Just a few years ago it was the conventional wisdom that self-driving cars were here, in a big way (almost), with people investing a lot of time and worry in how we would deal with the fact.
Today it seems the conventional wisdom that they are very far away at best, and perhaps never coming at all.
Putting it bluntly, the complacent, credulous optimism of 2015 has given way to smug, know-nothing sneering.
It is a swing from one extreme to the other--with a good deal of irrationality involved in the current, pessimistic appraisals, maybe as much as was to be seen in the past, more optimistic appraisals.
I suggest that there are at least seven reasons why the media is, for the time being, so relentlessly sneering in its attitude toward self-driving cars.
1. The Media Exaggerates Everything.
What we collectively call "the media" is, of course, an overwhelmingly commercial enterprise which makes its profits by fighting for and winning your attention in an exceedingly crowded and brutally competitive "attention economy." From this vantage point simple statements are preferable to long ones, which go right along with crude exaggeration being preferable to nuance--while surprising statements are preferable to what people expect.
The short, exaggerated, surprising statement is, of course, particularly commonplace in the area of technological reporting. Of course, my experience is that this tends to an exaggerated impression of how far some technology has come along, or will come along very soon--and this was indeed the case with the self-driving car a short time ago. Yet we also get the opposite, as with renewable energy, which the media was fairly relentless in dismissing . . . until photovoltaic solar became the cheapest energy source in the history of the world, with the price still dropping.
There were reasons why the media got that one so wrong, and just as in that case, numerous factors can seem to impel the media to treat self-driving cars in the same manner that it treated renewable energy--reasons currently more powerful than the earlier gee-whizzery.
2. Self-Driving Cars Scare a Lot of People in the Business.
Those who have followed technological R & D in the past may be familiar with the terms "sustaining innovation" and "disruptive innovation." Sustaining innovations are cases of improvement in the performance of existing products, according to the metrics by which it is already routine to judge them. Disruptive innovations are cases of qualitatively new products that might fundamentally change the market. New technologies aiding fossil fuel extraction (for example, new artificial lift technologies increasing the flow of oil and gas from wells) would be examples of sustaining innovation. By contrast renewable energy technologies like solar or wind are disruptive innovations, because they change the principal game from the ongoing one of "Who can deliver fossil fuels most efficiently?" to "Which energy source can give us electricity most efficiently?"--possibly driving fossil fuels out of this particular market (with coal already looking like a casualty).
Right now the car industry is looking at the prospection of such disruption, in multiple ways, with self-driving one of them, and the more worrisome because of the prospect it raises of "Transportation as a Service" (Taas). Taas would mean that rather than everyone who can afford it getting their own car, cars would be just something they would call up when they actually want one. This would mean a lot less cars out there (and those made by someone other than their company, should it fail to keep up in a competition they are by no means guaranteed to win). There would also be a lot less demand for everything that currently goes into cars, from the steel, rubber and glass supplied for the making of those cars (if less publicized than IT, do not underestimate the economic significance of the automotive-industrial complex), to service stations and car insurance (goodbye Flo?), to the oil companies which fill those cars' tanks (if they even run on gas anymore). Naturally a world where Taas replaces the current model of car ownership is something they would be inclined to dismiss or belittle. And the media being what it is, it tends to eat up, and mindlessly repeat, anything such people say. Still, it should be admitted that lately they are even more than usually open to the doubters.
3. The Romance of the Car.
On top of the reality that a great many powerful interests are massively invested in the current model of individual ownership of traditionally "manned" vehicles, there is the reality that many more have a less practical, but not necessarily slight, emotional investment in them.
Consider the place of driving in American culture. Getting one's driver's license is a "rite of passage," and getting an actual car to drive--in the eyes of most Americans a great step toward personal independence and recognition as an adult, the more in as so much that goes with being an adult (finding and holding down a job, dating) is very difficult to do without a car in the country's pedestrian-hating, transit-deprived metro areas (and still more outside those areas). Proving oneself as driver and car-owner means that one has truly taken that step successfully. The make of one's car is a significant indicator of socioeconomic gradation, two cars in the garage of one's own house bespeaks solid middle classness, and being able to buy one's child a car of their own when they turn sixteen an indicator that one has provided a genuinely comfortable upbringing, while in the fantasies of wealth that lend credence to the image of a nation of "temporarily embarrassed millionaires," possession of still more luxurious vehicles tends to be prominent. Indeed, the indulgence of a passion for cars--maintaining one's car oneself, collecting cars, restoring some favorite classic car if one has the time and money for such a hobby--has, like the viewing of spectator sports, long been one of the few leisure activities considered seemly for an adult male.
It is all such that the "new car smell," which is basically the smell of a bunch of health-endangering industrial chemicals that a great many people actually find repugnant, is a well-known object of fondness (unshared by their counterparts elsewhere).
