This hands-off experiment might drive us to disaster

Uber – the global taxi hire operation – is road-testing self-driving cars, following in the footsteps of Google which sees driverless vehicles as the way of the future.

And in a different context, so too do the American people. Because they’ve opted for the driverless approach to economics by electing to the nation’s highest office a man who patently hasn’t a clue what direction he’s going in.

Thus it would appear that the future on all fronts is freeform; from driverless cars to the driverless United States of America.

Quite why this twin-pronged new approach to steering has chosen to rear its head now is anyone’s guess – although the underlying reasoning appears to be ‘sure what’s the worst that could happen?’

Americans feel they’ve been totalled in a train wreck already, so putting a man without vision behind the wheel isn’t the gamble it might once have been – whether it’s in a car or with the country.

And at least the self-driving car won’t be steered by a bloke who’s just come from a good night at his Christmas party.

Obviously no one is advocating that we all take our hands off the steering wheel and see how the car drives us home – that might have worked for Padraic Ó Conaire and his Asal Beag Dubh back in the day, but we should still tend to favour a more hands-on approach.

But when the technology is sufficiently tried and trusted to take this responsibility out of our hands, then we should embrace change and all become backseat drivers.

For many of us, that wouldn’t be as extraordinary as it might at first appear – we’ve better at barking out instructions than we are at actually implementing them.

Furthermore, we tend to forget that airplanes have flown on auto-pilot for decades – and while we’ve had deaths and disasters along the way, more often than not you’ll find they’re down to actual pilot error.

So perhaps we’re better off when no one is at the tiller – or at least we’re in no greater danger.

Take the Irish experience; when we had no one in charge here – except three guys from Europe collectively known as the Troika – we fared better than we had with our own governments through the generations.

Once we abdicated responsibility for our own well-being, we suddenly found that we were able to meet our debts again and we didn’t run up huge bills on figaries.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.