Author Patrick McGinty keeps self-driving cars alive in science fiction

This episode is brought to you by Clareos. Clareos has developed the XIV portfolio of advanced low voltage batteries to be the perfect partner for the high voltage battery in any EV or hybrid. Clareos XIV. This is the power of X. Hi everyone, welcome to Shift, a podcast about mobility, a Pete Beglow your host. We often say that self-driving technology is a reality ripped from the pages of science fiction of the past. My guest today has worked to ensure that self-driving technology also stays in the pages of science fiction. Patrick McGinty is the author of Test Drive, a novel about a human safety operator behind the wheel of the self-driving test vehicle in Pittsburgh. Published in May, the book was on my summer reading list and I can tell you it delivered. A Patrick teaches English at Slippery Rock University, where in the past he has also taught a class about autonomous vehicle technology. This is a fun and fascinating conversation coming up, so let's get right to it. Here's my conversation with author Patrick McGinty. Patrick, it's great to have you on the podcast today. Welcome. It's great to be here. A long time reader is certainly of you, many other journalists. I love many of the people you've had on this podcast are people who informed my understanding of this sector quite a bit. It's very much an honor for me to appear in a podcast with all of them and you. Great. Well, I think this is going to be fantastic. Let's jump right in. I often ask our podcast guests, as you may know, as the final question of the podcast about what they're reading, what sort of materials are influencing their worldview. So, you're an English professor. I'm going to flip the script today and make that my first question. What's up? What are you reading? Whether about transportation or beyond? I'm always reading a lot. I mean, reading stuff that maybe this particular audience wouldn't be super psyched about necessarily. I just finished a small press book by Alyssa Quinn called Habilist, which is about, I guess we would say, staying all night in the museum that kind of comes to life and understanding humanity through the history of bones. That's blowing my world. I just finished Vitalik Budurin, who invented or helped co-found Ethereum, been doing a lot of crypto writing. So, I've been sort of pondering how to write up that book. I've been taking a little bit of a break from transportation book stuff. I mean, to prepare for this book, I read gosh, everything under the sign, I was reviewing everything that came out. I still read, I'm still, as we were talking before, I'm still somewhat hopelessly addicted to AV Twitter and other sort of online discourse areas. But yeah, I'm getting back to kind of reading a lot of small press fiction, been doing some reading about crypto. I did reread, you know, part of Ed Neeter Mire's book about Tesla recently. I was digging up a quote from that and thinking about the bizarre history of that book, which kind of came out. Ludacris, the unbornish history of Tesla. And I think did fine for Ed. And then, you know, it's three years happened and Elon tries to buy Twitter. And suddenly you can't get that book anywhere. It's like a best seller. Number one on Amazon. So I did dip back into that too recently. So I love reading Ludacris, which is a great book. And I will tell you, I am reading now and just finish actually Test Drive, which is your book. Highly enjoyable read, kind of like perfect for summer reading in some way. I really enjoyed diving in. And start telling us about your book a little bit. What made you want to write about transportation, time is driving. What made me write about it. So I live in Pittsburgh. If you know I think about Pittsburgh, like the driverless car scene has been not necessarily centered there, but it's been a presence. And it's a visible presence amongst the citizens. And I'm somebody that's been a writer since gosh, I was a kid. I've always wanted to write. And, you know, I'm not necessarily like a tech person. I'm, you know, I'm on kind of an old laptop. You're looking at my academic office, which is not particularly technologically snazzy. I'm holding an old phone to record. But my grandpa, like most grandpa's in Western PA was a steel worker. And worked all day in the steel mills, and then he would paint to sort of relieve pressure, sort of become human again. And painted all these great landscapes. I have some of them in my office. And I would sit in paint with them before he died when I was a kid. And he would say, don't, don't draw what you think you see. Just draw what you see. That's all you have to do. And like that's been kind of my artistic credo throughout my life. So even though I'm someone that's not super in detect, when I live in Pittsburgh, and I just observe, because like observational, just, I just keep a very observational practice of not sort of leading the witness artistically, so to speak, just sort of being observational. When I look at my city across the past decade, you see the Google flag higher than the American flag in Bakery Square. You see Duolingo higher than the East Liberty Library where I take my kid. And you see driverless cars in my alley, you know, around my house, sort of prowling around sort of snooping. And so my interest in them initially going back in 2015-16 was buying a new house, the Morningside area cleaning up the back alley and a driverless car, you know, it's sort of a test driver comes down my pot-hold alley and I'm like, holy cow, they are testing alleys like this. Like this is really, this is close to my property, this is happening. And just kind of got consumed from there, knowing people living around the sector, reading up about it. They started a multi-year process of me, you know, started reviewing some books that would come out related to it getting more into transportation mobility, teaching a class about driverless cars and ultimately writing this little slim summary novel that I'm glad you framed it that way. I think it would have sort of, you know, maybe not fun necessarily, but certainly quick, energetic, you know, sort of read is what I was going for. Yeah, I don't know if I used to work fun before or not, but it deals with a lot of complicated topics. You know, you hit on this role of, you know, technology and relationship with humans, impending climate change. There's really a lot that you pack into less than 200 pages if I remember correctly. Yeah, like 190 or something, yeah. Yeah. I want to dive into the novel beforehand. You mentioned that you teach a class about autonomous vehicles. What's your career path been overall and where do you teach and how do you start kind of incorporating autonomous technology into what you teach? Yeah, that's a very good question. I think some people I work with would still like Denese answer to that question. I mean, I teach at Slip-I-Rock University. 