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Focusing On Tech Alone, You Miss How Autonomous Driving Will Change Society
Hallie Siegel writes The way that consumers interact with and operate cars will transform most functions in commuting, travel, communications, car ownership, and many other as-yet unknown ways. Dieter Zetsche, chairman of Daimler and head of Mercedes-Benz Cars, said at this year's CES in Las Vegas: "Anyone who focuses solely on the technology has not yet grasped how autonomous driving will change our society." Robotics watcher Frank Tobe writes about how imagination is overtaking the ethics debate around autonomous cars."
Bottom line: we probably cannot imagine all the implications and collateral effects driverless cars will cause beginning early in 2020 for top-end and early adopters and progressively more widespread year after year until mid 2030 when these cars will be our major form of transportation.
That's it? That's your substance? Hell, why not try? Here are my own guesses:
These are all, of course, many years off. But it is starting to look more and more inevitable.
My work here is dung.
Why do we *need* to travel at all?
Because lots of things have to be done in person. I run a manufacturing plant. I can assure you that you cannot run a manufacturing plant from your bedroom at home. It's a little hard to run a restaurant while telecommuting. Good luck operating a retail store while telecommuting. Farming? Mining? Medicine? Freight delivery? Most jobs aren't really compatible with telecommuting if you actually give it a moment's thought.
Autonomous transportation in many cases is simply very inefficient teleconferencing. At least this is true in business.
I assure you that that is quite false in the majority of cases. Autonomous transportation is basically like a very small flexible train system that does not require tracks. It's like riding the bus - someone else is doing the driving but you still have to get there for a reason.
As a software developer I like coming into my office to work.
Having other people just walk over and say have you seen this happen before? Or walk over to the hardware lab and say "Can you check the sensor", is very useful.
Plus I like most of my co-workers and enjoy working with them.
I have had jobs where that is not true but frankly not being in the office would not have make the situation any better.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
There will certainly be some people that will need to have a dedicated vehicle based on the cargo they are carrying, but for the most of us, why have a car at all? Thing about the space savings if you didn't need to park all of those cars downtown and during the day they could drive themselves somewhere else and drive someone with a different schedule, sort of like a driverless Uber, where everyone just shares the cost of the fleet of cars based on usage.
Given it took about two decades for anti-lock braking systems to become widely available on cars (and that is a relatively simple technology compared to autonomous driving systems), most of us will be dead and buried before there is a significant percentage of self-driving cars on the road. First, we'll see "super-cruise control", where the driver can engage a partial system on a highway but the system will revert back to the driver if certain tolerances can't be met (e.g., weather, traffic levels). You'll still need a licensed driver behind the wheel. This will be an expense option on high-end cars for 5-10 years, then will trickle down to more mid-priced vehicles. In the meantime, the auto makers, in an attempt to cope with the shift in liability from driver to manufacturer, will introduce incremental changes to the system to increase those tolerances, but will still insist that the driver take over "just in case" a deer suddenly jumps out on to the highway. All the while the manufacturers will be collecting data on how the system copes with real-world driving to try to determine at what point a truly autonomous car is possible, and their risk in getting sued for a faulty system is acceptable. Given how risk-adverse most corporations are, especially auto makers, I don't see an autonomous car in my future (and I'm 52). Personally, I think you'll get more insight on the future of autonomous cars from the insurance companies than the auto makers.
"Could be worse...could be raining." Igor
I can see things that aren't really cars as well. an autonomous motorcycle with no room for a rider, but with a very large tool chest, so a plumber (for instance) doesn't need his own truck. The drone meets him at his work destination, unlocks and lets him access the tools of his trade.
A similar motorcycle acts as a delivery van. covered with drawers, each of which can lock or unlock independently. It goes to a destination, sends a message to the people inside the building and waits ten minutes. after the person inside authenticates with their cell phone (maybe by taking a picture of the drone) the drone unlocks the one drawer, and waits for the person to remove or add a package.
Make emergency vehicle drones and put them in strategic locations all over the city. call 911 and one of these drones pops out of the police box and could be there long before a human response, Then it could provide SOME assistance while waiting for the rest of the emergency team.
The party drone opens into a full tailgate bar. Flash mob raves.
"Rush hour" will become an anachronistic misnomer, as driverless cars could move at open freeway speeds, even with (increasingly rare) high traffic density.
Why the assumption that rush hour will disappear? If everyone continues to go to work at roughly the same time then the roadways will be crowded. Automation *might* alleviate this somewhat but I really cannot envision it disappearing entirely. The cars still take up physical space and the safety margins required won't be drastically less then they are now. Plus populations continue to grow so any efficiency gains are going to mitigated by larger numbers of people on the road over time. The human population has nearly doubled in my lifetime with little indication it is slowing.
I imagine watching cars travelling 65mph -- even when they're nearly bumper-to-bumper -- will make many logjammed drivers in the human/slow lanes think twice about their insistence on being in "control".
Do you think the laws of physics will be repealed as well? Traffic density will have a minimum largely dictated by the traction of tires to the road. Ice will still be slippery and stuff will unexpectedly cross the road and potholes will still pop tires, etc. Computers can have faster reaction times but that doesn't mean cars can stop or maneuver instantly. Several thousand kilograms isn't super maneuverable no matter who is driving. The tighter you pack traffic the more accidents *will* occur, with or without a driver.
I think driverless cars have huge potential benefits but I think touting them as the solution to traffic congestion is rather over-sold.
Fault is moot in that case. Whoever is insuring the vehicle that malfunctioned and caused the accident will pay out. You won't have to wait for anything. There will be lawsuits afterwards, sure, but it will be the insurance company trying to recover their costs from the manufacturer, and it won't really have much of anything to do with you.
And socialism is not the answer to ANYTHING. We already have socialism in medicine, and have for more than 100 years. More specifically, fascism/corporatism. Before that, we had a free market, and even the poorest family could afford a middle of the night housecall from a doctor. They had a harder time paying for the medicine than the doctor.
A basic income is better than the current haphazard welfare system, but it is unneccessary. Do you need free money from the government to pay for access to internet websites? No. Machines have brought the cost of such services down so much that its not even worth it to charge you anything. Robots will do the same thing with real world goods and services. Once everything is automated, everything will be free. If you have some weird thing that you want that requires human intervention, you will have to pay for that, but that's about it. Socialism will only delay that lofty goal.