I spent the weekend in San Francisco so, instead of a core post, I now have a lot of thoughts on autonomous cars (“it’s a crowded space,” or so I’ve heard). Regrettably, this is more pertinent to last week’s class than tomorrow’s, but nevertheless, I could not stop thinking about the Morse article on freeways, malls, and television. Everywhere you look, to borrow a line from an iconic San Franciscan sitcom, you’ll find cars kitted out with a myriad of cameras, LIDAR, and other sensors cruising up and down the hilly streets. Morse locates the freeway as a site of distraction, with the windshield acting as the frame and conduit for our eyes to experience a sort of televisual analogue. In a future with autonomous cars of increasing degrees of automation, how might this relationship be reconfigured? If the screen architecture of our car windows is no longer relevant or even potentially necessary in the case of full automation, how might “distraction” be redefined? While the car itself is actively ingesting vast amounts of visual data, we may do little more than stare out at the scenery as if on a plane or train. But more likely, we’d probably turn inward to our phones or friends along for the ride. Still, the contemporary conversations around distracted driving, and the stressed limits of our current autonomous technology (I saw a driver standing up through his open sunroof to take a selfie in Big Sur while his Tesla Autopiloted), might be shifting slightly the locus of distraction from the freeway to somewhere else. To keep this post brief, I’ll close simply by wondering what a hyper-current revisitation of this essay might yield, and if there may be a better alternative to the mall, in an age when it is dying out to online retail...
Alternatively, a car with literal screens to the outside, also abundant in San Francisco: https://youtu.be/COLbT0soBVE
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