Autonomous Vehicles and Smart Highways: Author Bennecke's Fictional Vision Sorts Out the Worst—And Best—Possible Futures
Especially after a wave of tragic incidents, opinions of self-driving cars and other automated transportation technologies are, to say the least, ambivalent. This holds true not only at the U.S. level, but also globally. According to survey findings from BCG and the World Economic Forum, as summarized by Statista , half of survey participants from ten countries say they would not feel safe in a self-driving car. Forty-five percent said, further, that they want to be in control at all times when driving. The ambivalence at the individual and societal level is affecting creative works as well. And Civil Terror: Gridlock (Jaytech Publishing, March 2018), the first installment in a new series of novels by civil engineer turned fiction author J. Luke Bennecke, is one of the latest examples. What if traffic jams were not only a nuisance but also an actual source of danger? With self-driving cars being tested across the world and computer systems at the helm, this possibility is not as far-...