social media. follow us on c-span history. >> next on american history tv, historian dan alpert talks about are we there yet?: the american automobile past, present, and driverless," in which he argues against driverless cars. >> tonight we are joined by historian and automated journalist dan albert. dan has spent a career writing and teaching about the history and culture of technology. his articles can be found in popular science and the journal for the history of behavioral sciences. he holds a phd in history, 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's available for signing at the conclusion of the program. please, without further ado, join me in welcoming him this evening. thank you so much. really generous and sweet introduction. -- >> thank you so much. that was really lovely. thank you, amanda. really generous and sweet introduction. i think everybody for being i especially -- amanda told me that the smithsonian associate people have reminded me how engaged these audiences are. so 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. there's a lot of material in the book. everything from teaching my daughter to drive to a freudian analysis. 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 want to talk about cars. i am both a lover and hater of cars for a variety of reasons. and i am looking forward to hearing from you about your experiences with the automobile. so keep your hands up.

how many people know this machine and have gone to see it? many -- keep your hands up if you stayed and listened 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? these two, i know them. yeah. pretty much mean. hands, as we are raising i did a thing in brooklyn, going on about cars, and i realized halfway through it, i said how many of you own a car? about three. can i get a quick show of hands? how many of you own a toyota? how many of you own a mercedes? how many of you own an american car? how many of you don't own a car at all or rarely drive?

ok, interesting, diverse audience. we are not going to talk very much about trains. we are going to talk about cars. is the museum of american history as it was back in 1974, just an thrall. -- just enthrealled. come fromguess would out of town, go to the museum. maybe the capital building and see the airplanes, but mostly go to history and technology. i hear there's some -- you know -- art museums? so that is sort of me. that is not actually me. i was much fatter back then.

this is a stock photo from the smithsonian collection. and i want you to get a sense of it. i want to talk to you a little bit about how that exhibition has changed and about what that exhibition tells us about what we think about technology. the very hard part as we face the prospect of driverless car's is understanding the process by on us orey are coming up invoking them. we look at this -- well, that is like an encyclopedia. it is not really saying anything about how the technology developed. it has got a collection of objects and labels that specifically say this guy invented it this year. this performance characteristic. very straightforward. and that is the way i experienced it as a kid. further anddied

further and thought about different ways of understanding technology, i realize this got an implicit story behind it. that story is a technological evolution. sometimes called technological determineism. machines are invented and they ping-pong their way through our lives and change them. gutenberg invents the printing press, people learn to read. the iphone is invented -- i don't know what that will do to us. but we don't think about the other way of doing things. and that rare much is our experience, right? eigha technology shows up and wy it. that also is reinforced here. in the cold war, there is an implicit understanding that technology was important, that

technology advances, becomes more efficient over time. bigger cars, faster cars. i want to show you quickly, i hope you can see things clearly enough here. c-span is making things bright. now i can see a little better. on the backback wall, you can see there is a high will just poking -- high wheel just poking out from behind their, old-fashioned bicycle before the chain was invented, and we work our way to more and more modern bicycles. in the far left corner, all the way in the back, horse and wagon. wagon.nd more advanced car, more advanced car, you can use the hand pumps -- you can even see the hand pump gas pumps that were used.

and of course the centerpiece, the race car. we don't know much what it is like to drive it, how do people experience it? do people go to races? was it something that happened on the side? know, two you may thousand nine, i think it is -- america on the move exhibit. this is the general motors transportation hall, a couple things that happened. the railroad -- the 1401 is in that hall. they are never moving that train again. a gorgeous train. do you want to go back and look at it? but there is also an intention and a purpose and putting trains and bicycles and other vehicles altogether, and that is to stop thinking about them and stop organizing them in terms of technical distances. there is no point putting a four

cylinder engine over here and a six-cylinder engine over there. i believe -- i meant to get over there today -- but it is a 55 country squire wagon. it really loses domestic -- ooze ity.mestic all of that is beautiful. but what else is very active -- there? there are people, there is content. i wonder if they are even moving. the kid looked a little unhappy here. you also have the girl with a bicycle. what is a bicycle about? it is about being a road user, learning in a sense to drive. if you look up there, a little red car. what is that? car.is a kiddie

what does that tell me? kids like toy cars. but more to the point, children rehearsing what their parents do. 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 automobiles fit into our society. these americans in the exhibition -- again, old will, this is a 1950 buick. me, i haven'tt been over there, but you can tell by the grill. of three holes on the side their, you can see those are classic buick symbols. you will even notice -- they do not even do anything, but you buick.tice them on a

arece how far in the wheels set and how far out the vehicles toy comes over those wheels, make it look heavier. with veryvehicle low-pressure tires, and you just float along. you undulate along. it is a magic carpet in a lot of ways. the problem is you have to go to a car dealer to buy it. and i feel terrible for these they are inhere -- attorney -- they going to bernity, negotiating with a car salesman here. any car salesmen here? one of the most disruptive things is they have been able to avoid car dealership. leaving that aside, it's actually a very inconvenient and

