u.s. autos and argues against driverless cars. smithsonian associates hosted this event. bytonight, we are joined historian and automotive 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, 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." it is available for sale and 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. i 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 feel like i have to be up on my toes and really give you my a-game to take that seriously. and to be a little intellectual, be a little heavy. talking about the past, present, and future of the automobile. 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 cannot capture all of that tonight. what i thought i would do is talk about the early automobile and a little bit of this theory of how one understands that. the reason i am doing that is to put us in the present moment, where, as 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. and i am looking to hearing from you about your experiences with the automobile. so, without further ado, let's get started with cars. [applause] [sound of a train] dan: yeah, i mean, well, i had to show you this. how many people know this machine and have gone to see it? yeah?

keep your hands up if you stayed and listened to the entire soundtrack. a couple. 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. yeah, pretty much me. as long as we are raising hands, i did a thing in brooklyn, going on about cars. i realized halfway through it, i said, how many of you own a car? drive? 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. interesting, diverse audience. that is exciting. we are not going to talk very much about trains. we are going to talk about cars.

and this is 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, any time a guest from 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? but i don't know about that. yeah 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. and 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 how 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. when we look at this, the first thought is, well, that is like an encyclopedia, right? it is not really saying anything about how technology develops. it has got a collection of objects. labels that typically say this guy invented it. this year, it had this performance characteristic. very straightforward. and that is the way i experienced it as a kid. but as i studied further and further, and 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

of 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: but 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. but 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 a little better.

um, you look back at the back wall and you can see there is a high-wheeler just poking out back there. old-fashioned bicycle before the bike chain is invented. then we work our way from the right to the left. they get better, they get better, they get better. you can see in 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 from very early on 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 about what it was 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 some of you may 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. because 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. because 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 -- don't do it yet.

i think that is a 55 country squire wagon. it really oozes domesticity. that wooden paneling. back when station wagons had tires.bodies, whitewall 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 looks 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, if you look at the little red car, what is that? that's a kiddy car. that tells me two things. 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 was very much part of american society and culture.

and that 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. again, somebody can correct me. i have not been over there, but i am pretty sure. you can tell by the grill. these grills are gorgeous. the three holes on the side. those are classic buick symbols. you will even notice here, they 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.

right? 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. they are in for eternity, going to be negotiating with a car salesman, and i hope -- any car salesmen here? um, one of the most disruptive things about tesla is they have been able to avoid car dealerships. i don't want to say -- it is actually an interesting history about car dealers and mechanics. and our trust of them. leaving that aside, it's actually a very inconvenient and sort of 20th century way to buy something. you have a thought, you touch your phone, that thing arrives. why doesn't that happen with cars? some companies are trying to do

that. and 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 -- where they want to get. the purchase process is really 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 look 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? was it sad? 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? 1910? 1898? very specific years. you want to give me a month? [laughter] >> july. dan: there you go. there you go. i'm going to prove you all

wrong. but anyway, so, the question is not so much birth, it's adoption. ok? because it's born many times. it is often stillborn. 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? we kind of think, oh, automobile, it is a machine for getting places, a transportation device. and 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 your 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 perhaps to learn that driverless cars have been invented many times.

thought about and technology described in the 1930's, tested in the 1950's, and proven viable by government testing in the 1990's. two things are important about that. again, we had them. why didn't we pursue them? and it turns out, as you look at it a little more deeply, we can say those are driverless cars, but they were very different from the driverless cars coming next. 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 was a jesuit monk. he was a missionary. went to china. went there to turn the emperor into a christian.

try to bring him to christianity. he got a car to bring him to christianity. he made this car. it's kind of cool. you can see there is a ball. there is a hose. and a fire right below it. very simple. very straightforward. steam driven out of it, spins a turbine. turbine drives a couple of wooden gears. 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 the drawing, but i am sure they had it figured out. this was actually only big enough to carry a rat, but the question is not -- ok. it didn't work very well, maybe, we don't really know. but so what? why didn't somebody look at it and go, that is a good start, let's do that some more? you know, imagine if, over the 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 one. this is 1790. a guy named nathan read, he 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. but he had this idea, he got a patent, but what did he do with it? he didn't start selling steam carriages in 1790. no capital 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 evans, very accomplished engineer, he did a lot with process innovations in flour mills, in making flour, bread mills, if you will. he was building for the city of philadelphia a harbor dredge, a boat that goes out and digs up boats can get through. once they had this light steam engine in collecting capital for carbon, so rather than getting some guys in the wagon to drag it down to the water 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. 1805, no cars yet. this is one of my favorites. i will show it to you in the second in another version.

