Keep your hands on the wheel, or there may not be a future / Hong Kong Radio 3
Texting is a relatively new first world problem with a staggering 2/3 of all drivers under 25 years of age and 1/3 of all Australian drivers admitting that they text and drive.
I say relatively new because texting for most people only began 8 years ago with the huge uptake in smart phones brought on by the iPhone, prior to which most people didn’t even know what texting was or where to find it on their Nokia mobile phone.
This new scourge has caused governments around the world to ban texting whilst driving and to spend millions on advertising and education campaigns to convince us not to do it and punish us if we do.
A new device called Groove, that slots into the port just below the drivers steering wheel and blocks all of the drivers calls and texts from coming in is to be launched in Australia and this new tech triggered Phil Whelan of Honk Kong Radio 3 to want to chat about this phenomenon and what else is happening in this space.
This new gadget is a hardware always on solution to the problem, but there are many apps and alternate devices that also do this, some of these apps include Live2Txt, Canary, DriveSafe.ly which require you to start the app before you drive off and turn it off when you’ve arrived and apps like textecution that automatically start when you are moving faster than 30 kms (but you better remember to turn it off when your on the bus or train or a passenger in a car).
These are all great tech solutions to the new problems, but there is a really low tech solution that costs no money and is always available and it’s remembering to turn the phone off yourself or putting it into Do Not Disturb or Airplane mode whenever you’re driving.
Increasingly I’m getting frustrated by the huge appetite to solve every tech problems with a tech solution when sometimes just good old fashioned human actions can achieve the same thing.
And besides when we get to 2035 and beyond our self driving, fully connected, intelligent cars, roads and cities will require no speed cameras, traffic lights or infringement officers and fines, because the car will not allow itself to break any laws and traffic flows will be dynamic allowing every car an express lane ride to wherever their car is taking them – well that’s the theory anyway?!
So have a listen to the segment now and then let me know your thoughts on the driving and texting and the roads of tomorrow
Frequently Asked Questions
Q: What are the genuine safety signals from autonomous vehicle deployment so far?
The autonomous vehicle safety data from commercial deployment presents a complex picture: on specific metrics — miles driven without human intervention, accident rates per mile in defined operating conditions — leading autonomous vehicle systems have demonstrated safety performance comparable to or better than human drivers in those contexts; but the headline safety data requires careful interpretation: autonomous vehicles are disproportionately deployed in favourable conditions (good weather, well-mapped roads, lower-speed urban environments) that are not representative of all driving conditions; the rare but high-profile failures (fatalities involving Tesla Autopilot, the Uber AV fatality in Arizona) have revealed the difficulty of edge cases and the risk of over-trust in system capability by users; and the Level 2 automation (driver assistance features that still require human attention) has proven particularly dangerous because it creates automation complacency without providing the full safety envelope of genuine autonomy.
Q: What is the ethical framework for the transition period between human and machine driving?
The transition period — where vehicles with varying levels of automation share roads with human drivers — creates specific ethical challenges: the allocation of accident liability when a partially autonomous system is involved is legally and ethically complex, with current frameworks inadequately addressing situations where the human driver should have but did not intervene; the trust calibration challenge — ensuring that users understand and correctly apply the capabilities and limits of their vehicle’s automation — is a human factors problem that technology capability alone cannot solve; and the equity question of who bears the transition risk (the consumers of early autonomous vehicles, the pedestrians and cyclists who interact with them, the drivers of non-autonomous vehicles sharing the road) deserves more explicit policy attention than it has received. The transition period is safer than no automation and less safe than full deployment, and its management is a governance challenge as much as a technology challenge.
Q: What does the autonomous vehicle trajectory reveal about the gap between technology readiness and deployment readiness?
Autonomous vehicles are the clearest current example of the gap between what technology can do technically and what can actually be deployed safely and fairly: the technical capability for autonomous driving in defined conditions has existed since at least 2015; but the full deployment requires regulatory frameworks that don’t yet exist for all contexts; insurance and liability systems that don’t yet accommodate AI decision-making; mapping infrastructure that covers all relevant roads; connectivity infrastructure for vehicle-to-vehicle and vehicle-to-infrastructure communication; and public trust and cultural acceptance that is still developing. The lesson is that technology readiness is only one of multiple conditions required for deployment readiness — and the non-technical conditions are often harder and slower to develop than the technology itself.
Q: How can I book Morris Misel for an autonomous vehicles, technology safety, or future transport keynote?
Contact the team at morrismisel.com/event-organisers.
Texting is a relatively new first world problem with a staggering 2/3 of all drivers under 25 years of age and 1/3 of all Australian drivers admitting that they text and drive. I say relatively new because texting for most people only began 8 years ago with the huge uptake in sma.
The window between a signal arriving and it demanding a response is shortening. Keep your hands on the wheel, or there may not be a is already shaping strategy conversations in forward-looking organisations. Treating it as a future concern rather than a present one builds a preparedness gap that will have to be closed under pressure.
The most important question is not whether Keep your hands on the wheel, or there may not be a will matter, but how quickly it will matter in your specific context. Leaders benefit most from mapping the ripple effects early — not just the direct impact but the second and third-order consequences that arrive later and hit harder. That is the practical work of foresight.