45 minutes to an hour north of Pittsburgh. I've been a writing instructor, sort of English-centered person throughout my career working as an adjunct for a long time. I'm an assistant professor now and we were starting this new university seminar program. Sort of where professors can teach kind of a niche interest of theirs as a way to sort of get students in excited in a topic or area that, you know, the professor might not normally get to teach in, but hopefully their enthusiasm carries the course. And when I even, they hadn't even initially made an offer about the course, but I got like sort of wind of it. I was sending out memos and emails and this crazy like five-page document that I started writing on my phone at the Children's Museum with somebody text to me about it. I started writing up this long note on my phone at the Children's Museum with my son. So I was like, I've got to do this. I've got so much in my head. And one of my big beliefs about, I mean, one of my big beliefs about the driverless car sector period is that like I just don't want that conversation rooted at, you know, in Pittsburgh at Carnegie Mellum where a lot of the robots just, you know, go on to get or get poached by those companies or at MIT or in San Francisco. And that if this truly is going to become a technology that has ramifications for everyone, then everyone needs to be talking about it now. And I teach at a university that's, you know, fluctuates between 30 and 40% first generation students, a lot of rural students. And I just really, really wanted to have conversations with people who weren't like, I was about to say who weren't Ed Neeter-Mire. I love Ed Neeter-Mire. I love his book, but who weren't who weren't like so deep in the weeds on this and knew all the gossip and knew all this stuff. Because you know, after studying AB Twitter and sort of the sector for a year or two, I was like, okay, I got the hang of this. I got the hang of who says what, of what the new things are, of who seems like they're shilling this, of who seems like they're, you know, they're more trustworthy. And I was just kind of like, how can I expand this conversation? I don't want to keep having the same conversation. I want to have different conversations. And so that was my impetus for, I mean, I still kind of can't believe it got proved, but I did, I did, I did teach it. And it was, it was amazing to have conversations with people with young students who, you know, in theory will be the people who are sort of asked to really buy in, to really sort of participate, to adopt, to think about, to push back the challenge and get their opinions on it. So it was one of the more special, one of the more sort of special courses I've taught. And in part, because my, I said to them on the first day, I was like, my expertise is severely capture your folks. I was like, I cannot build these things. I cannot. I was like, I am learning, I'm learning alongside of you. And it's up to you, the sort of, you know, help me out at some points too. So it was a really magical classroom experience. What sort of things did you learn from your students and this is taking a leap of faith a little bit but you know imagine you were teaching this class somewhere in the Bay Area and how might the students that you taught at Slippery Rock have a very different perspective than it's someone who's in the you know epicenter of of this technology. Yeah I mean my students were great like I'm really defensive of my students when people when people sort of crap on younger generations from my students age and I'm just I'm very defensive of them and most of the stuff that people don't like about them it's like well you gave them the phone and the apps and all the stuff that you you bemoan like one thing that I think would be different and that's a great question comparing their reactions to to like the Bay Area like Slippery Rock traditionally and I don't know everybody here would agree with this characterization but like traditionally was a teacher's school and I think has made a bigger transition to like health professions like we have a new college of health professions opening up you know physical therapists you know athletic training sort of early childhood special ed those are a lot of the majors and it was really incredible to me to see 18 and 19 year old students one of the first things they're asking and thinking about is not themselves not like their commute's not their friends doing whatever but like from second week in the course wondering about the disability community well how does this open it up well it maybe it opens up mobility but like what's the UX of the car if we still can't get in the car how does that affect it like really thinking through when I was 18 or 19 there is absolutely no way no way in hell that I would be thinking of any application beyond like what I could what I could do with it and to be frank like when I talk with most people you know that's what comes up their own commutes their own sort of life they think about it naturally but like I was so impressed by so many of my students and specific presentations they came up with that they were like thinking through their major in part of it because I asked them to think through their major a lot partly is a way to justify the course I want them not just to be like why are we learning about journalism cars like what is