very -- sort of 20th century way to buy something. you have a thought, you touch your phone, the thing arrives. why doesn't that happen with cars? some companies are trying to do that. for me, god for bid i see a lamborghini, i touch my phone and the thing i know amazon drops a box. for the car dealerships, that is where they want to get. that purchase process is really knot in the system. so that is kind of the way i want to frame this. ok? i don't want to look so much at the buick, although i do want to look at it a lot, but 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 the double glass ball -- all of those things -- double glass bulb -- all of those things. what was it to like to buy it? that goes to the way we think about the process of innovation. the process of invention. again, you think about driverless cars, they are being invented. 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. 1898. a very specific year. you want to give me a month? [laughter] >> there you go. i'm going to prove you all wrong. the question is not so much birth, its adoption. because it's born many times. i will show you how that happened. 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? also, what was it, really? we think of, automobile. you get in the car, you go, it is a machine for getting to places. obviously when the driverless car people think about it, that's what they think about. they don't and about how it fits in your driveway so your kids can to be around an automobile.

that is kind of an strange question, what is an automobile? by the same token, you would be surprised to learn that driverless cars have been invented many times. thought about technology in the 30's, tested in the fifth these, -- in 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 more deeply, when you say those are driverless cars, but they are very different than the driverless cars coming out. we will look at what those, driverless cars were like and what driverless cars are like today. all right. you are all wrong. the automobile was invented in 1672. he was a missionary.

went to china, went there to turn the emperor into a christian. tried to convince him with christianity. he brought him a car. it is kind of cool. you can see there is a ball. the 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. i don't quite see how that works from the drawing but i'm sure they had it figured out. this was big enough to carry a rat. -- it didn'tion

work very well, maybe, we didn't really know, but so what? why didn't somebody look at it and go, that is a good start, let's do more? imagine over if over the last 400 years the chinese decided to pursue rat cars. we would have pretty good rat cars. we would have cars that would carry rats around. we see that it was invented and we can't quite say that it didn't work, but we can't say it wasn't adopted. this is a fascinating one. this is 1790. a guy named nathan reed. 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 has this idea, he got a patent. but what did he do with it? he didn't start selling steam carriages. no capital available, no interest. let's look at a couple of others. this is another of my favorites. i call this the first amphibious car. oliver evans, very accomplished engineer, he did a lot with innovation in flour mills, in making flour, bread mills, if you will. he was building a boat that goes out and digs up the mud. so that the boats can get through. once he had this lightweight good steam engine in collecting capital or attracting capital for a car business, so rather than getting some guys and a wagon to drag the thing down to

the water, he said i'm going to put the wheels on it area may be we will call at the first amphibious car. i don't know. 1805, though. no cars yet. this is one of my favorites. i will show it to you in a second in another version. this is 1853. dungeons steam wagon. that car burned in a fire. i will show you in a minute a later one. the boiler sat in the middle, people sat on either side. it was essentially a mini one. he ran a very successful business running people out to long island. did about 30 miles per hour. for comparison, ford model t came out at 1909. it did about 40. perfectly fast. perfectly viable. it's not about transportation.

-- his reason for developing the car has nothing to do with about what you might think it is, it is not about transportation per se. he said he wanted to end the fearful misery of horses. this was something developing in in this period, sensibility toward animals. thinking of them as creatures. here is another version of it. this is 1856. -- 1866. i show it to you because it is in the smithsonian collection. it is not on display. we are the curators. it's just a great machine to look at. and it does tell us something about road transport. and i understand. i was a curator. it's not easy. now, here's my most interesting one. this is also in the collection.

it is a little model. different times in history you had to produce not just a drawing, but a physical model of your machine. 1879, this is patented by george selden, a patent attorney in new york, i think rochester. he was very smart. lightweight, it describes everything we think about for the early automobile. lightweight, hydrocarbon engine. able to deal with any reasonable able to deal with any reasonable incline. all kinds of other basic details which take over the car. 1879, the vehicle is not produced. because, this very smart patent attorney, he kept filing amendments. there are different ways you can extend -- any patent attorneys in the room? you can extend.

you are locked in because you have patent pending. but you can do various things to make sure the patent doesn't get issues. he waits until 1895. because in 1895 the automobile has arrived. the automobile was viable by the mid-19th century. by the 1870's. but it is not until the 1890's that it's picked up. about 1900.are at i'm going to digress. i know people want to know about electric cars. of you have driven an own a electric car? tesla? ok. one of the big questions people always ask is why do you get gasoline cars and nonelectric cars? you can ask the same question

about theme cars. if you look up the top there are 4000 vehicles in the country. in 1900. as you can see, steam and electric outpace the internal combustion. early historians look at that and they say well, internal combustion car is better. but 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 can't fly, but a goldfish -- i got that backwards. pigeons can't swim, goldfish can't fly. is a goldfish better than a pigeon? in fact the electric vehicle had a very good business model. for urbanry viable transportation which is where the early automobiles were.

