The Impact of Driverless Cars

JimmyB27 said:

The sad thing is, if we switched immediately, overnight, car accidents would almost certainly practically vanish, if not entirely. Eventually, of course, there would be an accident, someone would die, and the media would be screeching about killer robot cars.

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Humans are REALLY bad at risk judgment.

The potential problems faced by driverless cars are all surmountable. I think that's already pretty clear. And these problems pale in comparison to the actual problems experienced currently on roadways with cars driven by people, as rugcat detailed.

But in my mind, that's all secondary. What is significant here are the potential consequences, the creation of a new transportation paradigm, as outlined in the article in the OP. It's not just driverless cars, but the combination of such with ride-sharing programs and companies.

Even if we allow that not everyone would participate in such things, cars per capita would drop precipitously imo. Why? Well consider this: a driverless car could take someone to work, drop them off, then return home for use by another family member throughout the day (or then take another family member to work), then return automatically for a pick up. Multiple car households would be almost pointless. One can easily see how ride-sharing would slowly become the default method of transport. The benefit of car ownership would cease to outweigh the costs.

And if that happens, styles and models of cars would become pointless, as would all manner of personalization.

From the article:

Ancillary industries such as the $198 billion automobile insurance market, $98 billion automotive finance market, $100 billion parkingindustry, and the $300 billion automotive aftermarket will collapse as demand for their services evaporates. We will see the obsolescence of rental car companies, public transportation systems, and, good riddance, parking, and speeding tickets.

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But we will see the transformation of far more than just consumer transportation: self-driving semis, buses, earth movers, and delivery trucks could obviate the need for professional drivers and the support industries that surround them.

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That seems pretty accurate to me.

Now consider how the internet is slowly limiting many shopping trips. Amazon is already ridiculously fast, when it comes to delivery times. This is only going to speed things up. And grocery delivery will be far easier, as well.

All told, this means a great deal of business and job destruction.

Maryn said:

We have a Google employee in the family, and because of him, my brother got a longish ride in one of the driverless cars. It was nearly all on the highway, and while he felt some trepidation at first, especially in light of how heavy the traffic was, he ended up totally impressed as it deftly handled cars drifting from adjacent lanes, cars cutting in front of it, cars cutting it off to make a right exit from the left lane, a bottleneck, and other high volume traffic situations. He admitted the car handled the ride with no close calls and drove itself as well as, if not better than, he could have.

His prediction was that the well-off boomers who are aging out of being safe drivers with fast response times will be lining up to buy these, especially in Silicon Valley. It will allow them to continue to live as they always have, rather than being trapped at home or relegated to public transportation when they can no longer drive. He said he'd buy one himself if the price was $100K or less.

Maryn, who would not

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I live in a rural area with a 1+ hr commute each day - having a self-driving car would thus free up ten or more hours a week for me, which I would gladly pay for.

Additionally, many excellent pubs and restaurants are outside walking distance, which means either me or my wife has to stay sober to visit them - having the option for the car to drive us back without worrying about that would increase the amount of money we put into those local establishments (not least because we often just don't bother and instead crack open a drink at home).

Re: human intervention, I could see a model where centres of full-time "drivers" can intervene if a remote warning is sent by a self-driving vehicle. A lot of the potential of driverless cars is only realised if the passengers don't have to pay attention.

Like everything, for jobs that something kills off, other jobs are created or increased. Amazon kills some things, yet requires staffing itself.

If driverless cars caused a reduction in those things - I don't think it'd kill them off for a good while, because I think people still want personalization and as long as humans are on the road, I'm not riding in a Smart car, etc., there will be people needed to clean the driverless cars, gas them, maintain them, etc.

There will be businesses cropping up offering senior rides, or driverless car delivery services or etc.

I'm not really sure how this could happen gradually. In order to work, I think, my car would have to 'talk' to your car and every other car on the road in order to assess risks collectively and avoid them. If I'm in a computer-driven car and many of the cars around me are driven by people, my car may have a difficult time avoiding risks from cars it can't communicate with.

I wonder how these cars would react to flashing lights in the rearview mirror.

asroc said:

I wonder how these cars would react to flashing lights in the rearview mirror.

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I'm sure that police cars would put out a signal to make driverless cars pull over until the driverless police cars and their police robots go by...

