Blindspin

Fun stuff happening with cars these days.

There's Tesla's recent improvements that gives its car some minor abilities to drive itself - self-parking, changing lanes on its own. Evidently these are common in high-end automobiles, these days, but still impressive enough.

There's Google's self-driving car - although there are still issues preventing it from being able to take over 100%.

(Then again,  they should look to Tesla's efforts to make an electric car usable for long-distance driving: Expand the range as much as feasible, then find areas you can connect with that range, then connect those areas together, and pretty soon you'll be able to drive across the country.)

About 40 years ago, there was a story about what else a self-driving car might give rise to.

The Dream Master (1966) by Roger Zelazny is a science fiction novel about a psychotherapist who uses shared dreaming with his patients. By setting up dream worlds that visualize the patients' neuroses, he can evoke responses - epiphanies - about their anxieties. In addition to the standard therapist skills and the technical training to work the dream-shaping equipment, it requires a strong self-image, to ensure the therapist stays in control of the dreaming.  Another important requirement is brought up when a blind lady arrives who wishes to learn the trade: Without the ability to comprehend the world visually, she won't be able to build the dreams in a way that will be helpful to her patients. Which is the starting point for what happens to everyone involved.

In this future, most cars are auto-piloted: Enter coordinates and off you go. But nothing says you have to know where you are going. Instead, one might blindspin: choose coordinates at random and let the car take you there however it needs to. The two main characters - teacher and student - indulge in a blindspin soon after they meet. (He chooses the coordinates: she says her fingers know too many places to be random.) The short trip mirrors the journey the two are starting together as teacher and student. There are probably another half-dozen ways the short sequence foreshadows the arc of the characters' relationships - not because they are obviously known, but because that's the sort of writing Zelazny did.

One other, since it does make a good point: The origins of blindspins is attributed to a younger generation that used them much as drive-ins were used by teenagers in the 1950s. The period of the novel appears, similarly, to be a stultifying and stagnant First Turning. 

A Blindspin has nothing to do with blindness as such, although surely the term was chosen as an allusion to the student's disability. (And before the politically correct pedants come after that term, note that within the story it is a very definite problem - the question of whether it is feasible is answered, by the end, in the negative. ) It evokes a sense of not being in control - which causes the teacher trouble by the end. As a concept,  it's also an impressive way of revealing the unexpected details about the future - which details can be seen to have echoes in the past.