A car, a computer, a man?

We’re standing in a garage. Somewhere in a secret location. In a dark corner, a red light is moving back and forth …

K.I.T.T.?

Michael, is that you?

No. It’s us. The lads from ramp.

Silence. Only the red light – the scanner – is moving a little faster. K.I.T.T. seems to be waking up.

Do you miss Michael – sorry, David?

No. We were still in touch at first. He’d made a career for himself as a lifeguard, so I used to pop round quite often.

For old times’ sake?

No, because of Pamela Anderson.

I see. Let’s just leave it at the old days. The future is far more interesting. Everyone’s quite excited at the moment, wondering where the journey is headed. The car is changing and all that. Is the car even still fit to be a hero’s tool these days?

Absolutely. I’d even go one step further and say that, in the future, the car will actually be the hero itself.

Properly, with Turbo Boost and a body that lets you drive through walls?

Why on earth would you want to drive through walls? And the turbo boost for jumping over obstacles was just a cheap film trick with hidden ramps – but you knew that …

Hmm … of course.

No, I see the autonomous car of the future more as a modern-day everyday hero. Think of blind, elderly and frail people. Thanks to autonomous cars, their level of mobility will increase dramatically. Quality of life will improve, and so the car – previously merely a tool for the hero – will itself become a hero. Urbanisation will increasingly demand intelligent systems and models of mobility – think car-sharing, think Moovel – all of which will make everyday life easier …

A computer that drives an elderly woman to the shops? That doesn’t sound particularly spectacular, though.

Then take another example: a person suffers a heart attack at home. Every second counts. Until now, it has sometimes taken a long time for an emergency doctor to arrive on the scene and organise transport. Autonomous and connected mobility could handle the transport much more quickly. Think about driving skills in emergency situations. An emergency doctor is, first and foremost, an emergency doctor, not a racing driver; a computer, however – as the autonomous Audi RS7 proves – comes very close to matching the skills of a racing driver.

Doesn’t that contradict safety considerations?

Not when combined with modern hazard detection capabilities and vehicles being connected to one another. It is precisely this connectivity that can save lives. Time and again, for example, people lose their lives because emergency services cannot reach the scene of an accident on motorways quickly enough, as careless or indifferent drivers fail to form a proper emergency corridor. Connected cars would solve this problem too.

Do you really believe that people will develop that much trust?

First and foremost, people embrace anything that makes their lives easier. That is why they will also embrace autonomous transport from A to B. One of the biggest problems lies in the transition phase – and here, quite simply, in the fact that humans and computers are driving together within the same system, and whilst humans are the designated authority, they also remain the unpredictable variable.

Watch out, K.I.T.T. …

I’m simply analysing the facts. And the fact is: a person who, in an analogue, non-connected car, decides to drive the wrong way down a motorway in a suicide attempt does not fit into the logical traffic system that computers are programmed to follow. These are things that a computer can only foresee to a limited extent. And if a braking or evasive manoeuvre lies beyond the limits of physics, even a computer will be unable to prevent the accident. Nevertheless: I, too, am programmed to protect human life, and that will also be the top priority of every other self-driving car.

When it comes to protecting people, do we inevitably end up with the Three Laws of Robotics, as laid down by Isaac Asimov as far back as 1942 in his short story ‘Runaround’? However, there is also a certain potential for danger here, as depicted in the 2004 film ‘I, Robot’ and as is even laid out with K.A.R.R., your misprogrammed, evil twin, in ‘Knight Rider’.

Are you afraid of me?

No, you’re K.I.T.T. …

Your behaviour is typically human. You try to rule out every conceivable risk. Yet without a willingness to take risks, humankind would not be where it is today. Every development carries a risk, and compared with earlier pioneers in history, modern people today shy away from risk far more than was the case fifty or even a hundred years ago. The dream of progress coupled with absolute safety is an illusion.

Nevertheless, these concerns are not unfounded. Cyber-attacks could turn cars into weapons …

That is certainly a risk. But perhaps also an opportunity. Development in the field of software security is set to increase dramatically in the coming years.

You seem to have an answer for everything.

I am Knight Industries Two Thousand.

But what about the things we might lose as a result of autonomous driving?

I don’t understand that point.

People’s lives have already been accelerated enormously by global connectivity and availability. If cars now take over the driving for us, we’ll spend that time – when, for example, we’d normally be idly lost in thought during rush-hour traffic – working again, replying to emails, holding conference calls and so on.

Why would people want to let their minds wander?

To reflect, to make sense of their own existence, to find their way, or to view things with a bit of distance. This helps in making future decisions.

If I analyse human evolution based on the data available to me, it seems that over the last hundred years, people have given up a great deal of time for self-reflection. A trip to Italy 150 years ago was still a dangerous adventure lasting weeks. Today, by contrast, you fly from Munich to Milan in the morning, meet a business partner, and are back with your wife and children by the evening. That is efficient for you. Do you believe that humankind has lost something over the past hundred years because, due to technological progress, it has deprived itself of a great deal of time for so-called self-reflection? Progress is not a human trait; progress is a universal constant of evolution. Humankind is a product of progress; it has always accepted this and will continue to do so.

And what will become of the self-driving human? What will become of an old 911 with a naturally aspirated engine?

If they so choose, people will drive autonomously. They will elevate old cars even further into works of art and collector’s items. And there will be autonomous cars that are also sporty and, as you call it, ‘fun to drive’, when driven by human hands. The demands placed on cars will increase. I see only a minor distinction between purist driving machines and autonomous cars. After all, what do you do if, on your way to a lovely mountain pass, you first have to drive 250 kilometres on motorways, get stuck in a traffic jam and be held up in traffic? People will want to hand that over to the computer; only on the scenic stretches will they then take over.

And what will become of you?

I’ve now got a meeting with John Krafcik, Google’s chief developer for autonomous driving. He said he had a few questions on the subject of cars and humour.

And what do you intend to say to him?

I’m going to tell him a joke.

Which one?

When I was a child, we were so poor we couldn’t even afford the cheese for a mousetrap, so we had to draw the cheese instead. And do you know what we caught?

What?

A picture of a mouse.

At this point, a big thank you to Thomas Wetzstein from Böblingen, who, despite the rain, lent us his K.I.T.T. replica for the photo shoot (www.myknightrider.de), and also thanks to Motorwelt, who spontaneously supported us by providing the location.