Bad news: Robo-cars will make you work billions more hours. Good news: In 2040 A new report from management consultants McKinsey & Co. suggests the widespread adoption of autonomous cars will save billions of man-hours a year (or make us all work more hours, depending on your outlook) but not for a while. The dossier notes that software-driven vehicles are already in use commercially. Mining conglomerate …
yeah, right, and we'll all fly to work in personal helicopters.
back to freeing up space in cities - the space in cities will be chock-a-block because of more, many more cars on the streets. Likewise on 50 min saved for each journey. And think of those fun times when the software gets infected with a virus. But nosir, computer malware will be, like, TOTALLY eradicated by then!
No matter how long the commute is, if you're the one in the driverless car, you can dick around on your phone.
The total number of cars necessary to transport the same number of people will come down. If you only use your personal vehicle for 1 hour on a Saturday, that's 23 hours it is sitting around rusting. Pantsr for cars will be real. Others simply won't own a car, but will use an autonomous Uber. Others still could own an autonomous vehicle for commuting that is safer and allows leisure time. That could easily justify a $5k spike in price for early adopters.
This post has been deleted by its author
This post has been deleted by its author
Just because you're happy with random strangers in your car, or a significantly longer commute while you drive around picking up people you work with, does not mean anyone else is
And don't try the argument of "people car sharing could drive to the home of the person driving the commute" because that doesn't deal with the amount of traffic on the roads, just moves it around and worsens local congestion.
Not everyone lives in close proximity to their work colleagues, and there's a dozen reasons why work colleagues might be unwilling, uncomfortable, or find it outright inappropriate to car-share with other workmates.
IMHO the way to reduce traffic on the roads requires multiple synchronous, complimentary solutions.
Removing the need to commute in the first place would be a good start. Not every job can be done from home, but many can with common technology and the right managerial mindset. Tends to be the overbearing micromanagement types that are most resistant to the idea of remote working.
Stagger school start and end times perhaps, for different schools in an area or even different year groups in the same school.
Stagger work hours so there's no big peak morning and evening rush.
Stuff like that.
Saying people should car share is simply failing to address the issues at hand, and will not make the impact you thing it will
I think you underestimate the number of people who won't want to share their car. I wouldn't.
Yeah... you have an 8am mtg on Friday morning, so your car arrives at 6am for the commute only for you to find the seats covered in someones Thursday night kebab, and worse.
The cost premium of having your own JohnnyCab is likely to be lower than the train fares much of the home counties are forced to endure.
Does anybody actually want to be a bus driver?
The problem we still haven't solved is that not everybody in society actually needs to work full time, but Victorian ideas about the value of work (and that being unemployed makes somebody guilty in some way) mean that we can't distribute the work and the money around in an optimal way. The very rich continue to think that their luck in having rich parents and expensive educations along with lots of contacts means that they "deserve" a lot of money; and as the former Civil Service head Gus O'Donnell comments, MPs think that chauffeur driven cars and endless perks are "normal". Presumably Osama bin Duncan-Smith thinks that people on benefits are using them to pay their butlers, whereas in reality a lot of benefits go to housing benefit, which means our taxes being used to make rich landlords richer still.
Self driving cars should result in lower NHS and police costs, less fuel used, fewer cars (why bother to own one if they can be hired as needed), fewer delays (automatic routing) and lower overall vehicle costs. We could have the same standard of living with less resource consumption, in other words. But somehow I suspect that new intermediaries will arise to cream off the savings, a few people will get very rich, and everybody else will somehow not get all the benefits.
Job displacement will be far greater than job creation. Not everyone can simply move into creative work once menial work is eliminated. Many meat sacks won't amount to anything once robots take all their physical jobs and a portion of the mental/creative/service jobs as well
There's always more jobs that can be created if employers are brave (or just not evil). I choose to take the money I would have spent on pesticides and increased seed costs and spend it on additional wages/jobs (rate varies but all significantly above minimum wage) which to be fair this style of farming needs. The outcome is organic produce which amusingly wholesales at the same cost as the 'conventional' produce (because I am not an absolute twat and charge a premium simply because I can, I get the difference back in volume). I am not going to be buying an aston for roaming around the farm anytime soon but it provides a comfortable living. Then again I am a farmer and not a CEO, I probably wouldn't last 5 seconds running a major company before the shareholders beheaded me. But basically it does come down to choice, I view my approach as sustainable, if I do my bit not to screw over the local population they will be in a better position to buy my produce. There's also a local collective of farmers who help new farmers get started, labour, loaning machines, teaching, seeds and slips etc. It makes sense, the more robust the local supply the more business we get as a whole because there is no longer the need to rely on imports for a reliable supply. Plus is just plain sucks to see land unused when we import food.
