The terrifying shift from human power to autonomous mobility

A culture of fear makes it easy to cloud our judgment.

For thousands of years, walking and horseback riding were the fundamental modes of transport. Settlement patterns were a direct reflection on transport options. 

And then along comes an invention you’re familiar with. A technological wonder that transformed cities for the next 100 years. Development patterns changed because people could suddenly travel incredible distances. This invention was designed to transport multiple people at a time, but often just one person hopped in the box.

This invention opened up access that was previously inconceivable. The sky was the limit. I’m talking, of course, about the elevator.

Elevators transformed city planning in remarkable ways, long before automobiles did. TIME is one of many magazines to have published stories about the implications of vertical mobility boxes:

For nearly all of human history, cities were squat things. The height of buildings was limited by people’s willingness to climb stairs. Tall buildings were impractical. Walking up two or three flights of stairs isn’t terrible. Carrying a load of groceries and a screaming infant up four or five flights of steep, dark stairs, is, pardon the pun, another story.

Each elevator had its own operator who had to master the timing and touch of the hand-crank controls. Brilliant minds started adding new technology to make vertical mobility boxes even safer and more reliable. Automatic brakes were an incredible breakthrough. Operators in office buildings and hotels wore their Sunday best as a psychological reminder that “we will safely get you to your destination.” Property managers even had their female operators attend charm schools.

It’s hard now to imagine feeling completely helpless in an elevator, but such was life in the early 20th century. Zero chance that normies like you and I were going to attempt to operate an elevator without some rigorous training first.

Vertical mobility innovations hastened in 1945, when a major elevator operator strike brought cities to a halt. Electric power and emergency phones were already spreading, but the strike opened the doors to full automation. Self-driving elevators! You can practically hear the traveling public gasp. It freaked people out. Walk into a box, let the doors close and lock you in, and trust that this thing would take you quickly—not too quickly!—the proper distance. And here we are now, able to scan a card in a lobby that summons a box to whisk us to our precise destination without even pressing buttons inside.

The transition from human-operated to autonomous elevator took a while, both for technology to improve and for a skeptical population to trust it. Otis Elevator gets credit for installing the first automated elevator in 1950, but operators were still employed in some cities 30 years later. 

You and I will never have the time, energy, or need to read the thousands of opinion pieces about the dangers of autonomous technology as it relates to cars. I sometimes get flak from fellow urbanists about my optimistic outlook towards emerging technology. Life is full of trade-offs. There’s no scenario, with or without technology, that results in a danger-free life. The challenge for us is to identify and analyze trade-offs without being clouded by ideology or thwarted by lazy straw man arguments.

I’m not a computer science expert. I haven’t coded since I manipulated some html on websites in the late 90s, so I don’t get too deep on what a particular technology can or can’t do. I am a traffic safety expert. Traffic deaths in America are the equivalent of a 9/11 terrorist attack every month. That’s the track record of human drivers. There are a ton of factors involved, both in the design of streets and the psychology of drivers. But keep that stat in mind as a baseline. Anything safer than a 9/11 every month is an improvement to public safety.

It’s natural to be scared by emerging tech. Consider that humans are not the safest operators, that our current state of mobility is a public health crisis, and that autonomous vehicles programmed to operate safely will be part of the solution.