going to work at this court clinic. this is a can see, --

staged photo, i am pretty sure from the detroit news. ,he is dialing in. it's going to be an object of measurement. of course, none of these were objective. this is somebody showing a film. i think these two ladies must be other psychologists or secretaries or whatever. i don't think they were patients. and that's what they were called, patients. so as i say i did my , dissertation, my doctoral work , one chapter on this. ,and the idea is we find bad drivers. bad risks as drivers. and we correlate that with an outcome. in other words they do a , psychiatric test. may decide you have a bad attitude or maybe you are crazy theynile or whatever, and told the judge to take his license away. or maybe they think you are a little bit of a sociopath. and they take your license away. so i correlated this, p values has nothing to do with whether , or not you are a good driver.

has to do with whether you are black or white, a woman or a man, an immigrant, typically from places like syria, a jew. that would correlate very well with the outcome of your -- the deposition of your case. -- disposition of your case. ok. all right let's keep going. ,i am going to do this very quickly. there is another way to fix the driver, driver's education. how many of you went to driver's ed? keep your hands up if you did in public school. thank you. public school drivers education. now, here is the local government paying for you. now, it has changed a little bit. but paying for you to learn how to drive. isn't that strange? isn't that strange? why is that part of the curriculum? and what does it -- is it really about? turns out, the easier it got to drive, like, you know the double , clutching was gone, the

textbooks just got bigger and bigger. it was not about drivers training. it wasn't about how to operate the vehicle. it was about citizenship. it was about becoming an adult. it was about other things i'm going to try to show you. so this is -- again this is the , 1930's. they would have these safety parades, and different cities would get awarded each year as the safest city. i think this is kansas city but i'm not sure. but this is the schoolchildren safety parade going before the reviewing stand. and i want you to notice -- it is hard to see. it is not a great image. but -- so there is the car and the school. there's the school kids. and you will notice this sign right here. "america first, safety always." that seems to be a little bit of a -- what should i say -- conflating a couple of different ideas.

i do not want to take that too deeply, but i've always been fascinated by that. for a long time, i thought these were pictures of hitler's in the back, but they are traffic lights. this is a getty image a short , film, but it is a march on washington, a parade of school safety patrols. i was a school safety patrols. whoops. sorry, let's go back. you have to get this to run by doing that. there is joe dimaggio, fairly unclear. but you know, this is -- see the helmets and the margin? -- the marching? learn to march in step. any of you have this? belts. we have the orange belt, it went around here. shoulder strap. your job is a little bit of an authority. you are like a brown shirt. authority, right? vote for safety.

where do you see the guy with the shield? just a quick pause if i can. lbat is the cap county -- deka county, georgia. site of980's it was the the biggest study of driver education. the reason was the federal government were more interested in getting driver education. they found it didn't work, it get thehildren to licenses earlier and was counter productive. i wish we had the music. look at that. what is that about? always be careful.

confederate soldiers, southern flag, that is ok. look at this. there they are. against accidents. the flags, the white dresses. ok. let me see if i can do this. no, go away. wait. we have to present again. help me out. everybody relax. it is all going to come together. here is what we are going to do. that's all right.

we will get to review everything really fast. it's a problem with the slides. ok. talk about engineering the driver and some of the weird ways we tried to do it. obviously the solution we have now is eliminate the driver. let's see if we can engineer a better road. year, 1935.al this is a graham wood painting. this is called "death on the ridge road." been,sponse could have don't rush past another vehicle. don't speed. that's a two lane road. you're a bad driver. look at what is going to happen, the limousine.

the beautiful bright red truck. people will die. it will be gruesome. a lot of people looked at that and said, we need more laws. we have to get bad drivers off the road. others have said, let's get rid of the ridge road. that is exactly what they began to do. we think of the interstate highway system in 1956. suburbs, potato chips and barbecues. the planning begins in the 1930's and begins in this context. it's all the things you would expect. it is about work. everybody is out of work. a lot of shovels to build a highway. it's about safety. even today, the interstate highway system is twice as safe as other roads and surface streets. it's about getting rid of those cars, references to vehicles running willy-nilly over the landscape.

