Last week, Pew released a study measuring American attitudes toward future technologies. While the majority of respondents expressed significant reservations about most of the tech, Emily Badger is glad that the driverless car was among the most accepted:
Transportation geeks generally love the idea of autonomous cars because they’ll make ownership unnecessary. When cars no longer need people to drive them, they can drive around all day, transporting one passenger after another after another — in a network
that might look a lot like personalized public transit. The resulting transportation system would be tremendously efficient. Cars wouldn’t spend the vast majority of their lives parked. We wouldn’t need to devote so much of our land to parking spots. We could get rid of the urban congestion that’s caused purely by people driving around looking for parking. …
Maybe you own a car because you need it, for mobility. But you own that car because you want it for some more intangible reason. In the future, however, the arrival of mass-market autonomous cars will force us to confront the difference between these two ideas. When you no longer need to own a car for mobility, will you still want one anyway for the love of cars, or for what they say about you, or for some other deeply personal reason?
Elsewhere in the study, 65% of respondents felt “it would be a change for the worse if lifelike robots become the primary caregivers for the elderly and people in poor health.” Waldman, on the other hand, welcomes the age of the robo-sponge-bathing:
Part of the reluctance people have may come from the associations we have with the word “robot,” and not just that they might rise up and exterminate us. When you hear the word, what do you think of? Something made of metal and plastic, probably. Not something with gentle hands that could, say, turn you over carefully and apply a soothing salve to your bedsores. But when they actually start designing caregiving robots, you can bet they’ll make sure to make them soft.
That industrial design will be one important part of gaining acceptance for helper robots. But more important will be the fact the need is so great, and they’ll be really, really handy. We already have a glaring need for caregivers for the sick and elderly, and as the Baby Boomers age, it will only increase. There are never going to be enough people to meet the need, unless half the American population is made up of nurses, orderlies, and home health aides taking care of the other half. And that of course would be prohibitively expensive. Robots will be pricey at first, but the price will drop over time, and Medicare will gladly pay a few grand for a bot that can do work that would end up costing tens of thousands of dollars a month if it were done by humans.
Adi Robertson parses more of the study:
Despite our categorical optimism about “technology,” it turns out that we’re sometimes more conservative about things that are actually on the horizon. 63 percent of Americans, for example, think that it would be a change for the worse if US airspace was opened to “personal and commercial drones.” 22 percent thought it would be a change for the better. … 66 percent think that it would be a bad thing if parents could alter a child’s DNA “to produce smarter, healthier, or more athletic offspring,” compared to 26 percent in support.
The most popular advance was a world where “most people wear implants or other devices that constantly show them information about the world around them,” which 53 percent thought would be a change for the worse and 37 percent thought would be an improvement.
Jason Koebler asked bioethicist Jonathan Moreno to explain all the anti-tech anxiety:
“I’m not impressed that this tells us very much how people will respond in a real case,” Moreno said. “If you go back and look at historical change, people were terrified of horse and carriages, they were shocked you could go 10 miles per hour on a train. But then, once you get them on it, we got very comfortable going from 10-40 miles an hour.” The point, Moreno said, is that people adjust to new tech very quickly. …
It’s not hard to think of more recent examples. At first, people were horrified that someone could reach them at any time on a cell phone—now, we can’t live without them. By generally trusting that “technology” as a whole is a force that’ll make people’s lives easier, the public doesn’t have to pick and choose which ones to throw their proverbial support behind. And, maybe it doesn’t even matter what people want—innovation is going to happen regardless.
The Dish 