The end of learning how to drive - 2021


Tomorrow (July 6th, 2021) I will be going on my first ride in a self-driving car, so I've been thinking about it a lot, especially how this new technology will change things that have been taken for granted for so long, like learning how to drive.

I kind of feel sorry for young people who, at this very minute, are learning how to drive. They're trying to learn a series of rules, and laws, and they're also having to learn how to hold onto a wheel and guide a machine between lines on the road, and maybe even learning how to parallel park. This is as much of a waste of time as learning how to operate an elevator. It will be all push-button in the future.

As a Baby Boomer, this is difficult for me to accept, although you can see that I'm trying. Learning how to drive, which I did in the 1970s, was very important to me. Not only could I parallel park, I could back up using only the mirrors, and I could drive a stick shift. I had an endless fascination with cars, and the number of hours that I spent behind the wheel, learning more and more (hey, do they have their fog lights on in the middle of a sunny day?) make it seem very important to me. I could have been doing so many other things, like playing more golf, or fishing, watching a movie, reading a book, playing with the dog. The list goes on and on.

Whenever I take a deep breath and start saying, "Future generations will never know..." I can see my friends dive for cover - there goes Brad again! But it's what I think about a lot. And future generations may spend time driving a car, the same way that people still spend time with horses, or sword-fighting, but with the change in technology driving will become an interesting hobby, or maybe a specialty thing, left to the experts.

And as I time-travel into the future, and hear the young people listening to the old-timers who were obliged to learn how to drive back in 2021, I can hear them just groan and say, "OK, Gen Z!" Then they'll go back to doing something that actually interests them, like playing a video game, or flying around with their anti-grav boots.
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