Fictional self-driving cars prove deadly

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This article was published 31/12/2022 (1364 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

When has a murder mystery about giving artificial intelligence power over us ever turned out well?

You seriously believe robots will always be our friends and servants, or that we’d get a warm and cuddly fable about A.I. from super-clever Toronto murder mystery author Linwood Barclay?

An island in Massachusetts eagerly takes up an offer from benevolent corporation Arrival: we’ll ferry your cars to the mainland, you agree to try out our fleet of driverless electric cars for a month on the island, where the Arrivals have integrated controls to ensure absolute safety.

As the ads said for the original Westworld, what could possibly go worng? Worng? Worng?

The opening chapter gives us a hint, wherein two people canoodle while their driverless car chauffeurs them around Malibu. This would be a Gandalf, a vehicle from a rival benevolent corporation.

Let’s just say there’s a teachable moment in which we learn the consequences of not being clear in our instructions to an A.I.

Oh dear.

The evil Gandalf CEO Brandon Kyle reckoned there was industrial sabotage by evil Arrival CEO Lisa Carver that sent his stock plummeting. He’s sure, because he and Carver both stop at nothing. Including murder? You think? In a Linwood Barclay novel?

It goes without saying that neither Kyle nor Carver is meant to resemble any real-life manufacturer of electric cars, driverless or otherwise.

Barclay gets his plot revved up pretty fast. Media hordes come to the island to see how the Arrivals are working out; overseeing the event is local public relations consultant Sandra Montrose, single mom to two troubled kids, her husband having died nine months before when he fell asleep at the wheel, immediately treated horribly by hissable Arrival managers.

Carver is a monster, fellow monster Kyle sneaks onto the island, someone gives the Arrivals a virus, they start killing people. Like the Borg, the Arrivals have a collective mind, and they’re deadly.

Barclay has the template down pat: quickly establish the crisis, identify the people whose fate we care about, separate and scatter them and place them in ghastly peril, add scoundrels who are surprisingly peripatetic, and for good measure let’s have someone who just feels a little off. Gore ensues.

Driverless cars have been around for a long time, back to TV’s Science Fiction Theatre in the mid-1950s. Barclay has characters pay homage to Stephen King’s Christine, a demon-possessed driverless car, but the plot is closer to King’s novella Trucks, made into the execrable movie Maximum Overdrive. Though if Barclay is channelling anyone, it’s Michael Crichton. Whatever… it’s a terrific read.

Look Both Ways follows the technology-gone-mad template superbly — gosh darn, you can see what Barclay is doing, yet he does it so well.

Retired Free Press reporter Nick Martin is getting creeped out by the way his grandson’s strider bike has been looking at him.