What Should We Call Self-Driving Cars? | The Atlantic

If driverless cars do eventually take over the roads, what will it do to the way we talk about driving? For one thing, we’ll probably end up redefining the word “driver.” “A driver could come to mean the machine that drives just as a computer is a machine that computes,” Alexis Madrigal wrote for The Atlantic in 2014. After all, computers used to refer to people. Madrigal suggested using the term “driver” to mean a “driverless car,” and there’s something appealing, if a little fancy-schmancy, about its simplicity. Imagine these words coming out of your mouth: My commute is so much better when I take a driver, or They’re replacing the city bus fleet with drivers, or Want to share a driver?