Who's Driving?

Famed writer Richard Matheson passed away earlier this week at age 87. Trust us when we say that he wrote so many of the best fantasy, horror, and science fiction stories, films, and television shows ever that there's an outstanding chance you know some of his work extremely well, even if you've never heard his name.

So, what's that got to do with a blog belonging to a personal injury attorney in Los Angeles? Well out of the astonishing number of extremely memorable scripts fashioned by Mr. Matheson was one for a television movie called "Duel." It happened to become somewhat legendary as the first professional feature film assignment given to a very young unknown beginning director named Steven Spielberg. It starred actor Dennis Weaver as an ordinary salesman trying to make his way home through the desert, who is threatened by a gigantic big-rig which appears to be driven by either no one or someone very dangerous and weird, and which persists in menacing him for most of the film. (We won't tell you what happens.)

Now, we're not just bringing that up as a metaphor for all the bad things that can happen on the road which supply personal injury attorneys with work and telling you to be careful -- though, of course, you should be careful. No, we're actually inspired to take on a bit of science fictional thinking because of some articles we've stumbled over speculating on the possibility for terrorism perpetrated by bad guys hacking into now super-ubiquitous automotive computers and causing deadly crashes. The articles we've read don't even bring up the possibility of what could happen if someone malevolent got control of the self-driving cars that are being worked on by Google. You can see that the thought, at least, is pretty darn scary. Human toll aside, corporations might also find the prospect frightening because, if any sort of negligence was involved on their part, we personal injury lawyers might have to get involved.

We admit this is all extremely speculative, but one of the reasons that people like the late Mr. Matheson are so incredibly valuable is that they help us to think about problems with technology, sometimes before the technology is even here. Technology is neither inherently good or inherently bad, and it's a good exercise to at least consider all the possible consequences of something new before it arrives. We haven't really done that with the massive computerization of cars that's already in place. Maybe we should start to do some serious thinking about this issue prior to the day the first Google car comes online.