quieter,lso cleaner, more sensible. aey would be glassed in at time when gasoline automobiles could not really have glass. it shook and the glass would just crack. that the thing is electric car had a business model that is 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 money, build more cars. the electric vehicle company developed and i want you to think about uber or lift. -- lyft. that's what they were. in 1899, they had a fleet of hundreds of taxicabs, most of them in new york city. you could get a taxi ride, you could rent the vehicle for a week or by the vehicle. -- buy thee vehicle

vehicle. what they found as they had a hard time buying taxi service. it was a viable business. it?hat killed a couple of things, culturally, that i will talk about in a minute. business, one of the things that killed it was an attack on monopoly. if you recall your history, theodore roosevelt, the trust buster, this is 1890. turn-of-the-century. trucks are a bad thing, standard oil and so forth. in particular, a guy who was a big supporter of the gasoline automobile referred to them as the lead cab trust. and they were rapidly expanding. in fairness, just who bore or uber or lyft,like 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 a lot of rides? they were not interested in selling the vehicle. they were interested in selling you a ride. what killed them in terms of business, they sound familiar, they expanded rapidly. they kept increasing their capitalization. then they got into a scandal where they had done a fraudulent loan and the stock price went. ok. let me talk now about what the automobile is. mid-1890's,to the 1893. again, we can talk about what is the first automobile. there were a bunch of other ones. i took out an electric car because it was complicated. i will show you to have them

here. 1893. also in the museum's collection. that is the dirty eight motor wagons. this is springfield. massachusetts. they had a real winning car. very lightweight. very straightforward. they won races. and they were very durable. climbs, long distance runs. a good car. the cost drop guys. those are the stanley twins. 1905,ey come up between sold about 2000 of those vehicles. in 1897, they sold it was a 200. valuable machine. it accelerated easily, was quiet, and all of these things. a popular car.

the problem is those were not the first cars that captured the attention of the people who could afford cars. the people who could afford cars were the rothschilds, the vanderbilts, the top 10 of 1%, and what they did -- you think of them as americans. but they intermarried with europeans and they would cruise back and forth from europe. meanwhile in france, there is 1893, let's look at this up on the top. notice, i hope you can see them here, it's got lights. a little gaslamp. that is a real car. in fact, they were producing them, they were selling them. a place for your lunch basket right there. this is not just a little tricycle. or a 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, who have especially inherited wealth. i'm sorry, that is not the boucher. that is the dion bouton. my text got mixed up. this is maybe one of the most significant vehicles. my french. notice that these vehicles have the motor located under the seat. this vehicle has a motor out here. seems simple enough. but as the motor gets bigger, there is no place for it back here. this is called the system panel art and this is why engines are out in front. once they are out in front they get bigger and bigger and

bigger. this creates the modern architecture of the automobile. cars get bigger, engines can get bigger, and also these were powerful and they were fast and they were fun. again, i think we've got some lights. we've got more luxury. mostly, a lot more power. and we have a quote, this is new york times, france has paid the most attention, yet the beginning, this is very american pride, the laden beginning 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. rate? -- right? the other one is from the same article. this is reviewing the 1900 automobile show. the reporter from the time says "fortunately, none of these cars

in america have adopted that foreign freak, the wheel." it is not as simple as teller versus steering wheel. it has a lot to do with something called the ackerman steering system. it really is a major advance, engineering advance. let me keep moving. a lot of things about the automobile i could talk about, why it comes in in the it has to 1890's. do with demographics and the rising immigration. fromcularly immigration places like southern italy where you have a bunch of catholics coming in and jews coming in from eastern europe. not the good immigrants from earlier in the 19th century but swarming immigrants that seem not so nice to hang around. you get these wealthier -- and i say that in the context of how the nativeborn considered them. 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. before the automobile, there was the electric fate -- the electrification of the streetcar. in the 1850's, cities were as big as you could walk across, a couple of miles in about half an hour. the electric streetcar begins to expand. wouldea is the automobile come next. i'm going to focus on one of the many elements. and that's the bicycle. now we think of the bicycle in the automobile as enemies. and certainly they are. anybody that 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 can't even begin to imagine bike races got huge crowds. bicycle fashion. bicycle advertising. basically playing cards. 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 is a very sociable bicycle. there are all kinds of different ones. you can't see well here, but i don't even think she has a wheel under there. i think she is sort of like -- it is like a sidecar. it's kind of balanced. you ares a great -- going to want to have her there. and they get no view. this is a guy named major taylor, a new book out.

about a very interesting guy. number one racer in the country. obviously african-americans, aided -- at a time when african-americans racing against whites wasn't typically done. the fact that he made a career in the business is incredible. on the other hand, when they traveled, he had to go to certain hotels and so forth. here's what i want to touch on quickly. there are a lot of these women biking clubs and they were part of the suffragettes. and women's empowerment. one of the things you will notice is they are wearing long skirts. those had bike chains. anybody biked with a long skirt? even with your handcuffs. i'm always stuffing it into my sock. you've got to do this. unless you have one of those straps. then you get to the office and somebody finally at lunch points it out to you. and you're like, oh jeez.

