DRIVERLESS: WHO DECIDES WHERE YOU GO?

You think self-driving cars are a technology story. The bigger story is the system the car creates. Can the car drive itself? Is it safe? When will it be ready? Those are real questions. The bigger story is what happens to everything else when the driver's seat is empty. Who is liable when no one is driving and something goes wrong? Whose ethics govern the split-second decision when harm is unavoidable? Who sees the data that a car recording everything must collect in order to keep you safe? What happens to the millions of people who drive for a living? How is your city being redesigned around a vehicle that does not need to park? And who decided all of this on your behalf? Autonomous vehicles already carry hundreds of thousands of passengers every week, with safety records that are beginning to outperform human drivers. The technology saves lives. It also displaces livelihoods, records everything it sees, and encodes priorities that no one asked you about. The gains are real. The losses are real. And a system is being built around both, whether you ride in one or not. Driverless takes you inside the system being built around you, whether you ride in an autonomous vehicle or not. No jargon. No advocacy. A clear, vivid, story-driven journey through the questions that the technology coverage rarely reaches. You will discover that the autonomous vehicle industry's most-cited safety statistic does not mean what everyone thinks it means, and that the real safety case is strong but more complicated than the headline. You will learn how Waymo's vehicles drove past stopped school buses with flashing red lights at least nineteen times in a single Austin school year, revealing an error profile different in kind from human mistakes. You will see how the MIT Moral Machine experiment showed that the ethical priorities people want encoded in crash decisions vary profoundly across cultures, and that the car's algorithm carries the ethics of whichever country programmed it, regardless of where it drives. You will follow the containerisation of shipping from the Port of New York, where 35,000 longshoremen lost their livelihoods in two decades, and understand why the truck drivers of Interstate 10 in Texas see the same pattern approaching. And you will see how Helsinki's Whim, the most ambitious Mobility as a Service experiment in the world, raised 149 million euros and still went bankrupt, while China's car ownership surged past 300 million vehicles even as its cities built the world's most integrated transit platforms. By the last page, you will never look at a car the same way again, whether anyone is driving it or not. About the Mobility Made Clear Series Each book stands on its own. Read them in any order. Electric Vehicles Driverless Jaywalk