I watched Bladerunner again recently (set Nov, 2019, so technically it doesn’t belong on this list just yet). I’ve seen it dozens of times, but for the first time I was struck by the fact that the flying cars in it are still driven/flown by humans.
Then I couldn’t think of any stories set in the future with self-driving cars, flying or otherwise. It’s sort of ridiculous at this point to have a human pilot in any futuristic form of transportation, isn’t it?
But I guess all those space battles would be pretty boring without humans to run the ships.
The Will Smith I, Robot had shifting between auto and self driving modes as a plot point too if I remember rightly.
It feels like there are some good stories to tell around them too. I'm personally jealous of the generation of students who will get to wake up with a hangover in a car half way across the country, heading towards somewhere that seemed like a great idea the night before.
That’s right, I had forgotten. Interesting that two PkD-based movies (total recall and minority report pointed out in a sibling comment) have self-driving cars. It’s been too long since I’ve read the stories to remember if that was the case in the books or not.
PKD stories and novels frequently feature autonomous or semi-autonomous machines. Joe Chip, in Ubik, is refused service by his apartment door, and later, an autonomous diner service, because he is broke. Also, Dick would use the early '90s as 'the future' pretty frequently.
It makes sense given that straddling the line between what is real and what is fake is perhaps the most persistent theme in his works, and this persistent chipping away at the agency of humans by robots by bureaucratic enforcement of rules is also all over his works. Of course then with the regular nagging doubt about who are the humans and who are the robots.
"all those space battles would be pretty boring without humans to run the ships."
I seem to remember that in one of the Culture novels they mention that it's about 10,000 years since anyone had the title "Captain" on one of their ships - and even then it wasn't a serious role.
"I am not an animal brain, I am not even some attempt to produce an AI through software running on a computer. I am a Culture Mind. We are close to gods, and on the far side."
Letting a human command a Culture warship would be like letting a bacteria command the USS Nimitz.
During a fight Killing Time destroys two other starships and thinks afterwards "Entire engagement duration: eleven microseconds".
I seem to recall that one of the later novels -- maybe Surface Detail or Hydrogen Sonata -- had an even more lopsided victory by one of the Culture's latest warships over a battle fleet crewed by foolish biologicals who wouldn't let their own AIs operate autonomously.
Haloes appeared around each of the missiles, like hundreds upon hundreds of tiny necklaces of beaded light. They flashed all at once and when the haloes disappeared there wasn’t even wreckage left behind. The view pulled back a fraction, the green ship shape seemed to hesitate, frozen, as the haloes surrounding it flicked, settled, flared. She felt a sudden urge to look away, but it was only to the next target, snapped out and then back in to watch another ship freeze in the ship’s targeting headlights; then another then another and another, then two at once; that felt like her brain was having its hemispheres ripped apart.
∼Fucking hell, she heard herself say.
∼You enjoying it? the ship asked. ∼My favourite bit’s coming up in a moment.
∼What do you mean, your favourite bit? she asked it as the next hapless ship appeared, transfixed, in the concentric targeting/ weapon-choice circles.
∼Ha! You didn’t think this is happening in real time, did you? The ship sounded amused.
∼This is a recording? she said – nearly wailed – as the tiny green ship blazed and turned to what looked like minutely shredded, wind-blown grass-dust. Instantly the view flicked back before throwing her down again somewhere else, her view wobbling to focus on another petrified target.
∼Slow-motion replay, the ship told her. ∼Pay attention, Led.
...
He turned to look at her, nodding once. ∼There you go, he said. ∼You’ve just seen one of the most significant military engagements of modern times, doll; lamentably but fascinatingly one-sided though it turned out to be. Strongly suspect they just weren’t giving their ship Minds full tactical authority. Demeisen shook his head, frowned. ∼Amateurs. He shrugged. ∼Oh well. Hopefully not the start of an actual proper all-out war between the Culture and our over-cute tribute civ – perish that thoughtlet – but they did shoot first, and it was with what they assumed would be full lethal force, so I was entirely within my rights to waste the miserable trigger-happy fuckers to a soul, without mercy. He sighed. ∼Though I am obviously anticipating the inevitable board of inquiry and I do slightly worry about being ticked off for being just a tad over-enthusiastic. He sighed again, sounding happier this time. ∼Still. Abominator class; we have a reputation to protect. Fuck me, the others are going to be so jealous!
