One quite minor, and certainly not worth it in any manner, advantage of the shelter-in-place is that I am slowly working my way through about 20 recordings of Nova episodes,* most recently an episode about self-driving cars. Though this sub-Jetsons technology is touted as a safety improvement, that’s not really likely in the US, because driving is super safe now.

Nay, thou sayest? Let the numbers speak.

Our 35,000 annual driving fatalities occur at a rate of 100,000,000 driving miles per each! Boy howdy, we love to drive. At an average speed of 30 mph, one person would have to drive 24/7 for 380 years in order to rack up that many miles. That is a very, very high bar for self-driving carmakers to beat, and according to Nova, they are not close to doing so, though perhaps not for the reasons you would expect.

You would expect the difficulty of recognizing and reacting to every possible event on a  roadway. We saw, from the viewpoint of the vehicle’s detection system, a woman step abruptly into the street with nary a glance toward oncoming traffic, and a cascade of boxes slide down a truck ramp into the road. Most chillingly, when a turbaned food delivery worker raised a covered tray to the level of his head to navigate an obstacle, he disappeared from the car’s people-finder, because, obviously, people don’t have heads shaped like that combined profile.

There are some bad programming decisions, many revealed after an Uber autonomous prototype killed Elaine Herzberg, the first person to be killed thusly. Many of those poor decisions are captured on the Wikipedia site about that incident, including the disturbing news that Uber resumed road testing 9 months and 2 days later in a different city, after paying some undisclosed fines to her family.

Uber did not participate in this program. Nor did Tesla, whose Autopilot cars can autonomously maintain speed and spacing on highways and change lanes. Several carmakers have similar products on the road now, and human nature turns out to be their fatal flaw. Automakers offer various levels of cautionary advice to which some folks may adhere, but many others are texting, reading, sleeping, and even swordfighting while driving, as Youtube will attest. Some of those posters have died, abruptly. No cars have been found at fault.

Fans of this future may point out that safely isn’t the only benefit. What about those marketing renditions of parking lots repurposed as parks while point-to-point autonomous cars whisk folks to restaurants, work, school, and airports down mostly-empty roads? Children, blind people, and other non-drivers could be as mobile as car owners are now, and much climate-killing carbon release averted. Well, this might happen, or easy/cheap transportation could double down on traffic and pollution, just as ridesharing services dramatically increased congestion in cities.

Unexpected consequences. We’ll see some from shelter-in-place as well.

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* I have twice that many of Nature, and my failure to take this opportunity to view them may sentence them to erasure. In the hardly bearable worst case, I may have months more of excessive TV viewing in my future. At least I am not overeating.