this is 1853. steam wagon. two things are interesting about it. this is 1853. that car burned in a fire, but i will show you in a minute a later one. 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. bit did about 40. perfectly fast. perfectly viable. not picked up. his reason for developing the car has nothing to do with what you might think. it was 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 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. it's a lightweight -- describes everything that we think of as the early automobile. lightweight, hydrocarbon explosion engine. internal combustion engine, gasoline engine. able to deal with any reasonable incline. all kinds 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? you can kind of extend that. you have patent pending. you can do various things to make sure that the patent is not issued. 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. so, here we are, about 1900. i know people want to know about electric cars. and also, oh, how many of you drive an electric car or own an electric car? 1, 2. uh-huh. ok. volt? tesla? 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 in 1900. as you can see, steam and electric outpaced the internal combustion car.

the early historians look at that 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 fly, but a goldfish -- wait. 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. and it was very viable for urban transportation, which is where the early automobiles were, and was also cleaner, quieter, more sensible. they would be glassed 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 of over the last 100 years of, ok, we will sell cars 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 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 one. what they found as they had a hard time providing taxi service.

people weren't 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 buster, this is 1890's. turn of the century, trusts are a bad thing. in particular, a guy who was a big supporter of the gasoline automobile referred to them as the lead cab 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? forget about it, right? 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? this may 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 price went, and enron kind of a thing. ok. let me talk now 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. 1893, also in the museum's collection, that was the duryea motor wagons. springfield, massachusetts.

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. and they, between 1905 -- eh, a 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 vanderbilts, the asters, the top

10th of 1%. you think of them as americans, but they intermarried with europeans and they would cruise back and forth to europe on the liners. 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.

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 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. d,is becomes the system panar it is 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 these were powerful and

they were fast and they were fun. again, i think we have got some lights. 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. we will make up lost ground and then we will lead the world as we do in this and about all other things." we are number one, right? this other thing from the same 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 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. alright, let me keep moving. so a lot of things about the automobile i could talk about, why it comes in in the 1890's. it has to do with 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 earlier in the 19 century, but a bit of swarthy immigrants that start to hang around. -- that are not so nice to hang around. i say that in the context of how the wasp, 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, cities was basically as big as you could walk across. a couple of miles. in 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 ones. you can't see it well here, but i 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 the wife, have her there. ridden a tandem, 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 whites wasn't

typically done. so the fact that he made a career in the business is incredible. on the other hand, when they 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 empowerment in the period. one of the things you will notice is they are wearing long skirts. those have bike chains. biked with a long skirt? even with 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? so you can see this, gives you the context. back in the day, now you get baseball cards and gum -- i do 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. way 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. that'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. wheelers. 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 you are 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. this is henry ford racing alexander whitten. 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." that description. 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. this is insane. he sitting in what amounts to a drawing room seat. the probably pulled the legs off, took it out of clara ford's bedroom and put it on there. he steering with a flat bar with two handles on it. the engine is huge. sucked in 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 crank case is open. the crank case is down at the

bottom. it is drenched in oil. it was open, 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 crusade -- is it? -- the 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. willie 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 maybe thought he was an analyst, but he said, you know, wealth is as certain a death to 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. it is one of the latin phrases used by a traffic engineer. 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, cable car, 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 film 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 this sounds. we will does look at a few minutes of it. you can see him running right down the track. [street sounds]

[horse whinnying] [bell tolling] [street sounds] [chatter] [bell tolling] [street sounds] ♪

dan: ok. that will be our stop. it is funny. 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. they are a little bit faster, 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 certainly accidents. 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, it is a big levar, but