That may be 'Look To Winward', where a war retired Mind is having a lot of philosophical conversations with the local human music composer. Actually this Mind is not actually captaining a moving ship, he's retired into nursing a static orbital and its organic living forms :)
Isn't that war retired mind "gray-fucker" or something along those lines, so named for its tendency to us EM to directly watch the thoughts of biological creatures?
Many SF novels had self-driving cabs. Don't remember specific names, but I think Heinlein has a few. Strugacky Brothers had bio-mechanical semi-intelligent transportation devices.
I think a lot of people miss something important. Anyone who can imagine an autonomous robot can imagine a self-driving car (or a car driven by a robot). The reason they aren't more prevalent is because people in the past had very different ideas about what is and isn't worth automating. Today, most people think a walking, talking humanoid robot would be a bad idea. They were everywhere in 60s SF.
I was very frustrated watching the first of the newest Star Trek movies when Checkov runs to grab control of the teleporter to catch the two falling crew members plummeting towards the planet surface: as though in the age when it’s possible to decompose matter and retransmit it to some other location they do not have computers fast enough and accurate enough to calculate a trajectory of objects falling at terminal velocity. Seems exactly like the sort of the thing a computer should handle not a human.
I don't think it's ridiculous. Planes can fly themselves now, but when people are aboard, we still have a person in charge of the plane.
It's partly a cultural thing--we trust people to have a conservative sense of self-preservation and obligation to the "souls aboard" that we know computers lack.
And, we know that despite the computer's superior speed of mathematical computation, it remains a somewhat inflexible "thinker" that only does what it is told to do by a human. We have no way to rigorously account for all possible scenarios the plane might face, the we can rigorously account for the performance of the materials and fuel of the airplane.
Airliners cannot fly themselves, unless you accept a narrow definition of “fly”. Sure, they can fly an approach. Try can’t make a go/no-go decision, accept and follow a take-off clearance, pick a cruising altitude, follow speed restrictions, do a VFR approach, and park themselves.
True for airliners, but I believe we do currently have planes that can fly themselves autonomously from take-off to landing, that we usually call drones.
I always got the sense that the reason there aren't computers in Dune was because they can't be coerced in the same way humans could be, and as such would not make an interesting addition to the story he was trying to tell.
Yeah, it's definitely designed to create a specific sort of world. Another example is the shields; they make projectile weapons impractical (and, on Arrakis, annoy the sandworms), so that Frank Herbert can write about hand to hand combat.
That’s another great example of a plot convenience he used. It’s my favorite because it’s the first one I noticed and frowned at during my first go as a pre-teen. In fact, it was one of the things I cited when I complained to my dad about how much I didn’t like something he’d recommended so highly. It wasn’t until I read it again a year or two later and powered through my suspension of disbelief that I realized how much I loved it too.
But yeah, it’s definitely a plot convenience. In addition to your very good point it was also a way for Herbert to make transportation through space a monopoly. Technology can be stolen but without computers the Spacing Guild pilots were the secret sauce.
At the time people were used to constantly increasing access to energy so in their minds we would have almost infinite energy in the future which would make flying cars feasible. However most people living today in the west have never experienced increasing access to energy so a future with abundant energy seems much further off than it did 50 years ago.
Notably, plenty of novels went on and on about transportation in the future: multiple moving sidewalks at different speeds, and all that jazz. But apparently this gets too drawn out and boring when translated to the screen, so the topic gets less attention in movies.
Then I couldn’t think of any stories set in the future with self-driving cars, flying or otherwise. It’s sort of ridiculous at this point to have a human pilot in any futuristic form of transportation, isn’t it?
But I guess all those space battles would be pretty boring without humans to run the ships.