But where would you be going? To work? Not for long. Robots will be doing your jobs soon enough. Shit, once semi-AI hits, robots will become consumers too...and they'll be the one's in the driverless cars...going to work and stores...

...and do you think our corporately owned government will do for the people? We'll be useless...maybe a few people will be kept in national forests for memory's sake...but I don't care much for our chances. I will not ride in a driverless car. I'm not digging my own grave, thank you...

As mentioned, the only accidents involving self driving cars have been the fault of human drivers in other vehicles.

For people who cannot get a drivers' license, being able to get in a car and go anywhere they want? It's something that somebody who hasn't been limited to public transport can't really grasp, I don't think.

I think that if you look at game system AIs - I don't see a non-sentient AI having issues with things such as "There's a horse on the road - I need to slow down." or "That is a child playing - I need to slow down." And given how some people drive past riding horses or carriages - I'd trust a properly programmed AI first.

The real implications are in cities. I don't own a car. I rent one when I need one. There's something here called ZipCar where you can subscribe to car access.

Most of the cars owned in cities spend 22 hours a day in a driveway or a parking garage. That's not very efficient. I've seen a prediction - and I believe it - where most city dwellers will stop owning cars once self driving cars become common. Instead, they'll subscribe to a car service. A few clicks on your cell phone and your self driving car will be outside your home at 7:02am. It will have you to work by 8:40am - then it will go pick up somebody else who's day starts later.

Thus? Many fewer cars.

Bad for the auto industry. Very bad for taxi drivers. But good for the environment.

The problem, as with so much else, is the loss of jobs - but I don't want to hijack this thread into futuristic economic systems.

I for one definitely want access to self driving cars, though.

The city talk is interesting.

Most people in my city don't own cars to begin with. A large percentage of people I know don't drive. My high school had no driver's ed - I had two classmates who could drive by graduation, both lived in the far suburbs. I have friends from h.s. who still don't have licenses. It's not at all a given here that anyone can drive, and it's much more rare to have a car than not, because it's not needed.

Someone upthread, Brutal Mustang, I think, said it'd be no problem in cities if streets were closed to people so cars could run unimpeded, but it'd be a problem in the country. That's just so backward-seeming to me I don't know what to do with it. No, people don't ride horses down the street, but they need to walk across the street all day long. Major cities are often very pedestrian and very public-transit driven. The world's major cities have had public transit moving most of the populous for over a century, and on it rolls.

There'd be no diminished use of cars, because there aren't lots of people in cities using cars to get to work as it is. There are some, but they're people coming in to the city or leaving it, who don't want to take transit, nearly always. People do use cabs in cities, and that might change, but it's changing now, with Uber and the like, so it's just disruption upon disruption. People subscribe to car services now - I can rattle off the numbers of two in my city right now and I don't use them, and they're not the ones used by the people in midtown, who have accounts, where the black cars line up all day moving employees to and fro.

Again, so those drivers wouldn't have their jobs, but there'd be a need for people to maintain the cars, service the cars, put stuff IN the cars to be ferried places, etc. A whole new slew of disruption would crop up. You can't stop progress, and I don't want to stop safety. What worries me is the Dunning-Kruger effect writ large here.

I'd worry that, overall, the people most reluctant to stop, believing they're 'safer' or 'better drivers' than computer-driven cars would actually be the most dangerous people on the road.

Diana Hignutt said:

I'm sure that police cars would put out a signal to make driverless cars pull over until the driverless police cars and their police robots go by...

But where would you be going? To work? Not for long. Robots will be doing your jobs soon enough. Shit, once semi-AI hits, robots will become consumers too...and they'll be the one's in the driverless cars...going to work and stores...

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I drive an ambulance. But people already ignore the signals we put out, so the situation can really only improve. The day I see a robot successfully treating a heroin overdose, including the post-naloxone freakout, I will happily quit.

kuwisdelu said:

Eventually, it'll probably be illegal to drive a car yourself.

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I hope not. Driving is fun.

asroc said:

I drive an ambulance. But people already ignore the signals we put out, so the situation can really only improve. The day I see a robot successfully treating a heroin overdose, including the post-naloxone freakout, I will happily quit.


I hope not. Driving is fun.