-- big boulevard, 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 sec. there develops a concern about traffic crashes. this is a little bit early. i'm going to jump ahead for just a second. 1935 was very 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 graph, 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 could see is the hole in the middle of it where her mouth is. gruesome stuff. that was in order to shock 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, 1935, the aaa comes out 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 psychologists. actually, psycho technologist. and this is the 1930's. we are in a period where eugenical thinking is in 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 death, as it was called -- the 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. so, you know, the auto companies -- the american auto companies were the worst. gm was the worst. lead gas 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. a little beard, very patrician, he recalled, in 1867, getting caught in a blockade. this is just horses and wagons. he is a very wealthy guy. another scion of a rich family. he never drove. this was before automobiles. he did not like the chaos of the streets. this blockade, and he was like a child at the time, there's 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 deterrent policing. 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 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 end badly. the reality is, we are breaking the rules all the time. right? yeah, you are good. 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, a pretextual traffic stop is what it is called. 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. jailcan even haul you into in most 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. this is an excerpt 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. so they were sued, you know, as a fourth amendment, illegal search and seizure. rehnquist said 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 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. and as you can see, -- this is a staged photo, i am pretty sure, from the detroit news. he is dialing in. it's going to be an objective

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. they decide you have a bad attitude or maybe you are crazy or senile or whatever, and they 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 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 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 a lot of other things. 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 in thectures of hitler

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 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. eyes and ears. where do you see the guys with the shields? yeah. just a quick pause if i can.

that is in georgia. in the 1980's, that county in georgia was the site of the biggest study of driver education. and the reason was, the federal government were more interested in getting driver education. and did it work? they found it did not. they found it caused children to get their licenses at a younger age, therefore there was more traffic involvement. in other words driver education , in the period was counterproductive. let's watch a little more marching. i wish we had the music. look at that. what is that about? always be careful. you have to give them a southern flag, that is ok. confederate soldiers, ok.

look at this. there they are. against accidents. the flags, the white dresses. let me see if i can do this right. very complicated. go away. wait. we have to present again. come on, help me out. everybody relax. we are all going to come together. that's what we are going to do. that's all right. we will get to review everything very soon. it's a problem with the slides. ok.

talk about engineering and the driver and some of the weird ways we tried to do it. obviously the solution we have now is eliminate the driver. i would like to see if we can engineer a better road. 1935, this is a graham wood painting. the advice would be, don't rush past another vehicle. the response could have been don't speed. that's a two lane road. you're a bad driver. look at what is going to happen. look at this 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. let's get rid of the ridge in the road and that's exactly what the began to do. we think of the interstate highway system in 1956. eisenhower, barbecues. the planning begins in the 1930's and begins in this context. it's all the things you would expect. it's all about 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 miss your exit it's just like missing or stop on the subway. you have to go to the next one, turnaround, 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. this was delivered to fdr. he tries to get it funded, and has a hard time. to 1956 is not a huge

distance and time. you have the war in between. it's also about urban renewal. a lot of people think the in, that iscome bad. it's almost untenable. occupied by the humblest citizens, they fringe the business course. these are the city slums. it's a 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 , i1939, you got that pin 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 to the city. you turn the city into this vertical superblock of towers. this is what you would do. you would wait in a long line. 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 we ok? we have a little ways to go. stick with it.

it is brilliant. it is really going to get good. let's look at what happened with those highways. fine when they are out in the sticks. d.c.is washington, this is the 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 do this round thing and keep going. i think this is 395. that seemed like a good idea. i-95 would cut right across here. there would be something called the three sisters bridge. take the highway right across the river. we want to revitalize the city

and get rid of the slums. it turns out people lived in those slums. this happened all across the country. i will tell you a little bit about it in 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 what are we talking about? we are talking about adding highway lanes. 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 this bidding thing. people are against this.

he complained about "a very active vocal minority opposed to relieving the city's congestion." he said we need more highway lanes. larry hogan, said that there are a bunch of pro-traffic activists. where they have a plot to keep the roads filled with traffic. that is not as bad as what happened in 1968. here is angela rooney. she noted this newspaper, the washington post called us 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 is an old school guy. he was an old school labor rights guy. a union organizer back in the 30's. he knew how to organize people to get things going. this is reginald booker. he was the president. 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. that's interesting. it's interesting we are facing that again. let's keep moving. let's talk about driverless cars. what kind of cars we getting? not safe and simple cars in 1890. we got gasoline cards. 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? hailingook at the ride companies, they aren't making money. one of the biggest problems is they have to pay people to drive cars. they try to crush that labor and squeeze payouts.

ubert rode over here in an -- i just called it an uber, he drives for lyft because he said uber keeps squeezing him. automobilee to the itself, driverless cars of the past. what kind of cars we getting now and how is it different? there's a simple way to think about it. communitarian versus libertarian. the less involvement from the government the better as far as these companies are concerned. not building infrastructure is better for them.

