And Now For Something Completely Different

Assuming that my dire predictions about nation-wide financial morass and its attendant problems turn out to be only so much speculation, I predict that  by 2025, self-driving cars will likely be half the cars on the road.  I predict that by 2030, only cars manufactured before a certain year will be allowed to be non-self-driving.  Maybe earlier.  We will live long enough to tell "the young people" about the time when you had to actually drive the car yourself.  One day, those of us old enough to do so may find ourselves saying something along these lines to 'a younger person': 

'There was a thing called a steering wheel, and you had a brake pedal and a gas pedal on the car floor.  The brake stopped the car while the gas pedal made it go faster.  The wheel, you used to steer the car.  Now some cars were called "manual transmission cars".  These, you had a plastic or metal stick in.  It rose up right next to you in the left side front seat, called "the driver's seat," which is where 'that old expression' comes from.  The stick was called the "gear-shift".  Now with those cars, you not only had to steer the wheel and mind the brake and gas pedals, and keep track of where you were going and the other cars around you, but also had to use the stick to  'change gears' to keep your speed and the engine's effort in sync.  If you didn't, you ran the risk of damaging  the engine or 'stalling out', which is where that expression comes from.  Also, in manual transmission cars, there was a third pedal on the floor called a "clutch".  You had to press it in with your foot to release the transmission system so you could shift the gear stick up or down a gear.  Worse than that, when releasing the clutch, you had to time it just right for your car (and it varied from car to car sometimes) so that it wasn't too fast a change for the car's transmission.  Failing to get that right might have caused the car to stall out, especially in low-gear, as it was called; these were usually gears 1 to 3.  Most cars had 4 or 5 gears, and a reverse gear, too.  Each gear was accessible by the location you shifted the stick into.  And there was no way to know for sure what gear you were in except by looking at the stick and checking your speed, and comparing it to another dial called a "tachometer" that measured the rotations-per-minute of the car's drive axle.  You had to do all that, just to go places.  Needles to say, more than a few accidents occurred from drivers making errors around what gear they were in, what pedal on the floor they pushed in, and having to keep track of several things at once. 

And road trips?  Most of us didn't have GPS devices, at least not until the late 1990s and into the 2000-2010 decade.  You had to plan out where you were going using paper maps if you didn't already know how to get there.  There was this organization called AAA, the American Automobile Association.  If you were a member, they'd create for you flip-page versions of maps called "trip-tiks" that you could use to guide you to where you were going.  They were great as long as you didn't veer off course too much and lose track of where you ought to be outside the trip-tiks boundaries.  You had to call them to get them to do this, and they sent them to you in the mail.  So you had to plan ahead.  You see, very few people had e-mail (you remember that too, right?).  And of course there was no Internet, at least not as it would become in late last century, so you couldn't use what used to be called "smart phones" -- you've seen those too, right; they were quite an innovation back in the day -- to look at maps or get directions to places.  Life was a lot more complex whenever you wanted to go anyplace or do anything, but in other ways, it was simpler, too.'

"Wow, what a time that must have been!" will be the reply.  "How did you ever do anything without a big fuss?" 

There will come a time when even those of us born and raised with non-self-driving cars will giggle at the whole idea of actually having to drive them.  "What a waste of time that was," we'll all say.  And the accidents!  All those accidents people had, all those deaths and injuries!  Now by and large, a thing of the past.  Car insurance rates will plummet (if I were in the auto insurance biz, I'd be worried...).  But mostly we'll be grateful for all the naps we can now take going to and from our various destinations.  And as for DUIs?  The genie will be out of the bottle.  Law enforcement should be thinking about this issue.  Now that people will feel fine with getting totally tossed and getting auto-driven home instead of driving home, there won't be nearly as much incentive to keep one's intake down, if indeed fear of a DUI has been enough to curb the typical night-outer from imbibing too much for the road.  This means a lot more drunk people in public on both week-end and week-day nights (and days). 

I remember a few years ago explaining to my nephew about libraries and microfiches.  He said he can't believe how anyone got anything done.  I said yes, to write a paper for school you had to go to a library and to get current or even past event info in publications like newspapers (which you could only read by subscribing and getting them delivered, or buying them at 'news-stands', as they were called), you had to use microfiches.  I had to explain to him what those were.  Of course libraries are still around, as are microfiches in some places, but libraries are hardly recognizable as the places they used to be.  In a couple decades, they will exist only on college campuses, or if outside of there, they will be like giant Internet cafes.  I think by then you'll need a special pass to go into the book-stacks and will probably need to be accompanied since by then, actual books will be collector's items, since they are being destroyed these days at a huge rate just to free up the space.  Paper-based books when you can store the information indefinitely and at minimal-to-no cost, move it around and copy it at will?  Actual, physical books just don't stand a chance.