About the Piece

A design fiction, entirely invented, called AI 2040: FSD Edition. It takes one assumption, that driverless cars work, and follows Maggie Rourke, who is blind, and Tony Kerrigan, the taxi driver who used to take her home, from 2027 to 2040. It is a scenario, not a forecast, and it asks the question the technology cannot answer for itself: who do the cars work for?

In full

Design fiction, 2026. AI 2040: FSD Edition, by Charlotte Joanne.

AI 2040: FSD Edition

A Blind Ant design fiction

This is a scenario, not a forecast. It makes one assumption and follows it honestly: the cars work. Everything else is what happens when they do.

2027: The Chime

Maggie Rourke has been blind since she was nineteen. She is fifty-six, lives in Wallasey, and has never once driven herself home from anywhere.

Her first driverless ride is not in Liverpool. It is in London, on a work trip, in the spring the robotaxis finally took paying passengers without a safety driver. She books it on her phone with VoiceOver. The app asks one question she has never been asked by a taxi firm: “Would you like the car to find you, or would you like to find the car?”

She chooses “find me”. The car pulls in, and a soft two-note chime starts from the kerbside rear door. The phone says, “Your car is the one chiming. The door is on your right, about three steps.” She walks to the sound, puts her hand on the handle, and gets in.

Nobody grabs her elbow. Nobody asks her companion where she’s going. Nobody says, “You’re doing ever so well.” The car says, “Good evening, Maggie. Twenty-two minutes to your hotel. Would you like me to tell you when we’re five minutes away?”

She texts her sister: “I’ve just been driven home by ChatGPT, and it was the most respectful ride of my life.”

2028: Tony

Back home, Maggie’s taxi is still Tony. Tony Kerrigan has driven private hire on Merseyside for twenty-two years. He started after the car plant cut a shift and his foreman told him, kindly, that he should think about retraining. Driving was the retraining.

Tony knows which door of the Ship and Mitre Maggie prefers. He knows to say “kerb” and not “mind the step”. He knows she likes the radio off, and that she’ll talk about the football if Everton won and about the weather if they didn’t. Over the years he has driven her to a job interview, a funeral, a first date and a hospital at three in the morning.

The Liverpool trial starts that autumn: forty cars in the city centre, a hundred by Christmas. Tony’s Friday nights drop by a fifth. “It’s only the students,” he tells Maggie. “They’ll get bored of it.”

2029: A Press Release

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE. We are proud to announce our Driver Transition Programme for Merseyside. Experienced drivers are invited to retrain as Remote Fleet Supervisors, ensuring the safety and comfort of passengers from our state-of-the-art operations centre in Warrington. Each supervisor will oversee up to forty vehicles. We believe no one should be left behind on the road to the future.

There are eleven supervisor posts. Four hundred and six drivers apply. Tony isn’t one of them; the centre is forty minutes away and the shifts are nights. “Forty cars each,” he says. “Do the maths, girl.”

Maggie does the maths. She has done it before, from the other side, every time someone told her that the answer to a system with no room in it was a course.

2030: Blind Drunk

The Automated Vehicles Act had a phrase in it that almost nobody noticed when it passed: “no user-in-charge”. In a car with a user-in-charge, the person in the driving seat still has to be fit to drive. In a no-user-in-charge vehicle, there isn’t one. Everyone aboard is a passenger. The law does not ask a passenger whether they can see, or whether they’ve had four large glasses of Rioja.

In December 2030 Maggie goes to the Christmas do. At twenty to one in the morning she is, by any reasonable standard, blind drunk. This is the first time in thirty-seven years that the phrase has been only half true in her favour.

She taps the phone. The car finds her. The chime is the same two notes. She gets in on the second attempt, laughing, and says, “Home, James,” because she has waited her whole life to say it to a car.

“I’ll take you home to Wallasey,” the car says. “I’m not James, but I don’t mind. There’s water in the door pocket on your left.”

Nobody has to stay sober to get her home. Nobody has to wait with her in the cold. Nobody has to be thanked, or tipped, or worried about. At the other end she stands in her own hallway, keys in her hand, coat still on, and cries a bit, and isn’t entirely sure whether it’s the wine.