going on here so I did try to root it in like let's think about this through the lens of your of your major but that's one way they surprised me so much was thinking about other people and specifically like marginalized communities or communities that needed more help to what extent would or wouldn't this help other students kind of dance students I had a big cluster of dance students and you would think well what the hell are these dance students going to say about driveless cars what are they going to write about man they taught they wrote these papers and did these presentations on like how an intersection is like choreography and the choreography and sort of the sequencing of like of road scenarios and how it's all sort of you know sort of comparing like I'm going to give this is in there this is this is it's wonderful how stupid I sound because I know nothing about dance and I don't know how much about like computing either but they were making these ties between like things they're doing in their dance classes and I think Martha Graham is a big dance name has it relates to choreography and how her principal sort of kind of apply to this thing we read and so those are the types of things that would come up in that class where you know on the one hand it was great they were connecting their majors to it but also yeah some of the some of the presentations and research into the the applications the promises or or false promises or however they framed it in their own work about for communities like the disability community was just really I don't know maybe that stuff happens in the area maybe those conversations happen but like I kind of doubt it I kind of bet it's more you know robotaxe business use case that it that that sort of stuff. Selica Talbot was our guest on the podcast last week and she said something about how it's not the job of the people creating the technology to figure out where and how it gets implemented in society and I feel like listening to you talk about this experience both you and your students as outsiders have have a lot more practical things to say about about that second part of that of how this is useful for society how it gets implemented in society. For sure and like that's why you know I both like agree and disagree with that statement like on the one hand a statement like that can be used and I've you know I've sort of heard her on other pods and different things and like her a lot on the one hand like something like that it could be Mark Zuckerberg saying oh it's not my fault which Facebook does it's not you know it's not the responsibility of technology so I push back on that somewhat but at the same time that's part of my reason for for teaching the class is like I on some level I do agree with that where it's like yeah it's really hard to make things period like even me just making this book took a lot of time and a lot of edits and whatever and that to some extent it's the job of other people to figure out interpretations and applications and sort of have the back end of that conversation and that was yeah that was just me I mean the whole course was me sort of saying like yeah I bet some of these students who are not computing students and who are not from these epicenters can help figure out some of the applications who can help I just ran into a student downstairs the other day where we just started school here from summer this kid Noah who was like so excited to see me and see my novel come out he was like he did this whole project on trucking and had really you know he'd been a parts runner he'd been a parts runner running parts from like a automotive place to like different places and he did his whole paper on like how aby's could work like with last mile problems he did all this different research and I like yeah like figuring solving some of the problems not being like you know as to what to what your your guess was sort of saying yeah figuring out the applications you know taking the taking the reins of the problems and trying to use them to create solutions. So you mentioned sitting down to write your book and edit the book tell me about that process when did you when did you decide that you were going to write a novel that you know it incorporates a lot of self-driving technology into its plot line and say the least I mean I I'm always writing novels I got just I got novels coming out of my ears that most of them have not gone not gone anywhere to this point this is my debut novel it's not the first one I've written. I do feel though like I well I'll talk like artistically and then more sort of technologically how did I do it? Artistically for me this book helped solve a lot of problems like I have written a bunch of different novel drafts and one of the problems that like my friends or my wife or different people will tell me is like it's just generally sort of a focus issue like I always want to write in this part of Pittsburgh oh but no I also live in here and let's go over here and let's like do all these different things and so I've often had novels that are too complicated they're too complicated there's long I've had agents I've come close that I've gone in different ways and looking back at some of those books I do see how like you know they're a little you know energetic but maybe unfocused and like the thing that was great not only about my interest in driverless cars but just as like a narrative device is that just by having driving as this mechanism I could go all around the city I could write about every neighborhood I ever wanted to sort of set something in and just be there for half a paragraph and so for me just from an artistic perspective really early on like really really early on first week or two drafting out this novel years ago I was like oh this is this is going to work I was like this is just this solves a lot of personal artistic problems I've had with I'm focused I'm going to have this home base the sort of company this car this driving but I'm going to be able to roam and have this sort of able to sort of tie in a lot more so so from that perspective writing it was really fun technologically like it was it was a bear