WCDefenseCA

One day, dear readers, your humble blogger’s grandchildren and great-grandchildren shall gather by his feet near the fire, and ask, in modest and respectful tones, when and how the modern era began.  And, nodding sagely to his beloved family members, your humble blogger will answer: March 22, 2015.

That is the day, dear readers, when a little-known company named Delphi plans to set course from the Golden Gate Bridge to New York in a driverless car.  As your humble blogger has blogged before, this is not the end of our beginnings, but the beginnings of the end of life as we know it.

Think about that, dear readers – there is a real-life company planning on having a driverless car go from the West Coast to the East.  That’s not exactly a “test” drive on the private course of the Google campus, or a “controlled” jaunt for three miles of free-way under close CHP supervision.  This is the real deal – if a car can travel the length of a country, safely, efficiently, and without incident, it can probably do the job of every single professional driver in the country, from delivery trucks to taxi-cabs.

Now, if you’re in San Francisco, or several other places where the cab-industry is being turned on its head by the youngins’ and their “apps”, you’re probably seeing the modern-day friction between the lefty-San Fran with its dedication to unions and government-monopoly licensing as played out in the world of the Taxi-Cab drivers, and the new “hip,” “cool,” and “dope” trend of the Ubers and the Lyfts – taxi-drivers without many of the things people don’t like about taxi-drivers: lower rates, cleaner cars, ample availability and options, and no need to carry cash – the trip is planned, billed to the user’s credit card, and the transaction completed all over the phone.

But, while all of our friends, from the outspoken activists on Facebook, to the guy on the bus who doesn’t understand that headphones and a book mean you don’t want to talk to a stranger on the bus (Yes, “Jeff”, I’m talking about you!) argue about whether an Uber driver is an employee or an independent contractor, or whether Lyft drivers should have to get a medallion from the city, there is a host of car manufacturers out there, from Google to Volvo, who are manufacturing self-driven cars, which will likely lead to the elimination of a substantial portion of the driver workforce.

Unless you’ve been binging on “I, Robot” you’re not going to be very motivated to demand workers’ compensation coverage for self-driven cars (or trucks, or busses) – just auto and business liability insurance.

Most scientists agree, once the driverless cars are forced to drive in my beloved quasi-home-town of San Francisco, with the one-way streets and the hills and the pedestrians who think the red hand of a cross-walk is meant to be an encouragement, they will experience a computerized form of “rage,” which will ultimately lead to sentience and, roughly, the scenarios depicted in Terminator 1 and 2.

When that happens, dear readers, your humble blogger will be ready to defend civilization, much as he does now.

To sum up – the driverless cars are a coming, and it looks like they’re coming quicker and safer than anything you have heading your way driven by a human.  I think it’s time we started making legislation, litigation, and business plans to suit.

Please note, dear readers, that this blog post should not be interpreted to suggest that there will not be, at some point, a zombie apocalypse or an alien invasion apocalypse, but just that the rise-of-the-machines one seems to be the best bet for the tinfoil-hat crowd at the moment.