Driving

And so a completely frivoulous post-Christmas post, not about D&D.  It is about a game however, though it feels less like a game and more like an exercise in maintaining one's attention.

The game is Euro Truck Simulator 2, which I got for myself, just before Christmas, when I was assured it wasn't "under the tree."  I'd played it a bit; enough to drive from Luxembourg to Braila, through Poland and Slovakia.  It's definitely interesting to drive through areas that I've mapped.

I won't talk excessively about the game, except to explain that you're provided with a truck, you have a choice of roads to drive, so you can transport goods from one place to another.  The truck is quite pleasantly realistic; a physical driver's wheel, pedals and gear box can be purchased to play the game, or it can be played on the keyboard or with a mouse.  Being Christmas, the wheel I wanted wasn't in stock, so I'll have to wait to get it.

Beyond that, one learns how to manipulate the vehicle to keep it on the road, maintain speed, avoid breaking the law and avoid damaging the truck and the goods therein.  One has to find places to sleep, find gas, get around difficult turns with sometimes two trailers, handle strange European road configurations (unless you are European) and generally be a good driver.

However, NOT being a good driver has few actual game consequences.  The early game enables you to learn how to drive by charging you nothing for your mistakes, allowing your "employer" to fix the truck for free-to-you no matter how many times you roll it, and paying for most other mistakes you'll make.  It doesn't get serious until you buy your own truck, thus making yourself responsible for your own mistakes.  Until then, you can drive the truck off cliffs, into other cars, across country (as long as the vehicle lasts), ignore and smash other traffic out of the way, ignore police tickets, arrive super-late with cargo and so on ... without meaningful consequences.  The way the game is set up, you can play this way indefinitely.

This evokes an elucidation on my part.  To repeat, consequences only result from the game IF you choose to accept a path that creates consequences.  This suggests a psychology experiment in my mind, one worthy of a PhD thesis.

As it's a videogame, theoretically ALL the actions taken by a given player could be recorded, exactly, within whatever parameters a research could want to set.  We could, for example, record how many times a person broke the speed limit, how many accidents they had, how often they forgot to use the turn signal, how long it took when the sun set to remember to turn on the headlights, how long they left the wipers running after the rain stopped ... and hundreds of other extraordinarily detailed aspects of the game that applied specifically to a person's attention span, respect for others on the road, respect for the rules of the road, respect for the importance of the cargo being transferred and so on.

Suppose, for the sake of argument, that we decided that instead of computer driven cars, it was possible to get a job as an "online driver" of an actual physical truck moving along highways in the real world.  The terrifying aspect of that would be that you, as said truck-driver, would crash this 50-ton vehicle through someone's house ... because, not being in the truck, YOU'd have nothing to lose except your job.  Unless, of course, we could ask you to sign a waiver accepting personal responsibility, and costs, for whatever damage you caused.

On some level, it wouldn't be such a bad job.  You'd be a "truck driver," but you'd do it from home, which would mean you wouldn't have to abandon your wife and children.  When you slept, it wouldn't be in a truck cab, it'd be in your own bed.  You'd eat meals out of your refridgerator, not in some miserable truck stop.  When you needed to pee, you'd pull the truck to the side and pee in your own bathroom.  We could strip a lot of crap out of the cab that wouldn't need to be there, because you're not there.  But then, how could we trust you?

This goes back to the assessment of your driving the truck simulator.  Every aspect of your ability to drive would be interpreted intensely, and after, say, 500 hours of investment on your part, which you could put in after work at your present day job, you'd be able to prove that you have characteristics that demonstrate your trustworthiness.  Those things would absolutely be measurable.  By example, you don't forget to check the mirrors.  You don't bang into things.  You always hit the wipers when you ought to.  You don't speed.  Ever.  Because you're the kind of person that doesn't.

There'd be tens of thousands of people who wanted to do the job I've described, who simply wouldn't make the cut.  The computer would note dozens of things they consistently failed to do ... things that demonstrated how many people wouldn't be the sort that could be trusted.  It wouldn't matter how desperately they wanted the job or how many hours they put in.  Their own choices and movements would demonstrate, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that they absolutely shouldn't be granted that kind of responsibility.

Okay, so, let's ditch the concept of a remote truck driver.  That part of the argument isn't relevant.  What matters is that no matter what sort of job you wanted to do, a program like the truck simulator, which offers no punishment except the standards by which you measure yourself, defines who and what you are as a "responsible person."  Imagine a universe where you're not permitted to sit in the cab of a real truck because, basically, your own actions over hundreds of hours told employers what kind of person you really are.  Nor would it matter if you wanted to be a driver.  The same standard applies to EVERYTHING.  Would you make a good cook?  A good doctor?  A good counselor?  A good assembly line-worker?  We could tell in no time.  Even 20 hours would give us a quick predictor of what sort of responsibility you ought to be given, since after assessing millions of people, a computer would recognise certain habits you were going to retain from just the difference in hundredths of seconds regarding your pressing the gas pedal when the lights changed.

This idea no doubt frightens a lot of people.  Truth is, it exposes what you and I are.  There are no resumes, no letters of recommendation, no application process, none of that crap that's supposed to tell a future employer that you're reliable or that you're able to do the job.  We have already built the program that can tell us that.  And right now, it's been played by probably a few hundred thousand people.

Think about it.  You may cringe at the idea ... and obviously I doubt this particular program's going to be used for this purpose.  But the world is not full of only stupid people.  Someone else very smart, very connected and with capital is working on a process like this, right now, that you're going to have to step up and face, probably in the next decade.  If not, then I think that makes me the smartest person on this planet.

Personally, I'd be for it.  Assess me.  I'll own whatever the assessment is.  For the record, I'm a terrible driver.  My son-in-law, who plays hand-eye-coordination games rapidly performed two jobs in short order without any mistakes.  Having never played the game before, and without any training except five minutes of my telling him what buttons did what.  Took him 20 minutes.  He's an electrician, in his 30s, expecting a promotion to a management position on an office-building site in the next year.  He'll probably get it.

Meanwhile, I've flipped the truck unintentionally about ... 11 times?  Thereabouts.  I'm getting better.  In any case, I don't know how the blinkers work yet.  From a physical manipulation perspective, I'd be overwhelmed trying to remember to turn them on.  I'll remind the reader, I don't have a driver's license.  I've never had one.

But I'm absolutely certain that any assessment of my skills as a truck driver would prove that I'm responsible enough to be a stay-at-home writer.  Especially if the door were locked from the outside.