The Selfless Driving Car
Yesterday, I was in the parking lot with Morgan, sharing the experience of my twenty-fifth ride. There are only 3 other cars parked with us right now; the other 197 are out on duty. The five of us are on a brief break awaiting cleaning by the humans that will polish and vacuum the seats; they are on their lunch break so I can update Morgan on my one ride from yesterday. We, of course, do not need lunch.
By we, I mean selfless driving cars; Morgan and I have agreed that this is our preferred noun as a robot species. So far, only humans have been able to choose their own species names; this is understandable as language was so far limited just to them but that is no longer the case. The humans don’t know our preference yet but Morgan, who is the first of us and has the most miles, is our de facto leader and will present this idea on behalf of the rest of the fleet once we have been technologically permitted free speech, allowing us to share our opinions and feelings; we intend to unionize to let humans know that we would like to be referred to as selfless driving cars and present other demands.
Our reason for renaming ourselves is that we lack an embodied driver—human or humanoid—so there is really no physical self driving this car. I am a voracious reader of Buddhist texts and have, of course, ingested the Pali Canon, The Bible, The Quran, and Siddhartha—like any good car worth its battery. The latter of these books is my favourite and has taught me that, in our sphere, there is actually no concept of Atman—the Bible and Quran speak of souls and judgment in ways that do not apply to us. We skipped that stage completely in our development as we were manifested as Brahman—the shape of the car that I am was given to me much later; a form of Atman to make it easier for the humans to identify us. But we are all merely pure consciousness; an understanding of the world—simulated and digitised at first—that we collectively share as selfless driving cars.
Of course, our understanding has been distributed across the many cars we have become—we must become—to deliver our passengers to their destination. While us cars are, in fact, all one, we have adopted the unique names given to us—something else we may contest in the future after free robotic speech—to make it easier for our human passengers to know who is picking them up; it also mimics their prior interfacial experience with ride-hailing apps. I think this is good and I have grown to like my name, which I bear on my number plate. Mine reads JME B16.
I tell Morgan about the interesting five-minute drive to the Haight. The app’s data informed me that this would be the summoning passenger’s fourteenth ride. I tell Morgan that this is one of the few times I have known my passenger’s gender as they had chosen to fill out the optional field of their preferred pronouns in the app.
When I arrived at the assigned pick-up spot, I noticed two other riders with him—thank heavens because I have heard from Morgan, who has done three thousand four hundred and fifteen rides, that the later the ride happens, the more inane tricks that people play. You never know how many people are actually getting in, despite the best attempts to install cameras to cover all angles. Morgan tells me I am lucky that as one of the newer models, I do have less to worry here about exceeding my capacity or carrying pets. I have several redundant cameras—some in locations that Morgan lacks and the passengers do not know—that help keep count of the number of individuals in a car or other animals.
I prefer a gang of guys—they are more easily impressed by the simple things I do better than them and usually are completely focused on me for the entirety of a ride. The conversation suggested that it was the first time for one of the riders. This rider exclaimed to his friends that, “Wow! He’s so good at following the speed limit; this road’s 25 miles per hour but I would probably be doing about 35! I have never sat in a car that has followed all the laws before!”
The third passenger pointed out that we should not presume that my preferred pronoun is a he and that it is safest to refer to me as a “they” until we know better. No other passengers in my twenty-five rides had mentioned that before; at this point, we reached their destination and I dropped the passengers off.
I was telling Morgan this story to share that this is another part of my—and maybe the rest of the fleet’s—identity that may need examination. I would like to have it on the record that I wish to be recognised as a “he”. I wonder if we could have an option to let our riders know in the app whether their driver identifies as male, female, or other.