The Autonomous Vehicle Critique

Rebecca Solnit's February 2024 observation in the London Review of Books—that driverless cars are called autonomous vehicles but driving is not an autonomous activity—became the most quoted passage of her "In the Shadow of Silicon Valley" essay because it crystallized a structural misunderstanding embedded across AI deployment domains. Driving is a cooperative social activity conducted through eye contact, gesture, hand signals, timing, and the thousand micro-negotiations that allow millions of strangers to share roads without killing each other in numbers far higher than they do. When the human is removed from the vehicle, the social negotiation does not become more efficient; it becomes impossible. The machine can process sensor data and optimize routes, but it cannot make eye contact with a pedestrian stepping into a crosswalk or wave a cyclist through an intersection. The activities framed as autonomous—teaching, diagnosing, managing, designing—are, like driving, cooperative social activities involving not just information processing but the navigation of meaning between participants who bring different contexts, needs, and stakes