If you’re kind of an ass when you drive, autonomous cars are going to be great for you, a new study from the London School of Economics and Goodyear has found (via GeekWire). Basically, self-driving cars will opt on the side of safety and caution, which means aggressive jerks who drive like morons will be able to bully them all over the road.
The study found that, surprisingly, drivers who tend to be more aggressive (and therefore among the least likely to want to give up control to a robot, especially a weak robot that’s a huge wimp when it comes to wanting not to terrify people or run them down) are actually those who favor an autonomous future, because in that world they can count on most of the soft baby bot cars to get out of the way when they careen toward them unsafely in order to assert their sad, pathetic, frustrated dominance.
This is fine, because the people in those self-driving cars likely won’t notice because they’ll be enjoying life instead of stressing about having to defensively drive in order to deal with huge jerks weaving in and out of traffic on the freeway.
It’s also fine because any enjoyment of their dickish driving will be short-lived, since autonomous cars sharing the roadway with human-driven vehicles is probably going to be very short-lived, especially once we have more data to back-up the safety advantages of self-driving cars. Aggro drivers could also hasten their own demise, if they end up causing accidents trying to bully the bots. Enjoy your sunset, road warriors.