but this doesn't work. let's see if we can tell you what they do. 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? they have a moral panic about women being on bicycles. they have a moral panic about bloomers. women out by themselves. on bicycles. this, to give you the context, back in the day, now you get baseball cards and gum. i don't even know if they give you gum anymore. cigarette packs, cigar packs, they would come with a card. 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 of these legs showing. i mean, wow. what are they saying? if women are going to dress like that, what's next? they are going to start smoking cigars. can you imagine women smoking cigars? what a manly thing, they are turning into men! it really is this moral panic. but it is also women empowerment. let me show you about the bicycle culture and connected to the car culture. it's the sex appeal, but it's also about empowerment. i think i had another slide. danger and speed. here are bikes that are not your typical with a chain and everything. they are called high wielders. penny farthing's, 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 up it is five feet in the air. like you are on a horse coming on people. they refer to them as scorcher's, speeders racing through town. track, so that's ok. 1901, speed and danger. this is henry ford. racing alexander winton. the idea that henry ford, who is a failed businessman at this point beat the best racer with the biggest car company in the country was a huge deal. winton's car sputtered in the race. he lost. people went wild. i love this line, one man threw his hat up in the air, when it came down he stomped on it. hether man was so excited,

hit his wife on the head to keep her from flying off the handle. that description. anyway. ok. another cyclist. another cyclist. henry ford got him to do his next racer. it's called the 999, 1902. this thing is insane. he is sitting in what amounts to a drawing room scene. they probably pulled the legs off and put it on there. and he is steering with a flat bar with two handles on it. the engine is huge. like five gallons of air with every stroke. huge amounts of horsepower, did

90 miles per hour. there is no seatbelt. no airbag. no dashboard. the crank case is open, the crankcase is down at the bottom. it is drenched in oil. it was opened. the oil just sprayed everywhere. it was nuts. and this was ford. he was like, 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 didn't know. part of the reason there is this instead of this, he didn't know. that was all very exciting. to theseshed out races. cosmopolitan magazine through a race in new york, crowds were so thick, the had to come and everything. people loved it. what people didn't love is 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 can see the policeman even dodging the road. this is called the crusade of the 500, the charge of the 400. back in the day, -- list. everybody was listed on it. that's the joke there. vanderbilt, willie the second was the most notorious one of these guys. the ones who really got into it were young men of inherited wealth. their fathers had made a fortune. they didn't really need any money. vanderbilt told a reporter, he may be thought he was his analyst, but he said wealth is a

certain death to ambition as cocaine is to morality. in other words, he had nothing to excite him in life. life was too easy. the automobile shows up and off he goes. there is also an interesting op-ed. vanderbilt wanted to 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. foruse the fun of racing them is seeing how close they can get to pedestrians without killing them. let me turn now to how we deal with this problem. problem in the city. we begin to try to control the chaos of traffic.

order from chaos, we need to bring order from chaos. hopefully i can get this to work. 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 a street, cable car, cranking away on the camera. you will see the people turn and look at them. this is a pretty amazing thing. ing down market street, looking at the traffic. what i want you to do is look through the traffic. there is no sound in the original. 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 sounds. we will look at a few minutes of it. you can see them running down the track.

sounds][ [bell ringing]

dan: that will be our stop. it's funny, quickly, you see a bunch of cars in there. they are the same cars. you can see the license tags. i'm pretty sure he hired these cars to drive through. there were not that many cars in san francisco at the time. it does give you a sense of what is happening as the motor vehicles come in. 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. there are certainly accidents, people are run down by streetcars, stomped on and

kicked by horses. but it does work. it is a functional space. and it is a multifunctional space. on lots of streets, kids playing. the street is a multifunctional space. over time though, as the automobile comes in, it develops the concern about traffic crashes. this starts very early. i'm going to jump ahead for just a second. 1935 was a pivotal year. for a couple of reasons. one is that there was a spike in automobile traffic death. if you look at a public health graph, you see the number of deaths per million miles just keeps going up and spikes in the middle of the depression. also, an article came out in 1935. aressentially said, you

saving a few minutes and risking your life. in other words, slow down, drive carefully. of course, you've heard that. what was different was nobody had done a full on blood and gore story. he talks about -- he goes and visits actual accidents right up until this happened. he talks about bones sticking out. he talks about a woman's face so full of blood, that all you can see is this hole in the middle of it of where your mouth is. really gruesome stuff. that was in order to shock people. it does have an impact. it did not make people drive safer. but it makes people go, oh my god, another moral panic. gallup poll say people want more

policing of drivers. they don't mean them, they mean the bad drivers. write in this period, it's interesting the aaa comes out , with a driver's ed pamphlet in 1936. the insurance industry comes out with a textbook. and the press makes heroes of traffic engineers, traffic police, and a group called a traffic psychologist. actually psycho technologist. this is the 1930's. we are in a period where science iswhere eugenic thinking considered science. we are in a period where science is on the ascendant. the expectation 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 i will mostly leave fixing car out of the picture. for those of you who are familiar with it, ralph nader was not just a presidential

candidate, he wrote unfazed at any speed. from the 1960's, we got airbags, crumpled them, all the things we live with in this automotive cocoon that we drive. in fact, in the 1930's, and suddenublication death, 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 with safety components. they would say we have better breaks. or we have a turtle top, a safer roof so it will not crush when you rollover. the auto companies were terrible, gm was the word, lead, gas, -- glass, safety glass seatbelts, airbags, at every , turn.