we need to control them. instead of it being a symbol of freedom, but really about freedom, it's about controlling traffic. i like to think of it as a railroad. a concrete railroad with rubber tires. if you have missed your exit, it's like missing a stop on the subway. you have to go to the next one, turn around, take the train back. you get on and off only in certain places. that's what makes it work. the other element of it is urban renewal. this is the frontispiece for the original report describing the interstate highway system. the national freeway system. delivered to fdr. he tries to get it funded, and has a hard time.

also, 1939-1956. not a huge distance and time. you have the war in between. it's also about urban renewal. a lot of people think highways come in, that is bad. but really the purpose of a highways was not let's destroy the city, we hate the city, it's almost untenable. occupied by the humblest fringe thehey business course. these are the city slums. slums, a the city blight near its very core. we will come in and use highways as a way to rebuild the city. this is exactly what they did. if you went to the world's fair in 1939, you got that pin, i

want one of those. ralph nader, no friend of general motors, he recalls going as a young kid and walking with his parents holding his hand and rushing off and yelling gm. he was so excited about the exhibit. lots of people were. this was the idea. look at how wide that is. it looks like eight lanes. they go right through the city. you turn the city into a vertical superblock of towers. you would wait in a long line. something like 25 million people went to the thing. you would sit in something called the carry-go-round. it would rotate around this diorama. it was built by traffic engineers. how are we doing on time?

are you bored? ok? we have a little ways to go. stick with it, it will get good. let's look at what happened with those highways. fine when they are out in the sticks. there is nobody to bother them. d.c., theshington, 1950 layout for the freeways that go through the city. very quickly, here is the inner beltway. you can see the district lines here. this is inside the district. the beltway. that will work out good. 66 will come in and keep going. i think this is 395. that seemed like a good idea. i-95 would cut right across here. there'd be something called the

three sisters bridge. take the highway right across the river. because of course, we want to revitalize the city and get rid of the slums. turns out people lived in those slums. this happened all across the country. i will tell you about d.c. i have been thinking about this lately. i don't know if any of you have been following hogan's plan to widen the highways and put in dynamic tolls, a very high-tech solution. the reality is adding highways. what got me was the rhetoric. his secretary of transportation, who, by the way, was working for a company that built dynamic tolled highways. he got in trouble for a whole

bidding thing. people are against this. about "a very active vocal minority opposed to 'sducing the region congestion." he insists we need more highway lanes. larry hogan said that there are a bunch of pro-traffic activists in town who "plot to keep the roads filled with traffic." that is not as bad as 1968. here is a quote from angela rooney. recalled fbi harassment, she noted this newspaper, the ushington post, "called everything from communists to pinkos, to that little band of

discontented people." that conflict is there. it is still there. i will try to keep moving. this is sammy abbott. he was an old school labor rights guy. a union organizer back in the 1930's. he knew how to organize people to get things going. this is reginald booker. he was the president. part of the reason i think he was the president is they adopted this slogan. "white man's roads through black men's homes." if you look across the country, that was very much true. some mayors said that is why we want to do this. we want to racially segregate this town. we want to tear up west cincinnati and throw in a multilane exchange.

in reality, in d.c., it wasn't quite that way. these were white and black neighborhoods they were going through. but using that slogan really captured the moment. i think that's interesting. and it's interesting we are facing that again. let's keep moving. let's talk about driverless cars. why driverless cars now? what kind of cars are we getting? not safe and simple cars in 1890. not gasoline cars. we are not getting mobility as a service in the 1890's. we had them sit with a car dealer and buy a buick. that's not what is going on now. what has changed? why driverless cars now? ride hailingt the companies, they aren't making money.

