If the car is doing the driving , Willanybody be doing the thinking.
IF THE DOMINANT NARRATIVE holds and autonomous cars do colonize our roads, there will be no more mental calculations of time, distance, and speed. No best-guessing what that idiot in the left-turn lane will do instead of turning left. Not even any more weighing whether to grind your teeth, honk the horn, or flip the bird. Which doesn’t sound all bad. But will turning on an autonomous vehicle turn off a driving mind? Will relinquishing control and responsibility make us dumber?
Intelligence means different things to different scientists. It’s not solely a question of whether or not self-driving cars will make us stupid, but which brain cells are threatened with dying off. Jonathan Schooler, a professor of psychological and brain sciences at the University of California, Santa Barbara, is interested in the cognitive science of how human brains work.
This story is from the May 2017 edition of Car and Driver.
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This story is from the May 2017 edition of Car and Driver.
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