There is certainly the potential for many new jobs to be created, but consumers do play a part in forcing change with their wallets. If you want more jobs, try and find ways to support companies that provide them locally. Over time there will be a flow from one industry to another but there should be some that are left largely untouched, and if companies know that outsourcing will kill their business then they won't do it. I haven't lived in the UK for a while but before I left I remember the start of a backlash about offshored call center jobs and companies starting to onshore the jobs and boast about them. Just start applying the same tactics. I honestly never understood the logic behind offshoring large swathes of staff because if you send 20% of your jobs abroad and 50% of other companies do, you just made 10% of the working population likely unable to afford your products and also put up taxes. They should work to strengthen then economy by creating jobs, rather than undermining it. But wtf do I know :(
@haefen
What I find the hardest to believe is that although our political systems allow everyone voting parity people can and do vote in regimes that are detrimental to their interests. Put simply the poor outnumber the rich but governments that serve the rich at the expense of the poor still get elected :(
I don't understand how do many people can abdicate their responsibility to think about who they are voting for because it might give them a headache and just vote for whoever their patents voted for or whoever their union told them to vote for etc.
The poor, and the lower middle classes, don't actually understand basic economics. But in this country a lot of them think they have a higher social status than they actually do, and imagine that voting Conservative reflects this in some way. In the US the same group votes Republican because they imagine that one day they will be rich, and will be glad they voted Repub to get lower taxes.
It is exactly like people who aren't upset by tax evasion because they imagine that one day they will be rich enough to want to hide their money in a dodgy bank, even though the reality is that they will end up with nothing but the State pension.
When T S Eliot, the successful banker, export trader and publisher who happened also to be a great poet, remarked that human kind cannot bear very much reality - he meant it.
"A trait which they share with everyone else, to a first approximation."
I don't agree. There are plenty of people who do understand what goes on in the economy, and the mechanisms by which money goes ever upwards. Piketty explains in his book - which is taken seriously even by people who disagree with him - how the system is now in effect rigged so that money concentrates. I really think that if the majority of people actually understood this and how it impacts their lives they would be very angry indeed.
When we were first married my wife complained that I was more interested in abstract principles than what was going on around us. But involvement in financial charity work has made her realise that those abstract principles explain why poor people stay poor and why their lives are so often miserable.
Poor people with children don't have the energy or the resources to try and do more than earn a little more money, rather than fight their exploitation. Thatcher's great idea was to get them all into debt buying houses and cars so they would stay quiet. An efficient low cost automated transport system would reduce the debt and simplify the lives of a lot of poor people - so it could be disruptive for the status quo, just as the bicycle and then the bus were disruptive in earlier centuries.
What I find the hardest to believe is that although our political systems allow everyone voting parity people can and do vote in regimes that are detrimental to their interests.
I quite agree. The poor continue voting labour despite suffering significantly greater pain due to labours fiscal and economic imcompetence than average or higher earners.
"Job displacement will be far greater than job creation. Not everyone can simply move into creative work once menial work is eliminated. Many meat sacks won't amount to anything once robots take all their physical jobs and a portion of the mental/creative/service jobs as well"
Because we don't value our public spaces in this country. We're a species that has developed through a phase, only recently ended, where most people worked at growing things. If we could get away from the idea that working the land is necessarily menial, we could employ a lot of people who are not very intelligent to make the environment nicer. It wouldn't need to be a full time job.
It's an odd world where people like me spend our time in offices doing mostly creative work in engineering and IT so that one day we can retire and cultivate our gardens, but the idea of getting the unemployed involved in improving the environment is somehow thought of as degrading. People like the look of dry stone walls rather than barbed wire, but the idea of diverting farm subsidies to pay dry stone wallers rather than a new Range Rover or two for the fathers in law of Cabinet ministers isn't acceptable.
"Does anybody actually want to be a bus driver?"
This technology has the potential to kill off busses all together. Busses require a set time and a set route which does not fit everybody. Small electric self drive vehicles could be cheaper to run and pick you up and drop you off when and where you like.
Who would want to sit on the bus next to the smelly wino or any other the annoying types you find in public transport at the moment?
You have a Uber type app that calls a car to your location and off you go.
There will be cctv in these things. After all, people can see you on public transport. I wouldn't be surprised if they include alcohol and nicotine sensors.
