Aramis is back?

Hat-tip to Peter Erdélyi on this one… Heathrow Airport WILL USE DRIVERLESS TAXIS to take customers to parking lots– just press a button for your destination and it will take you there. (And I agree with the commenters who didn’t understand why these vehicles are “creepy”.)

Aramis is surely the strangest of Latour’s books. He was commissioned to investigate the failure of the Aramis system, a boldly proposed driverless system that was meant to replace the Paris Metro.

With the current Metro, let’s say you’re at Cluny-La Sorbonne and you want to go to La Défense… I just pulled up a Metro map with tiny print, and it looks to me (though I could be wrong) like the best you can do is take the #10 to Sèvres Babylone, then the #12 to Place de la Concorde, and from there on the #1 to La Défense. (Perhaps I’m wrong in this particular case due to the tiny map. And of course what I myself would do in this case is just walk a few blocks up to Chatelet and take the #1 all the way. But imagine it’s raining really hard… And besides, everyone who’s spent time in Paris has had some complicated two-transfer rides on the Metro.)

In any case, Aramis would have eliminated that. You’d have gotten into one of the “creepy” little cars shown in this article, pressed a button for your destination, and it would have done all the steering and transferring for you. (Though I shouldn’t use the scare quotes around creepy here, because creepiness was in fact one of the issues that arose: let’s say some thugs get in your Aramis car with you. That would be creepy indeed.)

Latour talked to a lot of people, heard many sides of the story, drew his conclusions about what the key failures were. “Don’t innovate in too many respects at once” was perhaps the main lesson he drew from the exercise. The problems ranged from the financial to the political to the purely technical (brake problems, if memory serves). The project was finally killed, and I believe Jacques Chirac was one of the killers.

When I was 13, I happened to pass with my grandparents through Morgantown, West Virginia, where they have (or had?) a sort of monorail system that was an offshoot of the Aramis project. I remember thinking it was pretty cool, but of course it’s just Morgantown, West Virginia, so I think there was only one line, unlike Paris. But it did seem impressive to a 13-year-old boy.