they are losing money hand over fist. one of the biggest problems is they have to pay people to drive cars. they try to crush that labor and squeeze payouts. -- it rode here in an uber called it an uber, but he only drives for lyft, because they kept squeezing drivers. when it came to the automobile itself, driverless cars of the past. when i talk about what is a driverless car, what i mean is what are we getting now and how is it different from the past? there's a simple way to think about it. this is libertarian. the less government involvement is barter -- that are as far as

the driverless car companies are concerned. not building highways is better for them. in 1958 these ads appeared in magazines for electric companies trying to keep the government off the electric grid. trying to stop nuclear power from being developed by the government. so they could make money selling electricity. this one on the right, if you searched on the internet to look for driverless cars, every other article uses this image. no one points out where it comes from. it comes from these electric companies. the thing you'll notice is it has no connection to current driverless cars. that's a lane marker. the car is going right down the center of a lane. he is not driving between the lanes.

as a side note, all the silicon telling us driverless car's are coming in we are geniuses, many of them such as google and others are pursuing a driverless cars. this is part of the same campaign. they are not pursuing driverless flying saucers. these things that will make a racket, safer helicopters. this is what i want. puppy in the back. groceries. mom at the wheel. a nice big steering whale -- wheel. it is a flying saucer. notice there are two flying saucer families. that is what electricity will bring you. but this is science fiction. this in 1958 is science fact. 1958. rca, cutting edge of

electronics, transistors and that good stuff, they test driverless cars. this is on a test track. you can see the guy on your right not sitting at the steering wheel. there is no steering wheel. there a joystick. no steering wheel. they are following, pretty sure that is an impala. a 1958.it's >> yep. aha! i was hoping somebody would be here. a driverless car. it works. i'm going to show you -- i'm going to tell you why not. why did they not pursue this? in 1958, gm was the most profitable company in the country. also this was required

cooperation with the people who made the roads. basically the government. you may be familiar with the quote of what is good for america is good for general motors and vice versa. the connection between the government and general motors is very much there. here is the way that general motors played it. this is the firebird two. there are three of them. i urge you to look up iron bird -- firebird two. let's see if it will play. >> using great power in small packages. that's the amazing new generator. exhaust heat is no longer a problem. the experimental car of tomorrow has a science fiction appearance but it is practical and usable in every design. even the electronic safety highway is feasible for the future.

here, tomorrow's driver might just push a button and the car would drive itself. electronic receivers would pick up various impulses and roll it along in complete safety. inside the car, a tv screen reveals travel information and gives highway and weather reports. dan: tv screen in the car? that's there. this was viable. now i'm going to show you the real thing being done in 1997. this was the intelligent highway system, this was right at the end of the building of the interstate highway system. there was going to have to be some reauthorization. will we build more highways? let's see if we can make our existing highways more efficient. how can we do that? let's squeeze more cars onto the road. also, let's reduce congestion. which is caused by creches.

you have been -- by crashes. you have all been stuck behind a crash. systems will be able to steer around obstacles and avoid them. it will be more relaxing because it will be self-driving. cars can drive inches apart. let's look at this. it is 1997, it is kind of vhs quality. take a good look. it will show you two different things. a pontiac swerving and a bunch of buicks behaving like they are in the army. here we go. >> here we are. driving with no hands. we are coming up to this obstacle up here. this is pretty cool. >> it is swerving. >> we are around it. no hands.

>> the consortium calls them the -- them scenarios. they demonstrate the technical feasibility of various types of automated highway technology. how they will increase safety and relieve traffic and session -- congestion. >> there will be platoons of vehicles closely together. dan: i find it hilarious. pontiac's slogan is we build excitement. and then buick just marches along. but it works. it required infrastructure. it was advanced by the government. i will wrap up quickly talking about those same things with what i'm talking about the libertarian driverless car. here is elaine chao talking about driverless cars. she mixes metaphors, mixes up