because I started writing it in present tense and trying to keep it sort of you know concurrent with our timeline and just quickly became apparent like this is a fool's errand there's just stuff happening all the time and so I kicked it you know I had the 2030 and had to make some guesses about different things but but like I'm not a I'm a sort of car person and one of the what's funny is the the galley you read that got printed before I went back to my GM person I have some moles in various places that that helped me and I had somebody sort of proof it check it whatever it was good and then I changed a bunch of stuff and moved stuff to the future and was maybe a little bit Lucy Goosey on on some engine based stuff some battery stuff some whatever stuff and I printed that galley that I gave you and I gave it back to my my person at GM my wonderful person and he was like what did you do is like what did what did you do here he was like this no longer this no longer syncs up and I was like oh man I guess you're right he he sent me the spreadsheets I haven't printed in my office I'm gonna frame it one day this spreadsheet of all the all the things I had changed that he said I needed to to rethink and sort of rename and just little parts and all this little stuff and to me that was like an awesome part of the process even though it was like very stressful it was like oh I've already sent this galley to car people like Pete Bigelow this is bad this is not this is not good it was great like I loved working with those people like I loved I understand a lot of these people accepted me as as just being interested and like wanting to you know hadn't necessarily read a book like this before and I love to be honest like the process it was really fun yes writing and figuring out that it was kind of in my artistic wheelhouse but working with car people as sort of was like yeah you people are a lot like me you like like my neighbors and my alley they the car dudes like norm Vietnam that was ponytail like he wants to be in his garage working tinkering by himself. Anyway. wants to walk down the alley and find Jim or find me and talk a little about it or show a little bit about it. I kind of the more I talk with these people, the more I was like, this is how I am. I like being in my desk, cup of coffee, writing, leave me alone. I want to work on my thing. But then I want to talk to another or my wife or I want to sort of like talk about it. And I really found a lot of kinship, someone unexpectedly. I mean, I'm someone who politically and ideologically like, look, you've had Jesse Singer on like, I love Jesse. And just about anything Jesse Singer does and writes and says, but writing this book also introduced me to a lot of different people in the A/B world and just the plain old V world. Who I really identify with a lot, just as far as how they go about their day, their habits, their relationships between how they want to work, how they want to relate. And so that part, you know, artistically was good for me, but technology was fun too. I like being humbled. I like being told I, you know, I've got stuff wrong. This book definitely, definitely humbled me a numerous instances. It was funny. I think in one of our early conversations, you said something like writing about building cars is really hard, even fictitious ones or something like that. And I, yes. Oh my God. Yes, it's not fun. But it's perfect. Like I feel like that's the lesson that Silicon Valley has learned about working with auto makers is, oh, there's a reason that. Building cars and mass producing cars is a really complex capital intensive bear. And, you know, everyone has, everyone from writers like you and me and my particular world to Silicon Valley CEOs have learned that lesson that building cars is a hard, hard endeavor. Yes. We already talked about Lucas Ed's book. And I think in like the first page or two, he makes that point like building cars is hard. You can come in and think you're going to do it all easy and you're going to learn a lot of lessons that other people have learned a long time ago. And I definitely felt that way, even building my make believe company, A/B's where I'm like, oh, I'll just kind of make him this way and this way. And every time I would talk to one of a couple people, they'd be like, no, you really can't like, you can't do that. And I'd be like, well, it's just a novel. And they're like, yeah, but like, let's really think about this. And they were, they were always right. Like I loved hearing just those lessons that they've learned across. And these are people at, you know, OEMs or people at, you know, sales departments or different things. You know these parts games inside, not. It was really fascinating going through that experience that, yeah, building cars is hard. Like I, I had them all along, alongside sort of as different developments were happening. And it was hard for me to be too snarky about like, oh, look at this Tesla recall or look at this or whatever because I'm sitting there, we're finding every single time I reference a battery and have to like completely swap batteries out of there because the battery of stuff like the big sense of the one draft like, yeah, I felt that paid in my own sort of fictional way. I'm curious. So I read the book a few weeks ago. I started rereading it again over the last couple days in preparation for our conversation today and one of the things that I noticed on the second read that I loved was just how much detail about the industry and the pushes and pulls with the technology are packed into like your first like four or five pages are just like packed with like the heart of the matter. And one example of that I'll give you is in a very human way you hit on like this uncertainty about the role of a human driver versus an automated system or something in between. And I wonder how much you kind of explored that as you as you prepared to write was, you know, what is the role of a rider or driver as we go forward in transportation? Yeah, I mean, I talked about that alley the day I saw that the driverless prototype was funny. It was an Uber car that then got bought up within two