From the May 2017 issue
If the dominant narrative holds and autonomous cars do colonize our roads, there will be no more mental calculations of time, distance, and speed. No best-guessing what that idiot in the left-turn lane will do instead of turning left. Not even any more weighing whether to grind your teeth, honk the horn, or flip the bird. Which doesn’t sound all bad. But will turning on an autonomous vehicle turn off a driving mind? Will relinquishing control and responsibility make us dumber?
Intelligence means different things to different scientists. It’s not solely a question of whether or not self-driving cars will make us stupid, but which brain cells are threatened with dying off. Jonathan Schooler, a professor of psychological and brain sciences at the University of California, Santa Barbara, is interested in the cognitive science of how human brains work.
“It’s certainly true that if people lead stimulating and complex lives, that influences the brain and influences mental development,” he explains. “There’s research on the complexity of occupations, people who have more complex jobs with more complex demands, and how that affects their thinking and also how that affects their aging. In general, more complex jobs will lead to greater cognitive flexibility.” That extends to everyday tasks as well. So autonomous vehicles may allow us more time for contemplating the state of the universe, which would better hone the keenness of a human mind than ruminating on the injustice of this week’s Bachelorette dismissals. But probably not.
John D. Lee, an engineer and the Emerson Electric Quality and Productivity Professor at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, also sees autonomous vehicles as a mixed bag for our minds. “The oxymoron of autonomy is that we think it reduces skill requirements when often it increases them,” he says. “If it’s not full autonomy, then sometimes you need to interact. We need to remain vigilant and ready to step in when necessary. Automatic makes the easy things easier and the hard things harder.”
Fully autonomous vehicles will almost certainly make us more cognitively lazy about driving, and likely will effectively “de-skill” us over time so that when there’s an emergency, we’re incapable of saving ourselves. “Skills we don’t use will atrophy,” concludes Lee. “The dangerous thing is that we will lose skills that we periodically need to drive safely.”
Lee suggests that driver training will need to adapt to semi-autonomy. And those technologies need to be designed to keep us sharp—not always to drive for us, but to prompt us to drive better and maybe even to offer some constructive criticism of our skills. Because while fully autonomous cars will promote complacency, the steps between here and there, if linear, “could make us much less lazy than we are today,” says Lee. In other words, there’s still time for us to swerve around a truly stupid future.
HIGHWAY TO THE DANGER ZONE
Not all driving is the same. The Yerkes-Dodson theory describes the relationship between psychological arousal and performance. At low levels of arousal, such as commuting, driving is a rote chore demanding minimal performance. When driving at speed or racing, the arousal level is high and performance rises with it as the task grows more complex—until it peaks. It’s at this point you feel “in the zone” and ecstatic, as that peak is self-reinforcing. It’s a tough edge to maintain, though. Too much arousal can push you past the Yerkes-Dodson peak and overwhelm your abilities. But that’s probably not what’s on your mind as the car spins into the wall.
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