different technologies. it's a future where time spent commuting is drastically reduced. the major factor in 94% of all fatal crashes is human error. advanced driver systems. this is important. ds. maybe some of you have this on your new cars. emergency braking. keeping assist, helps you stay in your lane. safety. insistselon musk, who his cars are fully self-driving or will be next week. every year we delay self driving, more people die. now he is attacking journalists who are complaining about the stock. he said that, if in writing an

article that is negative that you dissuade people from using an autonomous vehicle, you are killing people. he is like henry ford. anthony lewandowski involved in the google suit. once you make a car better than the drivers, you are responsible to have them there. and from general motors part of , what is driving him, this is similar talking about him, the fact that 33,000 americans are killed by highway accidents every year. 90% of the time by human error. they want to eliminate the driver because we are bad drivers. it's not true. this is the 94% fallacy.

they all read this document, which says, 94% of accidents are caused -- no, i am sorry. this is the critical reason for investigated from the national motor vehicle crash survey. it doesn't say who causes the crashes. you have to read the footnotes. nobody reads the footnotes. although the critical reason is an important part of the description of events leading up to the crash, it is not intended to be interpreted as the cause of the crash, nor the assignment of fault to the driver, vehicle or environment. the driver is always -- i'm surprised it's not 100%. the driver is always the last link in the chain. the driver can always avoid the accident. no matter how bad an

intersection, and we know there are bad intersections. them millionsugh of times without crashing. thousands of times without crashing. therefore, it must be my fault. it is only my fault because i could have stopped it. they could have stopped it long before. the way to stop it is to not get rid of me, it's to fix the road, the infrastructure, so that we are using our vehicles last, driving them slower, and they are safer. and the roads are safer. i think i'm almost done. what are these driverless cars? i call them ayn randian. the reason they exist the way they do is because they came out of defense research projects. the idea was to come up with self-driving vehicles because they had to keep sending home notes to people who died and send the priest over. this was bad. particularly, the poor guys who were contractors driving these

fuel trucks to fill up the tanks. they were getting blown up. you can't put a wire in the road in iraq. the things in the road in iraq blow up. you need something that operates on its own. here are some of the real reasons. again, going back. billion was there last valuation. -- was the last valuation. is $68 billion. the plan when they heard about self-driving cars was, we were going to take all of that 30%, we will keep. they would take the entire fare. the project's codename is $. there's a new book out right now. i put it on the list there for you. the author describes that. you cannot make money selling

cars. if you start with that quote on the bottom, auto companies earn less than the cost of capital. most companies destroy value. this guy a professor of finance. let me put it in simple words. building cars is a money-losing operation globally. what do the car companies want to do? what does uber want to do? they want to get rid of the drivers. they want money and maybe someday they will be profitable. general motors wants to become like the faang's. like the facebooks and so forth. general motors has a market cap of $57 billion, less than uber. stock price, 5.4. ford, 7.1. uber, they don't have one because they lose money. amazon, 75. facebook, 35. that's what they want to be.

they want to have the cost of capital to go down so they can make money. the last thing i will leave with you, the last line. there are no driverless cars. there are no driverless cars. this has been a real problem. a columnist for the new york times, i will start with the one on the bottom there. automotive news said, when your self-driving car is not autonomous. it's not like you sit in the backseat and let things go. my favorite is from the drive. terrified new york times columnist confuses volvo with magical driverless car. people are dying. the first death was the death of a man named josh brown. he was driving his tesla and using it on autopilot.

we talked about operational domain and all that. the ntsb studied it. they found that calling this thing driverless, autopilot, was a problem. adding to the problem is the moniker autopilot. joe and susie public may conclude from the name they need not pay attention to the driving task, because the autopilot is doing everything. that's exactly what happened. josh brown was not paying attention. he drove under the back end a semi trailer. he shaved off the top of his car and his head. there have been four of these that we know of. one in china. josh brown i mentioned. walter wong in california. jeremy banner. also elaine herzberg. she was killed by a self-driving test car. the safety driver was paying no attention. these things do not work yet.

they are certainly not safe. that is what i have to show you. this is the end of my road trip. that is my beloved saab. i really thank you. you have been very patient. i could go on forever. i love this stuff. more than loving talking is listening. i would love to hear what you have to comment on, say, you want to know how to change your oil or tire. i will help you. car buying advice, anything. stock tips. no. thank you. [applause] dan: every time i do a talk, i have a hard time getting questions.