there really wasn't research into crash survival in some of that research made its way to a guy named paul halston. he turned that into the automotive safety foundation. that is different than the 1960 solution. what are we going to do? this is 1903 on the right. this is the first set of traffic rules set up in new york city. --ittle guy, very pertinent very patrician, he was called -- recalled being caught in a blockade. he was a very wealthy guy. never drove. this was before automobiles. but he did not like the chaos of the streets that you just saw. this blockade, and he was a child at the time, he was like wait, there are only 12 wagons here. this is nuts. we must be able to do something.

the903, he convinced of police department to institute a set of rules. there it is. they posted these placards. take forare things we granted. the other car has the right-of-way. those kinds 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 driving from mississippi to alabama and the rules change. and also on the left is a traffic light. 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'm talking about a modern traffic rotary, have you noticed

-- has anybody been on a newish rotary? have you noticed these showing up? there are going to be more of them. you are going to be safer. even if you bump into somebody, you are not going to do a t-bone. you are not going to die, unless to do something crazy. the traffic light is the solution. it's 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 if you have called,kids, what's it the book, they hate you give. this is the movie. it centers around the shooting of a young black man, unarmed young black man by a police man. on the right is the shooting of philando castile.

he was unarmed. i've gone through the whole transcript, wrote an article recently about it. was it justifiable? was it not? we can argue about that. but to me, that's 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 are pulled over, it is just that they are pulled over so much more. they are searched way more. encounters with police often and badly. the reality is we are breaking the rules all the time. yeah, you are good, you are all good drivers, i know, and you

always signal. and you never roll through a stop sign. and you never have a brake light out. but we all do. i've done it. and i'm the best driver. a set ofeally have is rules now, and it starts in 1903 and expands which allows the police, to matter what they really think of pretextual traffic stop, it is called, maybe they think you are a gang member in the part of town and they can pull you over -- pull you over. they can even arrest you. they don't usually do it, too much paperwork. but they can even haul you into jail. that's weird. i like to say, we talk about driving while black, because of the way we decided to improve the safety of motor vehicle traffic, we are all susceptible to the general warrant. police have other discretions.

this is an expert in the 90's. the supreme court decided that sobriety checkpoints were constitutional. what happened? mothers against drunk driving got a hold of president reagan's ear and said our children are being killed by these dastardly drunk drivers. you have to 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. they were sued. as a fourth amendment illegal search and seizure. rank was 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 is one of the most interesting things, completely separate, but the statistics we used to talk about this. another element of fixing the driver. very strange. i did some dissertation work. recorders -- detroit reporters psychopathic clinic , ok? if you got a few too many or got in a crash or did something the judge thought was a little weird in the courtroom, he would send you to the psychologist. they would do a full workup, i tests, attitude test, intelligence test, and these, this was the famous psychiatrist. he thought was so important, he

was going to work at this court clinic. as you can see -- i don't know what he's doing. for thea staged photo detroit news. he's like, let me dial in. none of these were objective. here is his assistant showing a film. i think these two ladies must be psycho talent -- psychologists or secretaries, or whatever. they were not patients. and that's what they were called, patients. i did my dissertation, my doctoral work on this. the idea was we find bad drivers. bad risk to drivers. and we correlate that with an outcome. in other words, they do a psychiatric test. they decide you have a bad attitude or senile or whatever and they tell the judge, take his license away. or maybe they think you are a socio-polyp -- a sociopath, and

take your license away. 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 immigrant, typically from places like syria, a jew. that would correlate very well with the outcome of the disposition of your case. let's keep going. i'm going to do this fairly quickly. there is another way to fix the driver, driver education. how many of you went to driver's ed? keep your hands up if you did in public school? yeah. thank you,. -- thank you. this is the local government paying for you. now it has changed a little bit, but paying for you to learn 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, the double clutching was

gone, the cars were easier to drive, the textbooks just got bigger and bigger. it was not just about driver 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. this is the 1930's. they would have these safety parades. different cities would get awarded 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. i want you to notice it is hard to see. it is not a great image. there's the car in school. there's the school kids. you will notice this sign right here. america first, safety always. a,t seems to be a bit of what should i say, conflating a

couple of different ideas. don't want to take that too deeply. 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 short film that is a march on washington, a parade of school safety patrols. let's go back. you have got to get this to run by doing that. dimaggio, again, fairly unclear. see the helmets and the marching? learning to march in step. any of you have this? we have the orange belts. it went around here. and the shoulder strap. your job was a little bit of authority.

vote for safety. eyes and ears, live more years. where do you see the guy with the shield? just a quick pause if i can. that is the county of georgia. in the 1980's it was a side of -- site of the biggest study of driver education. the reason was the federal government were more interested in getting driver education. and did it work? they found it didn't. it caused children to get their licenses at a younger age, therefore there was more traffic. in other words, driver education was counterproductive. let's watch a little bit more marching. i wish we had the music. look at that. what is that about?

