Tokyo Driving School

Jan 05, 2009

Foreign residents in Tokyo wanting to switch their non-Japanese earned driver's license to a local variant inevitably make a pilgrimage to counter 27 on the 2nd floor of Samezu Driving School, tucked away in deepest Shinagawa. As one of the only places in Tokyo that offers this service the waiting room is a bukkake don of Tokyo's foreign residents - lending this corner of the building an air of infomality - when its time to pick up a form and head to the next counter visitors are addressed as ~san as opposed to the more honorific and generally elongated ~samaaaa more commonly heard resonating around the concrete walls of most local government offices and doctor's waiting rooms.

It just so happens that the building is a worthy destination for the amateur cultural anthropologist: from the non-ambient strip lighting reflecting off linoleum floors to the lengthy process that switching a license requires involving form filling, eye-tests, payments, photographs spanning half a day. But why am I here? In a world where our ability to location-shift ourselves from the tasks at hand what is the purpose of traveling to this physical building? How might the future perfect authority-to-drive be bestowed upon tomorrow's would-be driver?

Why does anyone need to take a driving test? Or any test for that matter? Imagine never having to take a test in your life ever again - not at school, university, in the work place.

Instead assessment is ongoing, everywhere - continuous learning pushed to its il/logical extreme. The authority required to start task X or access service Y assessed in real time drawing on a life's worth of data pushed through a filter of you in the here and now.

Instead of that one off driving test, the vehicle makes an assessment of whether you're fit to drive at that point when you decide to drive: it knows the time you've spent behind the wheel (and for novices time spent in the driving simulator); can factor in you ability to successfully complete hand-eye co-ordination tasks; that yesterday you partied late, drunk a bottle of wine and only slept three hours; the effects of the music that you've just listened to on your way here; that you have a tendency to become sexually aroused by the passenger you intend to pick up later in the journey (to comprehend how arousal and other emotions have on decision making processes Predictably / Irrational is a good read). The vehicle also has a fair idea of the journey that you are likely to take, the state of the road and of course other drivers.

Bearing in mind if we can truly make all this stuff work then we've probably solved self-driving cars, and putting aside the techno-Utopian dream for a moment. In this scenario just because someone is not 'fit to drive' don't imagine for a moment that they will barred from driving. As anyone in the insurance industry knows you can put a figure on the loss of life or limb,and whilst your society hasn't evolved to the point where there's an accepted culture of paying blood money, maybe it will come around sooner than you think. When you have the resources to pay, and the process is even marginally socially acceptable i.e. it's hard coded into the system - the ability to gamble, to take risks, to 'drive impaired' becomes a consumer choice, a luxury, a sign of wealth. From the roulette wheel to the spinning wheels of a dented, bloody, overturned car.

Yes, of course, the 'driving test' will continue to live on. As a rite of passage eventually going the way of the 'glove box' and the 'rear view mirror', a purpose forgotten within a couple of generations of net time.

If you've spent time in a large organisation these past few years you've probably brushed up against that early 21th century notion of 'life long learning' - that it's never too late to re skill, retool, learn something new. We are undergoing a fundamental change in the way we relate to objects and the way (connected) objects relate to us. 'Life long learning' is no longer about you in relation to what you can offer to achieve you potential - but rather the systems' ability to learn about you over the course of it, and your lifetime.

If we can create a working system that assesses your ability to do x, y and z - through a continuous assessment of you, a system that practically removes the need for 'the driving test' then that same system is going be smart enough to figure out how to maximise your human potential.

Which means that it will be smart enough to maximise it's own potential.

Location:
 Japan »  Tokyo »  Shinagawa Keywords:
 anthropology | bukkake | cultural norms | driving | school