What Your Car Reveals About You

May 22, 2008 — -- Want to hear something scary? What if your car could tell everything it knows about you?

Stuff like how angry you got at that little old lady who cut you off. How you try to cope with your own road rage. Where you were last night, and how long you stayed there.

We're not there yet, but we're getting closer every day. And it doesn't have to be a bad thing, according to Clifford Nass, professor of computer science, sociology, and several other things at Stanford University.

For several years now, Nass has studied how we interact with the machines that are increasingly taking over our lives. It started with computers, and we know now how much our computers know about us.

In recent years, though, much of Nass' boundless energy has shifted to that icon of personal freedom and gender bravado, the automobile. It's an odd switch, especially for a guy who says he never has been much of a car freak.

Nass, the author of two books on machine-human interaction, said his current curiosity about the automobile began when he was approached by one of the most innovative car manufacturers in the world.

"Toyota had become interested in the idea of having a virtual passenger in the car," Nass said in a telephone interview. "Someone who would drive along with you on a boring route and talk to you and stuff like that, keep you engaged. The idea was that it would be a virtual assistant of some kind, keep you awake, engaged, not bored, sort of make it more interesting for you, just as passengers do in real life."

While he was working on that proposal, another auto manufacturer showed him a demonstration of a system that was designed to help a driver deal with personal emotions.

"It would tell if the driver was upset," Nass said. "The driver is driving along and the car says, 'Oh, you seem a little upset, you should try to calm down.' But instead of calming down, the driver became even more upset and he started driving worse. And then the car said, 'Oh, you're driving very badly, you really must calm down,' which of course made the guy even madder. And then the car said, 'Oh, you're getting very, very upset, you really should consider pulling over,' and, of course, the guy slammed into a wall.