Of course, not everyone, even in America, is equally invested in this romance. For many driving is a stressful experience, car ownership burdensome financially and in other ways, and the rewards of less tangible kinds few. (Perhaps their car make is a testament to poverty rather than wealth, and it stings; perhaps they find no pleasure in tinkering with the innards of their car.) But enough people, even people who should know better, are sufficiently invested in it for this to also be a factor here. And for those who think in such terms a world where people do not sit behind the wheel of their own car, and maybe do not even own a car, is unimaginable--or at the very least, depressing--and they accordingly dismissive of the prospect.
4. We Are in a Moment of Downturn in the Technological Hype Cycle.
The idea of a "cycle" of technological hype, where early inflated expectations are often disappointed, leading to disillusionment, followed by recovery, "green shoots"--and perhaps inflated expectations again--has been popularized by the Gartner firm's much-publicized "cycle." That cycle, of course, tracks attitudes toward individual products, but one may speak of such a cycle being evident in regard to technological change more generally.
The '90s was a period of high expectations regarding technologies like artificial intelligence--and the '00s a period of bust that soon had even the ever-ebullient Ray Kurzweil backing off from predictions that clearly did not come to pass. Of course, there was another resurgence by the mid-'10s regarding many of the same technologies, but now we find ourselves in another period of bust.
Of course, a particular technology may make headway even in a period of bust. (Were this not the case we would see no recovery.) Yet common expectations--and this is what we are talking about here--are colored by the general mood, especially to the extent that the unknowns involved in prediction leave observers relying on "judgment" rather than analysis grounded in hard fact. Their gut feeling would seem more likely to err on the side of "Won't happen" than "Will," with all this implies for the broader conversation at the moment.
5. Cynicism is a Good Cover for Ignorance.
Added to these reasons for pessimism (the bad-mouthing of self-driving cars by prominent figures, the old romance of cars and car ownership, the lower expectations of technological change), there is the fact that striking cynical poses helps a journalist who is actually far out of their depth look as if they are not out of their depth. They do not actually understand the technology sufficiently well to render a judgment about it one way or the other (even to the extent that a layperson could) but sneering at least makes them look like they are resistant to a sales pitch--and thus possess a sophistication they do not really have, and never earned.
Put simply, they are the "pseudomature" kids that dimwitted conformists think are "cool." ("I don't get excited by anything. I've seen it all. You can't impress me!")
Of course, part of the "cool kid" package is being a mean-spirited little bully making those who do not say and wear and do the "right" things feel bad about themselves, as publicly as possible, to affirm that they are indeed the cool kid. Right now self-driving cars seem like an easy target for their kind. ("Oh, you were hoping for a self-driving car? Ain't happening. Ha ha!" It does not seem unimportant that many of those who might have most hoped to see self-driving, and especially Taas, make their lives a little better are the old, the young, the disabled, the poor--people who happen to be marginalized in one way or another, and thus favorite prey for bullies.)
6. Elon Musk is Making Self-Driving Cars (and the People Optimistic About Them) Look Bad.
As if all this were not bad enough there are those who make the cynicism easier still, especially a certain "tech billionaire."
Of course, it was never the case that Elon Musk was the only figure from the car industry talking up self-driving vehicles. But he was always beat out the rest of the competition when it come to the sheer aggressiveness of his predictions--starting with his claim that his company Tesla would deliver a truly autonomous vehicle by 2017.
Because the predictions were so startling, and because of his high personal profile (higher than that of any CEO of the established car companies), it was those and not the more cautious predictions that others made that monopolized public attention.
Of course, those predictions, which were as near term as they were dramatic, were not forgotten when the day came, and Musk proved very, very wrong--none of which stopped him from making similarly aggressive predictions again and again. (2017 saw Musk simply say 2019, and then when 2019 came along all he really had to offer were more promises that likewise failed to come to pass.) Soon he was even making claims that the cars had already arrived on the market in the form of his Teslas' Full Self Driving when what had been delivered was actually very far from that. To put it mildly, those dismissive of self-driving cars have been having a field day with this track record.
7. Commentators Are Overcompensating for their Earlier Gullibility.
Even beyond the exaggeration built into the business, the cynical poses, and the rest, there is the reality that the media was--as noted previously--telling a very different story a short while ago. Our remembering that makes them look very foolish. And now they are anxious to shore up what credibility they think they have in the public's eyes on this matter. "I knew it!" they want to say about the way self-driving cars failed to materialize by 2019, 2020, early 2021--but this is practically an invitation to check up on what they said before, a thing doable with a few clicks, which would give away the lie. And so instead they thunder on about the impossibility of the machines so loudly and so passionately and so lengthily that recollection that there had ever been anything different would soon slip from the feeble memories of most.
So far as I can tell, this has already happened for most.
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