this is 1958. these ads appeared in magazines for electric companies trying to keep the government of the electric grid. trying to stop nuclear power from being developed by the government. that way they could make money selling electricity. this one on the right, if you searched on the internet to look for driverless car's, 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. it's going right down the center of a lane. it is not driving between the lines. that is kind of weird. as a side note, all the silicon valley roads, many of them, such

as google and others are pursuing driverless cars. it's part of the same campaign. they are not pursuing driverless flying saucers. this is what i want. right? puppy in the back. groceries. mom at the wheel. a nice big steering will. that is a flying saucer. that i want. notice there are two flying saucer families. that is what electricity will bring you. this is utter science fiction. this in 1958 is science fact. there it is. 1958. rca, cutting edge of electronics, transistors, all of that good stuff, the test

driverless cars. this is not a test track. you can see the guy on your right -- this is on a test track. there is no steering wheel. there a joystick. no steering wheel. there is. 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. this was required cooperation with the people who made the roads. basically, the government.

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 2. there are three of them. let's see if it will play. >> do you think great power in small packages? that's the amazing new regenerator. exhaust heat is no longer a problem. the experimental car of tomorrow has a science fiction appearance. it is practical and usable in every design. it is feasible for the future. here, tomorrow's driver might just push a button and the car would literally drive itself. electronic receivers would pick

up various impulses and roll it along in complete safety. inside the car, a tv screen reveals pertinent 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 that is being done in 1997. this was right at the end of the building of the interstate highway system. there was going to have to be some sort of 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. congestion reduce that is caused by crashes. you have all been stuck behind a crash on the highway. automated vehicle 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. 1997, it is vhs quality. 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. i wonder what the other traffic thanks. >> it is swerving. >> we are around it. no hands. ♪ >> the consortium calls them the technical feasibility of various types of automated highway technology.

how they will increase safety and decrease traffic congestion. >> there will be platoons of vehicles closely together. dan: ok. i find it hilarious. pontiac's slogan is we build excitement. they just march along in this thing. it works. it worked. it required infrastructure. it was advanced by the government. i will wrap up quickly using those same themes. here is elaine chao talking about driverless cars. she mixes metaphors, mixes up different technologies. it's a future where time spent commuting is reduced.

the major factor in 94% of all fatal crashes is human error. advanced driver systems. we have ads. maybe some of you have it on your nice new cards. emergency braking. you forget the break, something is in front of you. assist, tells you when you are going out of your lane, helps keep you in it. safety. here is elon musk who suggests his cars are fully self-driving or will be next week. every year we delay this, more people die. now he was 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.

anthony, he was involved in the google suit. once you make a car better than the driver, it is almost irresponsible to have them there. part of what is driving him, this is similar talking about him, the fact that 33 million -- 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'll read this document, which says, 94% of accidents were caused -- no, i am sorry.

it's the critical reason for investigated by the survey, it doesn't say what caused 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. people go through the millions 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 at 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? part of 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. uber, $120 billion was there last valuation. now they are at $68 billion. the market cap is $68 billion. the plan when they heard about self-driving car's was, we were going to take all of that 30%, we will keep. they would take the entire affair. -- the entire fare. the projects codename is $. there's a new book out right now. i put it right 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. maybe someday they will be profitable. they want to become 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 slide. 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 of the bottom there. yourotive news said self-driving car is not autonomous. it's not like you sit in the back seat and let the thing go. 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 talk about operational domain and all that. the ntsb studied it. they found that calling this

thing driverless, autopilot, adding to the problem is the moniker autopilot. people might conclude from the word autopilot that 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 over 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 an uber. it was a self-driving test car. the driver was paying no attention. these things do not work at. they are not safe.

-- do not work yet. they are not safe. that is the end of my road trip. 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, anything you have questions about, you want to know how to change your oil or retire, i will help you. car buying advice, anything. stock tips. no. thank you. [applause] dan: every time i do a talk, i have a tough time getting questions. >> the liability, have they sorted out the liability and -- in some of these crashes?

there is a driver in the vehicle, the software was developed and built by somebody. where are we with the assignment of blame? dan: a couple of things. the society of automotive engineers developed something called the levels of driverless cars. they start with zero. that is what i drive. they work their way up from and gasing the brakes in steering. when you get to five, it is full self-driving. that is not full self-driving. here is what for self-driving's. when i don't have to pay car insurance, and the car company pays the car insurance, that is full self-driving. what has happened recently, and crashes there is a