always be careful. you've got to give them the southern flag, confederate soldiers, that's ok. look at this. there they are. against accidents. the flags, the white dresses. ok. let me see if i can do this right. very complicated. now, 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 really fast. there we go. it's a problem with the slides. ok. so talk about engineering, the driver, and some of the weird ways we have tried to do it. obviously, the ultimate solution we have now is eliminate the driver. let's see if we can engineer a better road. 1935. pivotal year, this is a grand wood painting, most famous for his pitchfork man and -- i don't know. go to the art museums, i told you. this is called death on the ridge road. response could have been hey, slow down, don't pass, don't rush past another vehicle, don't speed. that's a two lane road. that's a bad idea. you're a bad driver.

look at what is going to happen, beautiful bright red truck. people will die. be gruesome. a lot of people looked at that and said, we need more laws. we need to get bad drivers off the road. other people look at it and said let's get rid of the ridge road. that's exactly what they began to do. we think of the interstate highway system as 1956. eisenhower, the suburbs, tailfins, ruffled potato chips and dip and barbecue. actually, 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. lots 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. you haven't missed your exit. it's just like missing or 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 a great quote. front page 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, 1939-1936. -- 1939 to not a huge distance 1956. and time. you have the war in between. it's also about urban renewal. ok, the people think highways come in and that's bad. but really the purpose of these highways was not let's destroy the city, we hate the city, it is almost untenable. occupied by the humblest citizens, they fringe the business course. these are the slums around the center of the city. fringe the business district and form the city slump, a blight near its very core. we will come in and use highways as a way to rebuild the city. and this of course is exactly what they did. if you went to the world's fair in 1939, you got that pain, i

-- met pin, i want one of those. ralph nader, no friend of general motors, recalled 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. so this was the idea. i mean, look at how wide that is. it looks like eight lanes. they go right to the city. you turn the city, and there a -- you turn the city into this vertical superblock of towers. you would wait in a long line, something like 25 million people went to this thing over the course of 1939. you would sit in something called the carry-go-round. and it would rotate around this diorama. built by traffic engineers. -- ok.tly,

how are we doing on time? you getting bored? you ok? we have a little ways to go. stick with it, it's brilliant. it's really going to get good. let's look at what happened with those highways. those highways, they were doing fine when they were out in the sticks because there was nobody to bother them. this is washington, d.c. 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. you are going to have a beltway. that will work out good. 66 will come in and keep going. i think this is 395. yeah? that seemed like a good idea.

and i-95 would cut right across here. there was going to be something called the three sixers bridge. just take the highway right across the river. again, we wantse 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. it is a fascinating story. i have been thinking about this lately, because i don't know if any of you have been following the 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. peter khan, who is his secretary of transportation, who, by the way, was working for a company that built dynamic told highways.

he got in trouble for this bidding thing. anyway. and people are against this. about a "very active vocal minority opposed to reducing the region's congestion." he insists we need more highway lanes. hogan said there are a bunch of pro-traffic activists. keep they "a plot to roads filled with traffic." that's not as bad as what happened in 1968. here is a quote from angela rooney, one of the leaders of the highway revolt. she recalled fbi harassment, and noted that this newspaper, the washington post, "causes

everything from communists to pinkos, to that little band of discontented people." that engagement, 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. part of the reason i think he was the president's they adopted the 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. using that slogan really captured the moment. i think that's interesting. it's interesting we are facing that again. ok. let's keep moving. let's talk about driverless cars. why driverless cars? what kind of cars we getting? we are not getting safe & cars back in 1890. we got gasoline cars. we are not getting mobility as a service in the 1890's. we got sell a car to people and have them sit at the car dealer and by a buick. that's not what is going on now. so what has changed? why driverless cars now? two things. one, if you look at the right hailing companies, they are not making money. in fact, they are losing money.

one of the biggest problems as they have to pay people to drive cars. they tried to crush that labor and squeeze the payouts. overt wrote over -- a road here on an uber and the guy said becausedrives for lyft uber kept squeezing him. as far as the auto companies are concerned, you can't make money selling cars. i will talk about that in a second. but there were, with of the automobile itself, driverless cars in the past. when i talk about what is a driverless car? what i mean is what kind of driverless car are we getting now and how is it different? i think there is a simple way to think about it. communitarian versus libertarian. in the past, infrastructure, market solution, gm working with

the government. now, the less involvement from the government, the better for these driverless car companies. not building infrastructure is better for them. invented. cars were this was in these ads appeared 1958. 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 that they could make money selling electricity. perfectly reasonable thing to do. this one on the right, if you searched on the internet to look for driverless cars, every other article uses this image. nobody points out where it comes from. it actually comes from these electric companies. the thing you'll notice is it has no connection to current driverless cars. here is the lane marker.

that car is going right down the center of a lane. that's kind of weird. the other thing, as a side note, all the silicon valley roads, telling us that driverless cars are coming, we are geniuses, many of them brim from google and others are pursuing cars. this is part of the same at a campaign. they are not pursuing driverless flying saucers. will make a that racket, safer helicopters. this is what i want. right? puppy in the back. groceries. mom at the wheel. nice big steering wheel. an air vent. it's a flying saucer. that i want. and notice there are two flying saucer families. there is one there. that is what electricity will bring you. but this is science fiction. this, in 1958, is science fact.