When someone gets drunk and fouls a self drive taxi, and discovers that their card has been debited the full cost of cleanup and that they will be charged higher mileage for the next year, word will get around.
@ PNG
Should a passenger violate the JohnnyCab rules, agreed to upon entering, the doors will lock and the cab will be diverted to the parking garage or police station to await processing, await processing, await processing, await processing, await processing, await processing, await processing, await processing, await processing, await processing, await processing,
>any other the annoying types you find in public transport at the moment?
I suspect that many who make this assumption about public transport have very little experience of it.
Travelling in a bus can be a pleasure. Not always, of course, but the No.8 (Eastbound) can often offer drama/comedy/insight not found on stage or screen.
I wonder - do people who hate 'other people' realise that they are 'other people'?
If all the cars were driverless and in communication with adjacent cars would there be sufficient bandwidth for all the inter-car communication?
Imagine a road with four lanes per carriageway, maybe crossing over a similar road, with traffic joining from slip roads, say the M1/M25 junction, all lanes and slip roads working to capacity. The number of vehicles within range would be many time the total number of such cars built to date. How fast would they be generating data?
It's not so much the number of vehicles as the type of data. They are likely to be sharing coordinates, velocity etc rather than video. The father away another vehicle is the less you would need to know about it. Using fairly high frequency transmissions over short distances (probably with line of sight, forming a mesh network) and lower frequency for longer distances would allow for efficent use of spectrum and avoid overloading. It's probably not something we are going to throw on tmobile's edge network, but its technically reasonable. Although I understand why it would appear otherwise. The best and the worst thing about high frequency spectrum is its limited range. The short range allows many more users of the same spectrum (although the same could be said for lower band spectrum if you tune down the transmit power) as you have to be a lot closer to be sharing the same spectrum.
"The farther away another vehicle is the less you would need to know about it.... forming a mesh network"
Here's part of the problem. If you have a mesh network at least some vehicles will retransmit messages. How does a vehicle decide whether the source is sufficiently far away that it can afford to not retransmit some particular message? If there's a long chain of vehicles a message might need to be passed back to all the vehicles which need to brake ASAP after the lead vehicle. OTOH messages from the opposite carriageway are presumably of no interest to anyone.
And "at least some vehicles" in the previous paragraph raises another part of the problem. Just some? If so, how should it be decided which should retransmit and which should stay silent? Once large numbers start to be involved strange emergent behaviour could be exhibited - all retransmission ceases, everything tries to retransmit or maybe the whole collection flips between these modes.
Until you realize they take this into consideration. One of the things they're working on is obstacle avoidance. Even if a car can't react quickly enough to a box of nails breaking right in front of it, it can at least inform the tow truck, "Beware of road debris!" Then the tow truck can either see it coming and work around it or just drive with puncture-proof tires.
Frankly, the only ways you can perform the cascade you describe is to have a practically invisible obstacle or to be actively sabotaging the stretch of road for an extended period.
If this thing really does take off who but an idiot would want a google car?
Think of the options for data abuse and targeted advertising etc etc. They'll have got a whole new "product" - YOU the PASSENGER.
"CAR - take me to Aldi!" Ten minuites later, in Tesco's car park, in the opposite direction... having been fed a diet of ads for Tesco this and Tesco that plus Asda baked beans and some donkey porn...
If ithis is going to work there'll have to be standards -
(So microsoft will definately be there in front for a start /TROLL) So there'll be other suppliers of the new shiny. Some with rounded corners, probably.
If there are many options available there will always be the local grease monkey who can do the job quicker, cheaper, and probably screw it up less than the main dealer
Anyways I want an open source 'Nix version. Doesn't have to fly, Just has to have frikking lasers to deal with all those redundant bus drivers. Boot - meet other foot.
If the vehicle is self-driving then will there still be a need for the human to take lessons and pass a driving test? Even children should be able to operate these vehicles in the way they can operate powerful computers today that would have been unimaginable 40 years ago. Parents ask their kids.for help now.
This post has been deleted by its author
The population growth rate and transportation needs will be such that the number of existing manually driven vehicles will probably still be higher than current levels, even if half or more of the vehicles on the road are autonomous.
Even if all of the 4 (or more) wheeled vehicles are autonomous, the population density will drive more people to smaller vehicles - bicycles and motorcycles - which aren't going to be autonomous. Those people will still need insurance, so the insurance companies don't have anything to worry about.
