Would the perfection of autonomous vehicles mean the end of car culture? Some think so, but Deep Blue hasn’t yet brought about the demise of human chess tournaments, so perhaps kings of the road won’t lose interest when they realize they’ve become pawns. A meditation on this topic from “Five Perplexing Questions About Computers in 2039” from Aviva Retkin at the BBC:

“Andreas Riener at the Institute for Pervasive Computing in Linz, Austria, has written an abstract that starts with a bold view of the future: ‘The first self-driving car cruised on our roads in 2019. Now, 20 years after, it is time to review how this innovation has changed our mobility behaviour.’

This vision is rooted in a real trend. Self-driving cars have been making headlines for several years now. They are legal to drive in the state of Nevada, and Google’s driverless car has already racked up hundreds of thousands of practice miles.

Reiner’s contribution is to explore how this will change us. He predicts that once the robots take the wheel everywhere, many of us will lose interest in driving altogether. Fewer of us will own our own cars. Those who do won’t waste as much time pimping them out or driving around just for fun. People who still love cars might have to seek their thrills in special ‘recreation parks,’ where they can drive manually in an artificial environment. ‘If the vehicles of the future are only a means to get from A to B, this car culture would get lost,’ he says.”