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."

Comments

What an Embarrassingly Vapid Article

[eldavojohn]

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:

• Insurance companies will struggle to adjust. You know all those annoying GEICO commercials? Prepare to watch a lot less of them and if you're in the auto insurance business, now would be a good time to diversify. And if you're not in that business, prepare to enjoy not having to pay monthly on auto insurance. Huge plus for the economy.
• Real Estate prices will fluctuate away from metropolises. Oh, 1,000 sq ft in a downtown townhouse is $1.5 million dollars? Or a nice house on 100 acres of land is $125,000 but it's one hour away from downtown? Yeah, I think I'll just take that hour drive twice a day and just watch netflix on my phone or read on my kindle or code on my laptop or even just sleep it.
• Drunk driving/texting while driving/distracted driving will become ailments of the past. Lose your license? Afraid of going home from happy hour "buzzed"? Just buy an autonomous car. A lot less accidents too -- huge plus for society.
• Organ sources will dry up. A lot of organs come from car & motorcycle accidents. Morbid but true. Need to up our game on printing organs in order to prepare for this.
• If idiots connect their cars or the underlying system to the internet, people will end up at hacked destinations.
• Parking will become a bigger business -- especially garages that work hand in hand with autonomous vehicles.

These are all, of course, many years off. But it is starting to look more and more inevitable.

Re: What an Embarrassingly Vapid Article

[websensei]

"Rush hour" will become an anachronistic misnomer, as driverless cars could move at open freeway speeds, even with (increasingly rare) high traffic density. This will make its first appearance in formerly-HOV lanes. 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".

Most people cannot telecommute

[sjbe]

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.

Re:The real missed question

[LWATCDR]

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.