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You won't be needed. Robots don't overdose. None of us will be needed.

Ah, so the driverless cars will invariably turn into Skynet?

NinjaFingers said:

But good for the environment.

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How? Cars will be constantly driving empty between errands, using more energy than ever.

Brutal Mustang said:

How? Cars will be constantly driving empty between errands, using more energy than ever.

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They'd be saving energy. They can do the errands for multiple people at once, in a more efficient manner, than people who all drive separately, to and fro, on circuitous routes.

It's rather an obvious trend. Ever growing human populations will collapse the biosphere in ever-growing consumer corporatism, leading to the death of the people. Therefore a smart corporation with long term vision will see the wisdom in robot workers and robot consumers. They will be able to survive without a biosphere. Corporations will utilize robots to monetize the galaxy and eventually all time and space. Unlimited eternal corporate growth...with robotic workers, robotic consumers, and robotic stock holders. We're very nearly obsolete. So, feel free to smugly dismiss my words as neo-Luddite ravings if you like, but remember...I told you so.

cornflake said:

They'd be saving energy. They can do the errands for multiple people at once, in a more efficient manner, than people who all drive separately, to and fro, on circuitous routes.

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In theory, but is that how it would actually go down? Seems to me there'd be less cars in driveways, but far more on the road, many of them empty.

Brutal Mustang said:

In theory, but is that how it would actually go down? Seems to me there'd be less cars in driveways, but far more on the road, many of them empty.

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Why not? If they're empty and running errands, you need fewer of them.

If a car is, I dunno, an errand van from an errand company, maybe it has a whole lot of boxes inside, like Amazon lockers, instead of seats, and the Amazon warehouse or the drugstore or the whatever fills the boxes and it drives from spot to spot. It gets to your house, you get an alert, go out, put in a code or hold up your phone, your box unlocks, you take your stuff, it drives off to the next destination. One car, errands all day - it just circles back to whatever store to get filled up with stuff.

LOL

There is a Tesla store near me and I drool at the window sometimes.

I hate driving. I'm all for robot cars. Though robots freak me out. :/ Hm. We're getting closer to SF imaginings.

The way I envision it is that when you call for a car, the closest car comes. No, they wouldn't be cruising around all day empty - that's just silly. If nobody needed them, they'd park up. (Or go refuel/recharge if needed). Then once they got a call they'd be on the road again.

Also, there is car pooling. At least some people would agree to pool routes if there's somebody going the same way. (I might not as a woman on my own if I didn't know the person).

But let's say one car can drive three people to work. That's two fewer cars that need to be out there, meaning fewer cars that need to be built. That same car might then drive an elderly lady to the grocery store and back, then take a group of friends to the bar that evening. We're talking a drastic reduction in the need for vehicles, especially in urban areas. Because of that there would be plenty of space for them to park when they don't have a "fare." They would automatically turn themselves in for maintenance if onboard diagnostics detected a problem and every X miles as the manufacturer required.

Don said:

Whatever happened to all those unemployed buggy-whip makers and horse-crap shovelers, anyway?

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They went to work in the coal mines and died ignominiously.

It's a cute line. And it's certainly true that what we're talking about here is creative destruction. But that doesn't mean full replacement of industry and jobs, immediately or even across time.

I would argue that this kind of process can be far more rapid now, because of current conditions. And that matters for people in the moment.

Imo, one of the driving forces behind the "new normal" of the LFPR is the absolute loss of opportunity on a per capita basis because of certain shifts in the economy.

But I'm not suggesting this is something that needs to be stopped or the like. The wheels of change and all that. I'm just allowing that this kind of shift isn't automatically peaches and cream across the board.

cornflake said:

Why not? If they're empty and running errands, you need fewer of them.

If a car is, I dunno, an errand van from an errand company, maybe it has a whole lot of boxes inside, like Amazon lockers, instead of seats, and the Amazon warehouse or the drugstore or the whatever fills the boxes and it drives from spot to spot. It gets to your house, you get an alert, go out, put in a code or hold up your phone, your box unlocks, you take your stuff, it drives off to the next destination. One car, errands all day - it just circles back to whatever store to get filled up with stuff.

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Yeah, but human nature being what it is, I think people would wind up abusing it. Left sunglasses at friends? Send car.