>> the liability, have they sorted out the liability in some of these crashes? there's the driver of the vehicle, the software developed by somebody, the vehicle built by somebody. where are we at with the assignment of blame? the assignment of blame is a huge question. a couple of things. the society of automotive engineers developed something called the levels of driverless cars. they start with zero. that's what i drive. they work their way up from es andlling the brak they say when you get to five, it is full self-driving. it is not.

full self-driving is when i don't have to pay car insurance and the car company pays the car insurance. that, to me, is fully self-driving. what has happened recently with the tesla crashes, there are some -- there are two suits out, one in china and one here. the argument, they have this thing in the manual that says by the way, you have to keep your hands on the wheel. but there are all kinds of ways that doesn't work and the ntsb when they studied this saw that. so, so far, nobody seems to be holding these vehicle companies or these vehicles responsible for the crashes. yes, sir? >> do you see a time when it becomes mandatory to do a taunus autonomous driving? dan: i can imagine that, to be honest with you.

if the argument is about safety, you really have plenty of safety systems that already make driving very safe. what i can see is things like keeping cars out of cities, it would be very expensive to go into the city, where you have pedestrians and so forth. 10,000 of these -- about 30,000, 40,000 deaths a year, about 10,000 our alcohol that related. -- are alcohol that related. we have the technology to keep people from driving drunk, and we don't. the government has had every opportunity to solve problems like speed. just quickly, the european union has just instituted that all new cars will have speed governors. if you are on a 100 kilometer road, the car will not go over 100 kilometers.

we have gps and we have the technology. it is not hard. i could see that coming in, and i think that's different than saying you can't drive. people want to drive. >> when do drivers licenses become not required? dan: when did they become not required? it happened in the 1930's mostly and it spread from more populist and denser states out to places like north dakota. interestingly, early on, you would go to the dmv and they would say, are you insane, and you would say no, and you would get a license. driver testing did not come in

really until the 1950's, for the most part, so very late. people drove without licenses for a long time. >> you showed an 1895 patent. who did the patent holder sue? dan: so, george selden had a patent in 1895, and he sued the largest automaker in the country, and he fought for a while, and then he settled. he settled for 1.25% of the royalty going to selden. selden was now part of the consortium that included the electric vehicle company. they had bought the patent, so he got a piece of it, the electric vehicle got a piece of

-- the electric vehicle company got a piece of it, and another part of it went to the automobile license association members. i probably have that wrong. they were essentially an industry group, a trade group. they are often referred to as patent trolls. that comes out of the histories of henry ford. they had become known as patent trolls. they eventually had most of the automakers part of the trade association, and it did a lot of good things. for example, 8,000 different bolt sizes for cars. they consolidated that. they made standards. on the other hand, they were a

monopoly, saying who could and could not be part of this. henry ford tried to join and he was rebuffed. that patent fight went on years and years. in the end, the patent was declared valid, but only for a particular type of engine in the patent, so it was essentially thrown out. by that time, it had about a year's run. it's a fascinating story. if you're interested in following it up, i am really proud of the way i treat it in there, because so many of the other stories are just based on henry ford. does that answer it? maybe too much? ok. yeah. >> your presentation makes it sound like autonomous vehicles are inevitable in the u.s. i'm interested in your opinion about the timing. how long will it be before the majority of vehicles are

vehicles, and how long until -- before the majority of vehicles are autonomous vehicles, and how long until virtually all vehicles are a -- autonomous. dan: i don't like to tell people it will never happen. i do think that's a possibility. we are finding it much harder. part of that is the roads, how bad the roads are an drivers -- and drivers keep getting blamed. it turns out it is hard for to navigate it. i see it as a very long time before any sort of majority. there are more cars and drivers in the country, licensed drivers, 240 million or so. we sell about 17 million new cars, average car is about 12 years old. 20% of cars are over 18 years old. what does that mean?

