SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
from the who's-gonna-drive-miss-daisy? dept.
The race to bring driverless cars to the masses is only just beginning, but already it is a fight for the ages. The competition is fierce, secretive, and elite. It pits Apple against Google against Tesla against Uber: all titans of Silicon Valley, in many ways as enigmatic as they are revered.
As these technology giants zero in on the car industry, global automakers are being forced to dramatically rethink what it means to build a vehicle for the first time in a century. Aspects of this race evoke several pivotal moments in technological history: the construction of railroads, the dawn of electric light, the birth of the automobile, the beginning of aviation. There's no precedent for what engineers are trying to build now, and no single blueprint for how to build it.
Self-driving cars promise to create a new kind of leisure, offering passengers additional time for reading books, writing email, knitting, practicing an instrument, cracking open a beer, taking a catnap, and any number of other diversions. Peope who are unable to drive themselves could experience a new kind of independence. And self-driving cars could re-contextualize land-use on massive scales. In this imagined mobility utopia, drone trucks would haul packages across the country and no human would have to circle a city block in search of a parking spot.
If self-driving vehicles deliver on their promises, they will save millions of lives over the course of a few decades, destroy and create entire industries, and fundamentally change the human relationship with space and time. All of which is why some of the planet's most valuable companies are pouring billions of dollars into the effort to build driverless cars.
After automation puts everyone out of work, will anyone need to drive anywhere anymore?
(Score: 2) by VLM on Wednesday December 16 2015, @09:41PM
There is an observation that if you want to see what you will be doing in the future, look at what the rich are doing now.
You can estimate the likelihood of success by empathizing and estimating based on the past.
So you ask a plantation owner 200 years ago how people will pick cotton today, and you'll get all sorts of weird commentary about other races being property or human-form androids or genetically engineered cotton picking animals. Nobody would have commented about diesel powered GPS driven farm equipment. Or pointed out that most/lots of "fabric" is weaved of fibers made from polymerized crude oil, not cotton or linen. Of course they'd have no idea what any of that is.
So the odds are actually better than "the boring commute" will be replaced by the collapse of the corporate-crony capitalist economy. Or the end of cheap oil means the few survivors will be living at best a pre-petrochemical lifestyle, subsistence farming, wind powered trade, etc, such that most people will live a foot or two from where they work. Or the technological future will finally permit me to work at the computer on the desk next to my bed instead of driving 40 miles round trip to work on inferior desktop hardware. Or land zoning will move past "white flight", combined with economic decline, such that most people with jobs will rent apartments near where they work.
Looking at one example in more detail, if "near where I work" wasn't a complete shithole, I wouldn't drive 40 miles round trip such that I can live and do recreation and raise kids in near paradise in both a relative and absolute sense. At some point 40 miles round trip is too expensive or its cheaper to convert urban neighborhoods from filthy crime ridden shitholes with horrific schools to something a little more civilized... it could (emphasis "could") happen. People have been calling for "it" to happen continuously for my entire adult life although it hasn't happened yet, LOL. Still, it could happen. And its more likely than HAL9000 taking over my car, anytime soon.
(Score: 2) by deimtee on Thursday December 17 2015, @12:02AM
There is an observation that if you want to see what you will be doing in the future, look at what the rich are doing now.
You can estimate the likelihood of success by empathizing and estimating based on the past.
So you ask a plantation owner 200 years ago how people will pick cotton today, and you'll get all sorts of weird commentary about other races being property or human-form androids or genetically engineered cotton picking animals. Nobody would have commented about diesel powered GPS driven farm equipment. Or pointed out that most/lots of "fabric" is weaved of fibers made from polymerized crude oil, not cotton or linen. Of course they'd have no idea what any of that is.
He said look at what the rich are doing, not ask them to predict the future. 200 years ago, were the rich out in the fields picking cotton by hand? If not, you just argued in favour of his point.
Q. Do the rich drive themselves today? A. Only when they want to.
Therefore his prediction is that in the future you will only drive when you want to, not just because you need to get somewhere.
If you cough while drinking cheap red wine it really cleans out your sinuses.