The Self-Driving Life

I’ve heard a lot of talk about self-driving vehicles lately. From Tesla’s self-driving mode to those ghost taxis driving around Austin with no one in the front seat -- the idea of a car moving around with no hands on the wheel is becoming more common.

I started to think about what this may mean for the kids of today and had a funny thought about self-driving cars. To a young child, all cars are self-driving cars. They get in and without any thought, effort, or input off they go.

Goodness knows kids aren’t choosing the destination. If they were, in our case, we’d end up at Mount Playmore or Card Traders of Austin every time we got in the car.

However, it’s not just cars but pretty much everything must seem automated to young kids. Their meals are self-made, their dishes are self-washed, their bathrooms are self-cleaned, and their mortgages (if they knew what that was) are self-paid.

Of course, just as you learned in high school economics that there is no such thing as a free lunch, there is no such thing as an actually self-paying mortgage (or if there is, someone’s really holding out).

All of these things are only self-doing in the sense that someone else’s self is doing them for you. I don’t think the kids care though. They don’t have much autonomy anyway so it’s easy to get used to having everything sort of run itself.

It’s also why it’s such a task to teach kids responsibility. The deck is somewhat stacked against you from the get-go. You go from doing everything for them because they can’t do anything, to transitioning to having them learn to do the non-dangerous things they’re capable of, to trying to get them to take responsibility and move toward independence.

It’s amazing how important some of these transitions are. One of my young nephews recently learned how to unbuckle himself from his car seat once the car stops. I’ve never seen such a beamingly proud look of accomplishment on a kid’s face.

My daughter is wildly excited to assist with unloading plastic cups from the dishwasher or tossing clothes into a hamper. And don’t you dare try and help her get dressed if she is, “doing it myself!”

I guess when you don’t have much autonomy the little things you can control become even more important.  

Kids are a funny mix of fierce independence and complete helplessness. Maybe that’s the demographic the self-driving car makers have in mind. You can be independent from the burden of car ownership – just become completely dependent on our self-driving taxis.

Or maybe when we have a generation that goes from the “self-driving” cars of mom and dad to the automatic, self-brewing, self-doing, autocorrecting, self-driving, automated future the desire for independence will re-emerge. 

I just hope the cars still have steering wheels.