In my “day job” (as an attorney), I work occasionally with the president of an engineering firm, a man in his sixties, who got his engineering degree in the early 1970′s - before the days of computers, and when calculators were clunky machines the size of an Etch-A-Sketch. I got talking to my friend once about how his firm recruits engineering school graduates, and whether he considered those coming out of undergraduate or graduate schools today to be as qualified as when he got out of school. He made an interesting observation: Today’s engineering graduates, he noted, have grown up with nothing other than computers and their calculation functions, meaning that they have never done calculations by hand, in long form, or perhaps with a slide rule, as was once the norm. Numbers are fed into a computer program, and the computer spits out the result. The problem, he said, is that because these young people have never done this work the old-fashioned way, they don’t develop a sixth sense as to when the computer’s result is wrong, either because of an input or programming error. Whatever the computer says must be correct.
This observation has jumped into my mind recently as I have read about the increasing stream of automated safety technology, the best known being the driverless car developed by Google. Traffic engineers are now working on technology in which a driver will not steer, but the car will be guided down a highway by magnets. (California now allows such cars and roads by law, provided that the driver can retake manual control when necessary.) Auto manufacturers are now promoting imminent-crash sensors that begin the braking and slowing process if the driver does not. Some systems even roll up the windows automatically to prevent ejections from the vehicle. Other cars have alertness detection systems, which cause a coffee cup icon on the dashboard to start blinking when the driver exhibits signs of drowsiness, such as wandering from the traffic lane or driving at erratic speeds.
My goal here is not to catalogue, describe, or evaluate these innovations as safety tools, but to raise this question: if early crash warning systems, driver fatigue alerts, or even driverless technology become common, what will this do to the training of teen drivers? On the one hand, every feature that avoids a crash is a good innovation, but will we be inhibiting new driver training with systems that reduce or eliminate the risks that driving instructors and parents try so hard to teach teens about? For example, will a teen who should be very worried about following too closely be less concerned if his car is outfitted with a warning light that comes on when he is in fact too close for the speed at which he is travelling? Will a fatigued teen be more likely to get behind the wheel — or a parent more likely to allow a teen to do so — if the car has a sensor that will flash a warning if the fatigue starts to show up in the driving? Like these recent engineering school graduates who have not developed a peripheral sense of the wrong answer, will we deprive teens of part of the feel of driving that experienced drivers rely on for safety?
No brilliant answers here, but it seems as though there are so many recent articles about progress in driverless technology and automated safety features that the questions should be raised. Readers, your comments would be welcome.