even if all of them were self-driving tomorrow, or looking at two decades before we all bought them. the second thing is the cost of these vehicles because of the sensors and computing power is very large. and finally, they don't work. [laughter] dan: right? they speak about edge cases, but it is all edge cases. i certainly see them being used on a campus or in a small area or to get around a small city. we are very far away from outlawing driving and it all be autonomous. yeah. questions.reat >> [indiscernible] so you can drive across country [indiscernible] dan: the 500 mile one is a

tricky one, more than the range of a gasoline car. there are two possibilities for the technology. you get 250-300 miles, but you also need to be able to charge in six minutes. that is a tricky business. porsche says are coming out with one. -- says they are coming out with one. less than 500 word -- miles, very fast charging. now, you have to sit and wait for half an hour. but what if you show up and 70 -- and somebody is already sitting there for half an hour? it's a problem. i do think there are solutions to that. i think we are getting there. >> it seemed like in your presentation, we went from the advent of the car to driverless [indiscernible] and the things happening now where there is talking between the vehicles. what do you think about that? and where we are going with

that? dan: it is referred to as v2v. and v2x. what it means -- it's like the 1958 impala i showed you, where the technology is fairly simple. it is radios, sensors, and the most basic way to put it is it tells the cars to not be in the same place at the same time. it has been -- the radio spectrum to do this was allocated in about 2000, maybe a little earlier. auto companies are not excited

about it and they say it has been fighting it a long time. they say they don't want to get stuck with an old technology, they want to use 5g cellular and said, and they are not convinced it works. that's what they said about seatbelts, airbags, safety glass, etc. the pattern of behavior worries me. on the other hand, the 5g idea, it tries to do the same thing. the reason they are excited about that is once you have 5g in a car, all of this delicious data comes in. amazon can sell you things. and facebook can be there. i think that is what is going on. there's no reason not to have it. localities have put it in traffic lights and all of that. it's a shame it hasn't happened, it's a lot of good stuff. it's in the book. i am happy to stay and talk. yes? >> i was reading recently that in canada, researchers are developing morality software for their driverless cars so that the car knows that if grandma is riding a bicycle and a squirrel goes across the road, it is ok

to hit the squirrel, but not grandma. [laughter] >> do you see any challenges with developing that type of technology? dan: that is an excellent question. i love this part. i argue that that is a kind of totalizing conversation. in other words, what they are trying to do is say the automobile, the driverless car, is a new kind of moral actor. it enters a space which is going to force it to make decisions that human beings make now. and the reality is, it doesn't have any clue what is in the road or who is driving.

but, there has been a lot of coverage of that. i call it the amorality of robot cars. there is some stuff on the web. there is already a moral framework in the automobile driver-road system. for example, traffic engineers don't think about safety and then mobility, they think about mobility and then safety. that is a moral choice. i think other than the fact that philosophers are trying to make a living, it is an absurd conversation. i will read you very quickly. at some level, it's a useful exercise, because kids in college are learning the program and should think about this stuff. there is this guy who has written a bunch of things.

computers could decide who lives and dies in a driverless car. here is a terrible idea, robot cars with adjustable ethics. here's the real problem. consider the problem of a car barreling down the street with a crippled boy, should it swerve to avoid the boy and kill the driver? or just slam on the brakes and hope for the best? if kid in street is greater than 15, line print -- kill kid in

street, we are sorry for your loss. the real question is not which way should the porsche turn, the real question is, why is the porsche going so fast in the first place? the porsche should not be in that situation. it should not be tailgating a truck that drops boxes and has to swerve. that's the problem with the driverless car. deiverlessise of the -- driverless car. sorry, i get excited. i can take more questions, but clearly we need to wrap up. thank you for coming. [applause] american history tv is on social media. .ollow us at c-span history

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