1958. rca, cutting edge of electronics, the test driverless cars. this is not a test track. you can see the guy on your right. he is not sitting at the steering wheel. in fact, there is no steering wheel. >> rca, cutting edge of electronics, they test driverless cars. transistors. this is not a test track. you can see the guy on your right. there is no steering wheel. there a joystick. no steering wheel. they are following an impala. there is. a driverless car. it works. actually works.

i'm going to show you -- i'm going to tell you why not. why didn't gm pursue this? in 1958, gm was the most largest, company in the country. also, this was required cooperation with the people who made the roads. basically the government. some of you may be familiar with the quote, what is good for america's good for general motors and vice a versa. so that 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 were three of them. i urge you to look up firebird two and fiber three. wait, back. let's see if it will play. [video[

>> ♪ >> great power in small packages and with the 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. feasible for the future. avonfeasible for the future. electronics safeway highway is 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. ♪ >> tv screen in the car? right? so that is there? this was viable. now i'm going to show you the real thing that is going on in 1997. this was right at the end of the building of the interstate highway system. there was going to have to be some real authorization.

are we going to build more highways? let's see if we can make our people said existing highways , more efficient. how can we do that? let's squeeze more cars onto the roads. also, let's reduce congestion, which has been caused by crashes. automated systems will be able to steer around obstacles and avoid them if the it will be driver misses them. and it will be more relaxing because it will be self-driving. and cars can drive inches apart. so let's look at this. 1997, it is vhs quality. it will show you two different take a look. things. a pontiac swerving and a bunch we will see of buicks behaving like they are in the army. here we go. video]

>> here we are driving with no , hands. we are coming up to the obstacle. it is cool. i wonder what the other traffic thanks it is swerving. . it sees the barrels and and we are around it. no hands. ♪ >> the consortium called them scenarios technical feasibility which demonstrate the of various types of automated highway technology. how they will increase safety andhow they will increase safety and traffic and action -- -- and decrease traffic congestion. >> they will be showing platoons of vehicles closely together. ♪ >> i find it hilarious. pontiac's slogan is we build excitement. so back i gets to, and then they are they just march along in uxo this thing. it works. but again it required , infrastructure. and it was advanced by the government.

now i'm going to wrap up quickly and talk about those same themes as we are now seeing with what i call the libertarian or iran driverless car. here is elaine chao talking about driverless cars. she mixes up different technologies. it's a future where time spent commuting is reduced. it has reduced congestion. the major factor 94% of all fatal crashes is human error. advanced driver systems. this is important. ads. we have ads. will help solve that. some of you haven't. emergency braking. right, you forget to break and something is in front of you. lane keeping assist that tells you when you are owing out of your lane and helps you stay in it. safety.

here is elon musk who insists 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 effectively dissuade people from using an autonomous vehicle, you are killing people. he is like henry ford, modern henry ford. anthony lewandowski who was involved in the google and pursuit. suit. uber once you make a car at her than the driver, it is almost irresponsible to have them there. and the founder of cruise automation now part of general motors. this is someone talking about him. part of what is driving him, this is similar talking about -- someone talking about him, is the fact that 33,000 americans are killed by highway accidents every year. 90% of the time by human error.

[h, that makes me so mad sarcastically] 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, this is the critical reason for crashes investigated in the national motor vehicle crash causation survey. it does not say who causes the crash. you have to read the footnotes. nobody reads the footnotes. [angrily] '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 fall 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. in their label 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 but before. the way to stop it is to not get rid of me, it's to fix the road, fix the infrastructure, so that we are using our vehicles last, driving them slower, and they are safer. and the roads are safer. so i think i'm almost done. , what are these driverless so cars? ni call them iran -- ay

randian. they came out of the 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. in iraq. 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. -- kalanik's 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. billion -- the entire fare. the projects codename is $. there's a new book out right now by mike isaacs, super pumped. i put it on a list for you and he 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 in support building , cars is a money-losing operation globally. what do the car companies want sowhat do the car companies want to do? uber want to do? they want to get rid of the drivers. general motors has a market cap

of $57 billion. 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 you. -- 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. ok? the last thing i would 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. automotive news said self-driving car is not when you're autonomous. he was in a volvo with lane keeping and breaking, but 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 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. joanne susie public may conclude from they need not pay attention the name autopilot that they need not pay attention to the driving task, because the autopilot is doing anything is what people might think. that's exactly what happened. josh brown was not paying attention. he drove over the back end a -- right under the back end of 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. walter wong in california.

jeremy banner. also elaine herzberg. she was killed by an uber 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. that 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 and 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 how to change a tire i , will help you. [laughter] car buying advice, anything. questions stock tips. , thank you.