or three years of that. But when that first car came down my alley, I remember looking in at the test driver and just kind of being like, what a strange job. What a strange kind of just sort of looking at them, the sort of attentiveness but relaxed, what does that feel like kind of like being, I think I say at some point in the book, I think it made it in the final copy, like being an astronaut, but on earth, like you're sort of floating around but have to be attentive and sort of floating around. And look, I, you know, I know a lot of test drivers. I know a lot of people at all different companies and I'm very, I don't know, I would just say I'm like very interested in their jobs. I'm very interested in how to stay alert. I mean, the same things that test drivers demean are just such an indication of, you know, I mean, I'm an English professor since maybe we'll be nerdy to people, but just the whole semantic issue around autonomy or autonomous itself. Like, it's autonomous, but we need someone there. But we'll have partial autonomy, but it'll, we'll need someone there that like to me, when I look at a test driver, I almost see the physical manifestation of the semantic war that goes on in this industry, whether it's, again, we could go through all of different names, all the different companies have and the different adjectives that now get thrown in. Like, when I see a test driver now around town, I see them regularly in Pittsburgh. I just kind of, I sort of talk to myself and I'm like, are they partially engaged or they fully, is that a full self-driving, you know, sort of test drivers that are partial of this is that a, like they do to me, symbol kind of the semantic war in this world of life, like that we sell these things, me and we still have this person there sort of navigating the issue. So that's kind of, you know, that's kind of a strange answer, but that's my honest answer. But when I see them, I think about words, like I think about, I think about how we have someone there. And yet we sell these words on marketing materials, on websites and whatever that sort of almost start the opposite of what the actual human experience I see is. And to me, it's a real strange disconnect between like the humans doing the work and the words said by certain companies in different ways. Patrick, I want to ask you about that language in particular. I'm going to table that thought for a minute. So to continue on this line of thought about test drivers, there's a lot of details in the novel that appear to be based on the Uber self-driving crash and Tempe in particular. So I want to ask you two part question, A, did you kind of call some of the details from those headlines? But then maybe more importantly, you've humanized a test driver so well in your book. When you look in real life at Raphael Vasquez, the Uber driver who's been charged criminally with regards to that Uber crash, do you find her responsible? Do you have some sympathy for her? Yeah, I certainly have sympathy. I mean, one of the unfortunate things about being a test driver is that people know Raphael's name and not the people who invented the technology or the, you know, Leventoski, whoever you want to sort of credit with different things, that like, it's not that Leventoski hasn't had his name and other headlines for other reasons. But I mean, at that fundamental level that the person who uses the technology is more known for a bad thing than the people who invented it, like, yeah, I certainly have sympathy on that level. As far as like, am I culling from people, you know, people ask all the time, is this connected to this? Is this based on this? There's like some really, really small random stuff like things that I don't know, or served in a cafeteria or different thing, like very, very small things. But I honestly, for several reasons, I really didn't do like one-to-one sort of translations. One is because like, quite frankly, I wanted to protect a lot of people. I know in the sector and didn't want to sort of, I don't know, jeopardize it anyway, not that my little small press book would do that. But the second is, it's so weird. Like, what would happen is I would write something and I would be like, is this a little bit too much? Is this whatever? Like, immediately, within a week or two, something would happen in the world, and I'd be like, oh no, the world is very dangerous. And this very bad stuff is going on all the time. There's stuff, there's a lot of infrastructure failure in my book as far as bridges, telephone polls, whatever. And like, sometimes I would write something and be like, this is maybe too much. And then I swear within two weeks of thinking that this huge bridge in Pittsburgh collapsed, the Furn Hollow bridge, and like collapsed most terrible when I was like, oh no, I live in an old city that's like dying. And stuff is collapsing all over the place. So inevitably, it almost worked the other way, not to make it sound like I'm some kind of genius. It's just kind of how fiction writing works, the more and more you do it. Like, you create this world in your head and you put it on the page, and you're like, does this work? And then the world kind of responds to you and says, yeah, it does. It has, it has a racy to it. It happens so many times. And then there's these events called surges, like weather events, like weather, rain is really sort of the climate villain here. I'm writing this in 2018, 2019. Well, now that the book's out and getting reviewed, there's very good critics and reviewers who are like, and what is clearly an allegory for like COVID surges and whatever. And I'm like, man, I wish I was. That's like, I was like, you know, it's like, it's this weird thing or it's just a term I use in the book. and it just kind of ends up meaning something else. And so what I would say is like, 'cause lots of people have asked, are you working closely off this event or that one? I certainly paid attention to those events and maybe in retrospect, tweak things one way or the other, but more often than not, I was just kind of trying to really be observational, think through in my head what I wanted to replicate. And then the world would just sort of be like, no, you can even be a little bit more, I don't know, violent or dangerous. Sometimes the A/B sector would be like, no, you can be much more farcical. This is a farcical sector at times. You don't need to be, 'cause I would worry about that sometimes, not all the time, but I might be too mean about something I'll make. I wanna shave this a little bit more heroic, this a little bit more fraught, this a more regular workplace, this in certain ways. And then something, or I would maybe, I don't know, meet somebody in Pittsburgh or work in a second, I'd be like, I don't know. I think I'm fine, do it. Do it and what I'm doing. We're gonna take a short break from my conversation with Patrick for this word from this week's sponsor. There's a revolution going on, the electrification of our vehicles. By 2025, there will be twice the number of hybrid and electric vehicles on the road. 