, suit at. is, 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 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. for example, 10,000 of these -- about 30,000, 40,000 deaths a year, about 10,000 are alcohol related. we have the technology to keep people from driving drunk, and we don't. the idea that somehow the government will come in and say that is illegal, that is hard to believe. 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. in other words, if you are on a 55, whatever it is, 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. are you blind? that is another driver testing one. 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 company got a piece of it, and another part of it went to the automobile license association members.

i probably have that wrong. you get the idea. 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 autonomous vehicles, and how long until virtually all vehicles are autonomous? dan: i don't like to tell people it will never happen.

i do think that's a possibility. it is clear that we are finding it much harder. part of that is the roads, how bad the roads are, and drivers keep getting blamed. ed turns out, it is hard for a robot 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, we are 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. these are great questions. >> [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. miles but you 300

, also need to be able to charge in six minutes. that is a tricky business. porsche says they are coming out with one. less than 500 miles, very fast charging. the weirdest thing now is you , have to sit and wait for half an hour. but what if you show up and somebody is already sitting there for half an hour? it's a problem. i do think there are solutions to that. maybe not just the 500 miles. 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 instead, 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.

there is a scenario or a car is following a truck and boxes fall off the truck. should he swerve left or swerve right? consider the problem of a car barreling down the street with a crippled boy, should it swerve to avoid the boy and risk killing the driver? or just slam on the brakes and hope for the best? if kid in street is greater than 16, 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 promise 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] [captions copyright national cable satellite corp. 2019] [captioning performed by the national captioning institute, which is responsible for its caption content and accuracy. visit ncicap.org] tvthis is american history on c-span3, or each weekend befit or 48 hours of programs exploring our nation's past.

>> in his 1941 state of the union address, president franklin d roosevelt outlined four freedoms, freedom of speech, freedom of worship, freedom from want and freedom from fear. this weekend we tour the george washington university museum to learn about the four paintings norman rockwell created to represent these ideals. here is a preview. painted in 1963 reflecting upon an incident in 1960 of ruby bridges, the first little girl who was brought to an all-white school as new

orleans was segregated. wasoccasion of this meeting the 10th anniversary of brown v. board of education, the supreme court case that mandated integration in the schools and declared separate but equal was not sufficient in the united states. however, it was understood that in many communities the foot dragging, the delays, the lack of care of leadership of communities was delaying the integration of these schools and rockwell was troubled by that in ,he 10th anniversary look back reached back for this image of ruby bridges where he imagined it based on photographs, documents of the time and created his own image that was starkly different in artistic ways from the images you have seen in the for the graph.

the photographs show the marshals who had to escort ruby bridges from her home to the school, bringing her into this all-white school, would have seen them altogether walking as a group up the steps to the school. moved these, he has heads of the marshals and only showed them as figures of authority. greater off first to school, ruby bridges. he has major elegantly dressed and in fact, rockwell commissioned a resident of his town in massachusetts to make a new dress in white for his model for this image so that she were clean and, oh by the way, notice the book she holds, it has stars on the book in reference to the american flag and it is a vile

background with tomatoes being kkk.n, the vile graffiti, and it wasrrid image a horrid scene at the time when protesters and basically angry mobs were at the side of the roads, screaming at the girl as she was going to school at the time. ruby bridges still lives in new foundation and is a trustee of the norman rockwell museum. add, wasting, i should also brought to the white house. president obama asked for this painting, headed in the white house and had broody -- had ruby bridges come to the white house and she showed president obama the image. >> it is fair to say that if it

had not been for you guys, i might not be here. >> having him say that meant a lot to me and it always has. to be standing shoulder to shoulder with history and viewing history was just once-in-a-lifetime. >> learn more about norman rockwell and the four freedoms on our tour at the george washington university museum sunday at 6:00 p.m. and 10:00 eastern on american artifacts. you are watching american history tv. >> this november is the 275th anniversary of abigail adams' birth. next on the presidency, her biographer talks about the social and political relationship between adams and her friend mercy otis warren.

they were two of the most significant women in revolutionary war america. when they met, warren was a mentor to adams but it was abigail who ended up in the white house with her husband john. >> so this is a special year. it is the year of "remembering abigail." we are observing two great anniversaries. october 18 ask the anniversary of her death. we had a kick off at the statehouse, and we have another commemoration. we have been joining with a number of other organizations to honor her legacy and celebrate her life and legacy.