Imagine the gift giving that you might do for Father’s Day once we have self-driving driverless autonomous cars available. Photocredit: Getty
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As readers know, I tend to be considerably serious about the topic of self-driving cars, but have opted to make an exception for this Father’s Day by providing a bit more of a light-hearted “analysis” about how you could potentially use self-driving driverless autonomous cars for making Father’s Day a special day for your dad.
Suppose we did really have an abundance of self-driving cars on our public roadways, what could you do to celebrate Father’s Day?
Here’s my Top 5 ways you could do so:
1. Have an autonomous car go pick-up your father and whisk him to a secret destination where you and others are waiting to surprise him with a Father’s Day celebration. In this case, the AI driving the autonomous car would need to remain mum and not spill the beans about where he is being taken and what awaits him. Note to the AI developers at the automakers and tech firms, please add this “no tattle telling” option into your driverless car AI systems, thanks.
2. You get into a driverless car, deck-it-out on the inside, and go pick-up your father to take him on a touching journey around the neighborhood that he grew-up in, tracing his roots, and as a bonus, a really big bonus, you listen patiently to his (once again) endless stories about his childhood and act like you’ve never heard the stories before. You might need to turn-off the AI’s vocalization since it could potentially complain about already having heard those stories and ruin the mood in the autonomous car, or worse still, finish telling each story before your father can do so (that’s what Machine Learning or Deep Learning can do, so be watchful).
3. On Father’s Day, you get a fleet of self-driving cars to be temporarily programmed to laugh at his dad jokes, no matter which autonomous car he happens to get into, leading him to become convinced that his sense of humor and joke telling is universally welcomed and acclaimed. Admittedly, the downside with this approach is that you’ll need to gird yourself for even more such dad jokes from him thereafter. Just make sure that the AI system doesn’t pattern match to the jokes and decide to start telling them on its own, else none of us will ever be safe-and-sound in an autonomous car again.
4. Some fathers relish a quiet day of no duties, no ruckus, and so you arrange to have a self-driving car pick him up and take him essentially nowhere in particular, but meanwhile the inside of the driverless car, which has wall-to-wall LED screens that are usually being used to entertain while inside an autonomous car or allow for remote working efforts while commuting, those screens are filled with scenic pictures and videos of serene forests and pleasant beaches. You also intercut pics of you and the family on vacations and at the end of the no-journey journey the screens fill with all of you in a real-time chat-mode wishing him a Happy Father’s Day and thanking him for his tireless efforts. That will work fine if 5G is around by then.
5. Here’s the topmost way — buy him his own self-driving car, and though he has always wanted a flying jet pack (he’s carped about it, many times), this is the next best thing. He’ll learn to love having a driverless car and you certainly won’t ever hear him complain about having to give you a lift to school or the mall or to piano lessons, since he’ll just dispatch his own obedient autonomous car to do those fatherly errands for him.
Conclusion
Hope you liked my handy list.
Say, I’d like to thank my kids for celebrating Father’s Day with me, and wish all of you a wonderful and joyous day.
