Picture this: You’re driving with your son and daughter down a particularly precarious section of Highway 1 on California’s coastline. On the left are stone cliffs and to the right is a sheer chasm to the ocean below. As you start down a steep section of road your brakes go out and, as you turn a corner, tires screeching, a group of 20 schoolchildren are crossing the road. There are only two options: Drive through the crowd of kids, or plunge you and your own children to your deaths. You have one second to make your decision.
As autonomous vehicles (AVs) and other automated machinery become more readily available, this is a question programmers of these computerized decision-making machines are grappling to answer.
A 2016 study, “The social dilemma of autonomous vehicles” by Jean-François Bonnefon, et al., found that overall AVs should reduce traffic accidents, but when choosing between two evils, such as running over pedestrians or sacrificing themselves and their passengers to save the pedestrians, people’s reactions are complicated. Whereas participants in the study readily approved other people to own what are called “utilitarian AVs” (AVs that sacrifice their passengers for the greater good), for themselves people preferred to ride in AVs that protect them at all costs. The study participants also disapproved of enforcing utilitarian regulations for AVs and would be less willing to buy such a vehicle. Consequently—and paradoxically—some AVs could end up being programed under the utilitarian model whereas others might not, resulting in what the study suggests could be an increased casualty rate until a safer algorithm or technology is utilized.
Can you imagine a world where some people own self-driving cars that protect them at all costs and some don’t? Well, that sounds almost like the way it already is, with plenty of folks likely to crash right through the group of schoolchildren in the scenario above, while others would take the self-eliminating plunge into the ocean.
What does this have to do with the business of wine?
It is likely that everything in the future will become more automated, and not only will the programmers need to consider moral decisions for the machines themselves, policymakers and businesses will need to consider other challenging questions, too.
According to a report by the Institute for Spatial Economic Analysis, 60 percent of low-wage jobs in large metropolitan areas are expected to be lost to automation by 2035, and agriculture communities will be hit hard.
We are on the verge of automated winemaking. The future of winemaking will include increased automation in the vineyards, too. With mechanized harvesters programed to pick the grapes, destem them and optically sort them into various quality levels at a rate unimaginable to their human competitors. It’s not beyond reason these machines will soon also be made to macerate the berries and start the fermentation process before getting them to the winery. Heck, why not just skip the winery all together and bottle it in transit? Or why even deal with grapes at all?
Goodbye grapes, hello future
Some companies are even toying with creating synthetic wine made from a concoction of chemicals. Ava Winery in San Francisco, whose motto is, “Goodbye grapes, hello future,” has recently created such a wine, and they claim that the majority of people can’t tell the difference between their designer wines and real wine made with actual grapes. And Ava is not the only one racing down the track.
A few of these synthetic wine producers are even looking to open wine factories in wine country so that they might make “regional” wines that have labels that read “Made in Napa” or “Produced in Sonoma.” I wonder if they could call theirs an “estate wine” if the chemicals were made onsite. And if you live in Timbuktu and you see a Cabernet Sauvignon on the shelf that was made in Napa and is rated highly (remember these are designed wines and can be optimized for any flavor profile, including being made to rate highly with reviewers), but costs only $3 a bottle, then that’s the one you’re going to probably purchase.
Conditions are changing fast
When was the last time you used cash or went into a bank to deposit a check? Each time we order something online or write an email instead of sending a card or letter we inadvertently—and unavoidably, it seems—erase the need of what used to take many people’s labor to accomplish.
Beyond what is to some a science-fiction horror story of synthetic wine, imagine the impact on furthering the loss of jobs. It’s not inconceivable that the unemployment rate becomes 40 percent, 50 percent or higher in some of the hardest-hit areas. What are all those people going to do? How will they make a living? And how will companies survive when they have few customers who are able to afford their services? What will the programmers code as being utilitarian at that point, I wonder. Or perhaps by then the programmers will no longer be needed, either. If that turns out to be the case, what will the computer-generated programed utilitarian algorithm be then?