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And now back to my conversation with Patrick McGinty, author and professor at Slippery Rock University. Without giving too much away, you tell the story and made the climate change backdrop of bits and in here in real life, in parallel to autonomous vehicle developments, we've more recently seen the electric vehicle sector take off. There's a ton of interest, a ton of hype as this is the solution to thwarting climate change. Do you see the same hype patterns playing out from where autonomous vehicles were five years ago or so to where electric vehicles are today? - Yeah, I mean, the short answer is probably yes. I mean, I sent you, at some point this week, an old timeline of AV promises of one to launch as would be for when's crews gonna come out, when's our, we're gonna do this, we're gonna do this from like 20, this is timeline from like 2016 to 2020 of when all this stuff's gonna come out. And of course, damn, you're none of it came out. And like, yeah, I have lots of friends who work in those sectors working on projects that I do, you know, think you're cool. I'm, you know, rounding need to have a new, rounding into shape, and needing a new car for my commute. And I'm thinking about range, I'm thinking about I work north of the city of this university. I'm thinking about all these issues quite a lot in my personal life, in addition to my intellectual one. I will say like, yeah, I mean, it's hard not to have, though those years fighting the AV war, I was not blind like fighting with anybody, I was purely just observing. I barely tweeted anything, but just my own personal intellectual AV wars, I think are gonna be pretty foundational in my life because I think I really, really watched over like a four or five year period, a lot of the promise, a lot of the hype. And then again, some real, like, I think getting back to Jessie Singer, I think she's pretty persuasive about some of the benefits, some of the safety benefits that have come, whether it's A-DAS, whether it's breaks, whether it's different things that have come out of just this renewed funding and attention to mobility. But I'm not gonna forget that hype anytime soon, like that was a real, I observe pretty carefully for many years, just sort of quietly teaching my class, writing a little bit about it. And so yeah, it does make me nervous as far as the promise, I mean, certainly, I think more than even just, more than even just EVs, though, just mobility at large, one of the most depressing things, like as a person who has a book out in the world about driverless cars, I get asked about them, like just random people, like my mom's friends, my neighbors, like, and people, and then I push back, I'm like, what do you think about driverless cars? And it's one of the most depressing things I've heard so much recently is like, oh, I would just love, I would love to get so much more work done or I'd love to sleep. And I completely get that, like, I would love to grade, on my commute to work, I would love to do things, but I take a step back and I'm like, man, what a depressing picture of American life that we need to do more work and we need to sleep. You know, like that's it. I've been reminiding a lot on that more. I'm sort of taking your question in a different direction than you asked about sort of the environmental impacts, which I don't have it closely enough or well versed enough sort of stance one way or the other, but I've been thinking a lot about how much I hear the desire of people when they talk about driverless cars or other types of mobility, like, oh, to get more work done, to sleep more. And that's like, that conveys to me an illness in our country, if we need more sleep and need to get more work done, that I've been kind of reminiding a lot on the root of that, the cause of that, how mobility can and can't change that. In another dimension of that is kind of this ongoing return to office or work from a little bit debated. What's the role of work in our culture, right? Yeah, yeah, for sure. I mean, driverless cars too, I mean, I remember I had a big piece in the baffler, kind of my entrance into this world, my like, hello, I've been studying you all for three years here, I am, was when I wrote this piece for the baffler that surveyed a lot of the writing to date. And gosh, it was due March 15th, 2020. And what I like was like, you give me like two more weeks to work on this, I've a kid at home and I don't know what's going on, we're all gonna die, whatever. And in that piece, I kind of made like a gesture, like, you know, one of my like half guesses was like, maybe people won't want to share autonomous rides anymore because of germs or COVID or whatever. I was just kind of throwing darts. This was like three weeks into the pandemic, the baffler issues coming out. Much more so than like shared car spaces though. Yeah, it's just commuting, is commuting period, is office space, is that issue? And that, that, I mean, I don't know, congestion reports, you, congestion reports, I like you, you read a lot more of them and this stuff than I do. I, when I read stuff about congestion and whether it will go up or go down, it sort of, it reminds me like jobs reports, when it's like