Three streets away, Tony is parked outside a closed kebab shop, waiting for a fare that doesn’t come.

2031: The Crash

The first fatal robotaxi crash in Britain happens in Leeds on a wet Tuesday in March. A car misreads a cyclist’s hand signal in low sun, and a man dies. It leads every news bulletin for four days. A minister is summoned. A campaign group calls for a moratorium. A columnist writes that we have handed our streets to machines that do not know what a human life is.

In the same week, twenty-nine people are killed on British roads in crashes involving human drivers. None of them is named on the national news. Nobody calls for a moratorium on people.

Maggie listens to all of it on the radio and thinks both of these are true. The machine made a new mistake. We should learn from it. And the old mistakes are still happening, quietly, every day, and nobody is counting them as a cost of the way things are.

The moratorium doesn’t pass. The software is updated. The man in Leeds is still dead.

2032: The Fleet Pack

Tony’s brother-in-law Gary, who is in insurance and has a buy-to-let flat in Crosby, buys a Fleet Pack: three self-driving cars that he never sees, which earn on the platform while he sleeps. The brochure calls it “passive income.” Gary calls it his pension.

At a family barbecue, Tony asks him who sets the fares. “The platform.” Who decides which cars get the good jobs? “The platform.” Who takes a cut? “The platform.” What happens when the cars wear out? Gary goes quiet and gets another burger.

Private car insurance for human-driven cars goes up for the third-year running. Insurers have noticed who crashes. Maggie’s neighbour sells her Qashqai and says she feels like she’s sold a horse.

2034: Last Shift

Tony’s firm closes in April. His last fare, by a coincidence neither of them arranged, is Maggie. She books him deliberately, the old way, on the phone.

They drive the long way round, along the prom, windows down. He says “kerb” when they stop. She gives him a tip that is far too big, and he tries to refuse it, and she tells him not to be soft.

“You know what gets me,” he says. “It’s better. For you, I mean. I’m not daft. It’s better for you. I just thought there’d be a place for me in it.”

Maggie has spent forty years being told there would be a place for her in it. She doesn’t know what to say, so she says the true thing: “There should be.”

2036: The Utility

By now almost nobody under thirty in the Liverpool City Region owns a car. It makes as much sense as owning a bus. Cars are something you summon, like electricity or water, and so the argument that was always going to happen finally happens: who owns the tap?

Two proposals go before the combined authority. The first is a twenty-year exclusive licence for a single platform, in return for a fare cap and a jobs pledge that everybody privately agrees is worth nothing. The second is a public fleet, like Merseyrail on tyres, owned by the region, with fares set by an elected mayor and any surplus paid into a local citizens’ fund.

A small disabled people’s transport co-op from Birkenhead submits evidence. It runs nine cars, owned by its members, most of whom used to be the people nobody wanted to pick up. Their evidence is one sentence long: “We were the first customers of a world without drivers, and we would like to be owners of it too.”

Tony, who now helps run the co-op’s maintenance and charging depot for slightly more than he used to earn driving, reads it out at the hearing, because Maggie has a cold.

2040: Tuesday Afternoon

The scenario doesn’t tell you which proposal won. That’s the point. The cars were always going to work. The question was always who they would work for.

What we do know is this. On a Tuesday afternoon in 2040, Maggie Rourke, seventy, blind, and slightly tipsy after a long lunch, stands outside the Ship and Mitre and taps her phone. Two notes chime from the kerb. The door is on her right, three steps. She gets in without anyone taking her elbow, and the car takes her home.

She thinks of Tony, as she always does at the kerb. Then she thinks the thing she has been thinking for forty years, in two halves that she refuses to separate:

There’s never been a better time to be blind. But somebody still paid for the ride, and it wasn’t the people who own the cars.

Behind the fiction

Maggie, Tony, Gary, the operators, the Liverpool trial, the Driver Transition Programme, the co-op and the crash in Leeds are invented, and so is everything dated after today. What is real is the law the story leans on: the Automated Vehicles Act 2024 provides for self-driving vehicles run by a licensed no-user-in-charge operator, so that nobody on board is the driver. The towns and the region are real places.

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About the author

Blind Ant is written and run by Charlotte Joanne. About Blind Ant says more.