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\CWHY WE SHOULD KEEP CARS AND HOW WE CAN MAKE THEM BETTER
\F0

\JA large and probably increasing number of thoughtful people
have come to believe that American society made a mistake
in basing itself on the automobile.  They think that we should
try in the long run to reorganize our society around some
form of public transportation, becasse we can't afford the
resources to continue with cars or because society would be
better without them.

This paper analyzes whether we should continue to base our
society on cars and concludes that we can and should.
Moreover, expected advances in computers and computer science,
especially in artificial intelligence, will eventually make
cars even more useful than they are today.

The topics discussed include the value to the individual
of personal transportation, the problems of duplicating
the virtues of the car in a public transportation system,
the long range energy and resource problems of cars, the
effect of cars on where people live and work, the legal and
moral issue posed by attempts to modify people's life styles
by court orders, administrative regulation, and laws,
and the possibility of computer control of cars leading to
an eventual automatic chauffeur.
A final section discusses
how people have come to take the positions they take and
may be unpleasantly \F1ad hominem\F0 for some tastes.\.


John McCarthy
Computer Science Department
Stanford, California 94305