jobs are going to go up, rather than going down, no, this, what it just kind of seems like, you know, depending on which way you're standing, the wind's blowing, some way, how do you read, how do you trust like a congestion report? Like, it's funny, people talk about me, I wrote a speculative novel about the future and people are like, oh, you got this wrong, this wrong. I'm like, half the stuff about the driver's cars, it's just predicting like, what congestion is going to be? Like, what do you mean, I'm the one who's making random guesses? How, like, are there congestion reports you trust? Are there like, stances or beliefs or like, ways you think like congestion or sort of, what would be altered one way or the other? No, I think it's too hard to tell right now, which is kind of a cop-out answer, but nonetheless the truth, I think, you know, either short term or long term, it's just so precarious, it feels like, yeah, it can go any number of ways. 'Cause it's rooted in like human psychology too, like how would, how would working from home change, okay, we wouldn't be commuting, but then we'll be still be going out. I mean, that's why when I look at some of these congestion reports, or studies or whatever, and not to disrespect any of these scholars who are putting tons of time into it and they are like helpful, but some of them, there's just a human aspect to it that I'm just like, well, obviously, people aren't gonna behave that way. Like, you know, like, I just, I don't know, that's been one of my frustrations is like the speckledness of some of it. And whereas like for you, I know you, one of the other things about writing a novel in the future, or writing fiction period, where people are like, oh, do you have to like invent stuff or do you have to like make up how people are? I kind of feel like with fiction, I get to like actually say how people are, like I think your job's impossible. Are you the other tech writers who you have to deal with so much spin, so many of these people at different companies sort of saying all these different things, not that I'm not at all saying that like this is a fake news operation or something, and your work, I've relied so much on your work, so much on, you know, Kirsten Korsek, so much on all these different people who do this work. I just look at some of the work and I'm like, man, this that's really hard because you guys hit walls that I just get to, like, leap over, I just get to go into the company and walk around. You know, I found your job very difficult. Do you find your job difficult? - Yeah, because I think one of the keys, and first thank you very much for reading, and I appreciate everything you just said. But it is getting over that wall in a way that, it'd be easy to write a lot of one-dimensional stories. And I think to do anything of real value that you have to get beyond that, get beyond the stated timeline and really think about, you know, for one example, why is that realistic? Why is it realistic? Why is it not? How does that fit into the greater context of what we know about future technology? And you know, a lot of times, once you start asking those questions, you find that, not, I don't wanna say a lot, but certainly there's a lot of hype out there, as we've mentioned, and a lot of it is, you know, it's easy to poke holes in the credibility. - Yeah, or the question, I mean, you're asking a lot of why questions there. You, I'm sure all the time, have to be like, why are they telling us to me right now? Why am I like, why is this coming my way right now? Which is why I'm suddenly interested in talking right now. - What's the whole of the second thing around that's underway? - Yes, I know, oh, I loved, like, it's so fun getting to talk to you, because I've just been this total weirdo, like studying in my home, being like, oh, they're like doing this interview now, they must have something going on, and my wife's like, is this still car-related? Is this still driverless cars? Like, what do you, you're like, you're like putting a strange map of where that's why it has been fun to get to know more people. You know, even since the book has been released, it's been really nice hearing from people in and around the sector. You know, just, just, I hope there's more. I know, Joy and McNeil is a writer who has a novel coming out next year, sort of related driverless cars, and much like, much like I taught this class, and it's like, I do want some people, podcasts about a completely different topic, a year ago asked me if I was a cynic, and I was like, no, I wouldn't spend all this time on it if I was a cynic, you know? Like, am I critical? Do I have like a certain type of politics? Like, yeah, absolutely, for sure. But I wouldn't devote all this time and thought to it if I was a cynic, so I want more conversation with my students, more and more novels that like, I kind of feel a little bit, I don't know, a little bit bashful, a little bit naked being like the lone driverless car. Novel right now, I'm excited for Joy and's book to sort of come out and have some more conversation about it, because I like, I mean, I'm a team fiction person, I'm an English professor, it's not a stretch for me to say these things, but I think the pie graph of like our readership about this topic is skewed way too much towards Twitter, and could even afford to like chip away with some of the, you know, reports and other things again, you all, I can't praise you work enough, but just thinking about this issue in different ways, beyond just studies, beyond just reportage, I think would be tremendously beneficial. - And I think it may have been in the baffler piece that you mentioned or maybe somewhere else, but you've written about the kind of arc of books and literature now with your own contribution about self-driving technology and how that has evolved in recent years from the kind of like, you know, Pollyanna hype to things that are much more nuanced and skeptical now. - Yes, for sure, the car gasms that happen in a lot of really early books I love, books I've taught, I mean, that still are like sort of car euphoric. I mean, let your listeners behind the curtain, like