Why We Drive

In the AI Story

The book's philosophical core is the argument that driving is a practice in MacIntyre's sense — a coherent, complex form of cooperative human activity whose internal goods include the specific pleasures of skilled operation, the satisfaction of successful navigation through complex traffic situations, and the cultivation of the alert, responsive, self-directed agency that skilled driving requires. The Google self-driving car's freeze at a four-way intersection serves as the paradigmatic case: the situation required judgment, which human drivers supplied through eye contact and the body language of driving, and which no rule-following algorithm could generate.

Crawford's analysis connects driving to broader questions about agency and political self-government. The driver who successfully navigates a complex situation exercises the same kind of practical judgment that democratic citizenship requires — the capacity to read particular situations, apply general principles contextually, and take responsibility for outcomes. The progressive elimination of such judgment by automated systems, Crawford argues, is not merely a matter of convenience. It is a contraction of the domain in which citizens develop the capacities that self-government requires.

The book addresses the specific antihumanism that Crawford identifies in the discourse around autonomous vehicles. The Google engineer's response to the intersection problem — that humans need to be "less idiotic" — exemplifies what Crawford calls the tacit ideology that legitimizes the replacement of human judgment with automated systems. The ideology operates through premises that are individually defensible but collectively constitute, as Crawford argues, "apologetics for a further concentration of wealth and power." The driver is not merely being inconvenienced by automation; she is being dispossessed of a domain of competence.

Why We Drive has become central to debates about automation, algorithmic governance, and the specific question of how much human judgment a democratic society can surrender to automated systems before the capacity for self-government erodes. The book's arguments apply directly to AI-mediated knowledge work: if the elimination of the driver's judgment costs something essential, so too does the elimination of the engineer's, the lawyer's, the physician's judgment — even when the automated replacement is faster, cheaper, and functionally adequate.

Origin

Why We Drive was published by William Morrow in 2020, incorporating research Crawford conducted into the history of driving, the psychology of skilled operation, and the political economy of the automotive industry. The book drew on Crawford's experience as both a motorcycle mechanic and a driver who had spent significant time with high-performance vehicles — experience that gave him empirical grounding for philosophical claims other theorists could only advance abstractly.

Key Ideas

Driving as practice. Skilled operation of a vehicle develops specific cognitive and moral capacities that cannot be replaced by automated systems without loss.

Judgment vs. rule-following. Complex situations require judgment that no rule set can capture — a point the Google intersection case demonstrates with parable-like clarity.

The antihumanist ideology. The legitimation of automated replacement operates through premises that treat human agency as primarily a source of error to be eliminated.

Political dimension of embodied judgment. The capacities that driving develops are the same capacities that democratic self-government requires — their erosion is a political problem, not merely a practical one.

Self-reliance and agency. The capacity to be responsible for one's own passage through the world is constitutive of a specific kind of self that automation progressively makes obsolete.