[applause] 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? the software is developed by somebody the vehicle is built by somebody. where are we at in the assignment of blame? >> that is a huge and very interesting question. a couple of things. i say one is that the society of automotive engineers developed something called the levels of driverless cars. they start with zero. which is what i drive.

they work their way up from controlling the brakes and gas and steering. they say when you get to five, it is full self-driving. that is not self-driving. when i don't have to pay car insurance, and the car company pays the car insurance, that is full self-driving. [laughter] recently, these tesla crashes, there are some suits out, one in china and one here. the argument 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 far, nobody seems to be holding these vehicle companies

or these vehicles responsible for the crashes. yes? >> do you see a time when it becomes mandatory to do autonomous driving? i can't envision 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, either making it very expensive to go into a city. where you have pedestrians and so forth. we don't talk about this much but 10,000 of these there about about deaths a year, 10,000 are alcohol-related. we have the technology to keep people from driving drunk and we don't. so the idea that somehow the government is going to come in and say that is illegal, i find

hard to believe. because the government has had every opportunity to solve problems like speed. and the european union has just instituted all new cars a new all new cars will have , speed governors. in other words, if you're in a 55 or a 100 kilometer road, the car will not go over 100 kilometers. car will 35, road, the knock over 35 kilometers. we have gps and the technology, it is not hard. i could see that coming in at a -- but i think that is different than say you cannot drive. people want to drive. >> when do drivers licenses become not required? >> when did they become not required? it happened in the 1930's and spread from more populous states out to places like north dakota.

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. or are you blind was another driver testing did not come in one. really until the 1950's, very late. people drove without licenses and for a long time. you showed an 1895 patent. who did the patent holder sue? >> not to sell the book but i talk about this quite a bit. so george selden had a patent in 1879 and kept going until 1895, and he sued the largest carmaker in the country, winston who we thought racing. and he fought for a while and

then he settled. he settled for 1.25% of the sales, a royalty going to selden. selden was now part of the andselden 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. and i probably have that wrong. but you get the they were idea. they were essentially an industry group, a trade group. they are often referred to as patent trolls. that comes out of the history 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, there were 8000 different bolt sizes for cars. they consolidated that. they made standards. on the other hand, they were a monopoly. 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 to run. it's a fascinating story. the selden patent story. if you're interested in the one thing 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 you? maybe too much. your presentation makes it

sound like autonomous vehicles are inevitable in the u.s. so i interested in your opinion am about the timing. how long it will be before the majority of vehicles are autonomous vehicles and how long until virtually all vehicles are autonomous. >> i would say two things. one, i don't like to tell people it will never happen. thatthink there is possibility. we are findingt it much harder. part of that is how bad the roads are and drivers keep getting blamed. it turns out it is hard for robots to drive on those roads as well, to negotiate it. i see it as a very long time before any sort of majority.

there are more cars than drivers in the country, licensed drivers, 240 million or so. we sell about 17 million new cars, average car is about 12 years old. even if all of them were self driving tomorrow, we are looking at two decades before we all bought them. assuming we all buy them. the second thing is, the cost of these vehicles because of the sensors and computing power is very large. finally, they don't work. [laughter] right? they speak about edge cases. they work except for these edge cases. but it is all edge cases. we find out. i certainly see them being used on a campus or in a small area or to get around a small city. think we are a very long way from this idea that we will outlaw driving and it will all be autonomous. these are great questions. [indiscernible]

>> are we going to get to the point where we can get to the point where we have electric car that might be 500 miles between charges so you can drive across country not worried about driving out of power. dust driving and running out of power. >> the 500 mile one is tricky, 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 something like that, less than 500 miles, very fast charging. and charting networks. now, you have to sit and wait -- and charging that works. now, you have to sit and wait for half an hour. but what if you show up and 70 is already sitting there for half an hour -- and somebody is already sitting there for half an hour?

it's a problem. but 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? >> what you're talking about is referred to as v2v. or v2x. the impala i show 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. the radio spectrum to do this was allocated in about 2000, maybe a little earlier. auto companies are not excited about it and 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 invested in it put it in traffic lights and all , of that. it has not happened. it does a lot of good stuff. 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 ok to hit grandma. [laughter] do you see challenges with developing that type of technology? >> it is an excellent question. i love this part. i argue 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. right? 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. it is up on the web on and plus one.com. nplusone.com there's already a moral framework in the automobile driver-road system. for example traffic engineers something about safety and then mobility. they think about mobility and then safety. that is a moral choice. i think other than the fact that these 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 to program and should think about this stuff. there is this guy who has written a bunch of things. computers to decide who lives and dies in a driverless car. here is a terrible idea, robot cars with adjustable ethics. consider the problem of a car -- barreling down the street and boxes fall off the truck. should they serve right or swerve left. this guys not wearing a helmet and kind of deserves to die. very quickly. consider the problem of a car barreling down the street with a crippled boy whose crutches break. should the car swerve left to avoid killing the kid and risk killing the driver against the utility pole? or should it slam on the brakes and hope for the best. the coders,e want and i hope you know your python code here. if the kid in the street is greater than 16, line print:

kill kid, we are sorry for your loss. adults -- kill ass in porsche. 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. sorry, i get excited. i can take more questions but clearly we need to wrap up. thank you. [applause]

>> over the next hour on "reel feature four films profiling industries negatively impacted by the coronavirus pandemic. take a journey with us to see how the industry's operated in the 1940's and early 1950's. ♪ ♪ narrator: somewhere with