when I'm writing that piece in 2020, and I'm writing about the arc of driverless car writing, in my head, I'm like, yes, and this'll end with me. I will write a book at the end of this that will be the part of goal that the end of a driverless car rainbow. Now, it took many years and many other sort of rejections after that, but I really did, I mean, that sounds much more arrogant than I actually am. I'm joking around, but I really did feel like, I can push this forward, I can push this genre, this subject forward, like I really did feel like, I saw very clearly the arc of writing the sort of 2010s, the 2010s hype year, and my head, I was just kind of like, it would make sense for there to be a novel that sort of, it's up for other people to say, whether it caps this particular ear or whatever, it's just one thing in a long line of work, but it does sort of, it made sense to me as it, from a critical and artistic perspective that like there would be all this work, that's sort of cycling around this sort of hype year, and then there's something new and then, though, I'm really excited about this decade, and on of writing. I mean, Lord knows I can put the stuff if I tried, and I have tried to move on to other things, and other interests, but here I am, talking to Pete about driverless cars, happily ever that, very happily. - So, I know I have a book end, I'm not going to spoil it for others, but what do you think to feature halts for self-driving technology? - I mean, definitely, going back to my students, my students, one of their first projects they had to do was a historical, let's have a historical record of innovation. Let's, before we even study driverless cars, let's study other stuff, stuff that, when gangbusters, stuff that flamed out, what a great presentation on there, and you know, it was by the kid Noah, who I already talked about, who did such incredible work. His was on self-checkout machines, and history of self-checkout machines, and their integration, and their cost, and labor replacement, and not, and he kind of wound up at like, they're here, but they're not everywhere. You know, that was kind of his, like, that was kind of his sort of take away, if I'm remembering correctly a few years on, from his self-checkout machine, you know, sort of piece, and I thought it was really profound. I think about it often, as far as like, what the integration will look like, sort of specific use cases, specific functions, it's around, but it's not everywhere. I mean, certainly, with driverless cars, I mean, I think we, I think it's probably fair to say that if you want driverless cars, it'll be like much like how EVs or say like a person's third or fourth car right now, an AV would be somebody's fifth car, their third car, there's something, you know, if it's even private ownership, period. I mean, I've had very smart people in my life for a long time, one of the smartest people I know who studies transportation at a very, very, very powerful bank, told me a long time ago, he was like, yeah, the main play is just like trucking logistics, that's really all that gets me excited about this, like that's, and he's told me that since 2016, I was talking to Zero about all these different things, and he's kind of held to that and has been smart, or right about a lot of things. So, you know, certainly I think you're gonna see, you know, more in there. I don't know, I get back to the psychology of it, and it's a tough war for that secretary of the way, and if people are saying, I don't know, if what I'm hearing, just anecdotally, but I have to say I talked to a lot of people, is they wanna work more and they wanna sleep more. That's a hard sales pitch, even if it's true, for the driver's car secretary to say, yeah, we'll help you work more and sleep more on your commute, which even if people want, that's a tough, that's a tough intellectual pretzel to kind of like, say you're gonna change the world by giving into people's, like most basic, exhausted desires, not particularly aspirational, and that's, I mean, that's anecdotal, that's my own sort of small thing about it, but I have been thinking about that a lot, that work and sleep thing that I've heard all summer, been doing talks, readings, getting drinks with people afterwards, talking with local communities, been in Portland, Durham, Pittsburgh, Eerie, and I don't know, when people think about its application, they're like, yeah, let me work more, let me sleep more, and I'm like, both that's depressing, and I'm also like, I don't, that doesn't really sound like a message you wanna be trading on, but so much. So that's a long way of saying, probably small use case applications, probably polite integration in certain ways, but I mean, there's been people, I'm Lell, Brian Celesky, or other people who said, for a long time since I started studying this, yeah, we might not have level five in my lifetime, we might not have, you know, some of these capabilities for a long time, and those people have, I don't know, the people who've pumped the breaks have generally been right every single time, so I looked at those voices to tell me what to think. - Patrick, it's been great having you on the podcast today. Thank you for making the time, really enjoyed the conversation. - Oh, this was great, thanks so much for having me. - Patrick, I think is the first English professor to appear on the podcast, and he follows Selika Talbot, who was our guest last week, and she teaches at USC, so I think maybe these two things combined, just go to show how every aspect of society might be touched by self-driving technology, and it's appearing as a key topic in college classes nowadays. If you'd like to read Test Drive, Patrick's book, you can find it on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and on the website of Propeller Books, it's publisher. If you'd like this particular episode of the podcast, or shift overall, please subscribe on Apple, Stitcher, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. Thank you for listening, thank you again, Patrick, for his time. Hope you all have a wonderful Labor Day weekend, and we'll catch you next week. (upbeat music)