As such, the number of mechanics, etc. necessary to maintain the vehicles will not decline.
This post has been deleted by its author
"As such, the number of mechanics, etc. necessary to maintain the vehicles will not decline."
Bingo. It's a fallacious argument to say all those jobs will suddenly disappear when cars can all drive themselves. Smells like FUD to me.
There will likely still be the same number of vehicles on the road. Probably many more than now. All those vehicles will still need to be maintained.
Grease monkeys will definitely have to retrain for the new technologies, but the role won't disappear.
while for the rest of 23 hours it stays unused so you shouldn't need to own a car.
Problem is tens of millions of people will need the car at the exact same hour so this will not reduce the number of cars on the road in a significant manner.
Is anyone ready to delay his/hers arrival at the office for five or six hours just because he has to wait for the next available self-driving Google ? Heck if this would be possible we would already be doing it with our traditional cars right now. Ask these idiot management consultants if they will accept their employees to arrive in the office whenever they please just to avoid traffic jams or how about these muppets themselves arriving at 2 am for a meeting with their client because hey, there's no congestion at that time of the day.
Driverless is still much safer and results in more leisure (or productive) time than a normal car. So buying your own driverless car becomes a value proposition. If the technology adds $2-5k to the cost of the car, is it worth that amount to a.) reduce the chance of an accident to as low as 1/6, b.) convert many hours of driving into captive leisure time. Or maybe c.) ensure that you can lend the car out to a friend or child without them wrecking it. How about d.) eliminate the need to pay for car insurance, or at least reduce insurance rates greatly.
Driverless is much safer? How do you know? Show me the statistics... oh, wait, there aren't any.
Driverless cars *may* be much safer if every car on the road is driverless, but there are still a significant number of cars on the road in excess of twenty years old and a few around over a hundred.
It's going to be an interesting twenty years or so while the remaining manual cars - bought this year - are EOLed off the road... and I would not care to put my name on the bottom of the safety audit for the driverless car control systems.
"Driverless is much safer? How do you know? Show me the statistics... oh, wait, there aren't any."
Have you tried asking Google? They've been running real road tests of their driverless cars for years. I'm sure they could provide you with stats a plenty.
@ Charles
There are stats from the many processes that have already been automated, which include aircraft, trucks, ships,and of course manufacturing, testing and operations. Even in your own business there are likely processes that have been automated and resulted in fewer injuries or deaths.
Of course you could ask google, I'm sure they will claim to be doing much better than past automations, not that I would believe them but I'm sure some would.
"Then again I am a farmer and not a CEO, I probably wouldn't last 5 seconds running a major company before the shareholders beheaded me. But basically it does come down to choice........."
Only if it's a privately owned businesses - if you are running a publicly owned company (ie., anyone can buy shares in it) you have a legal duty towards the shareholders to maximize the return on their investment. In some countries you can end up in jail for failing to do so.
I wonder what would happen if a regulation came along that dictated that a business's primary duty was to its clients, second to its employees, and third to its investors. IOW, the people come before the money, and if you can't do (3) without adhering to (1) and (2) first, then you're not in the right business.
This post has been deleted by its author
This post has been deleted by its author
You can easily argue that paying your staff more, and keeping your prices below the maximum you can squeeze out of the purchaser builds "good will" (through quality, responsiveness, long term relationships with purchasers) - a very valuable item on the balance sheet of many business.
In fact a number of businesses operate in exactly that manner and for that exact reason.
Sooner or later Mr Cameron is going to have realise that Welfare is essential! It wasn't so long ago that we were proud to have a reserve workforce and do we really want to end up a nation of call centre workers and bean counters. As for the car we can barely get a desktop to run securely never mind something your going to trust with your life. Bet these things will be easy for muggers to target and pull over(or maybe just kids having fun) as well.
It's hard enough to explain accidents from encountering the unexpected. (As the SO tried to explain "But the dear hit me, I didn't hit the dear!") Especially when no one is actually paying any attention.
When trying to explain to the police/insurance people how the car ended mounting the curb, I sure hope there's multiple camera angles recording everything.
But, you know, that brings up an interesting point I've not yet seen mentioned - video evidence.
Now everyone knows how absolutely freaked everyone was that Gevilgle was photographing the public vistas for street view. How much more freaked are they going to be that - due to liability concerns and legal defense needs - every auto auto will be covering front/sides/rear views with multiple cameras? Every auto auto, recording all the time everywhere they go!
A wrong turn up someone's driveway means lawsuits? Bwahahaha....
How much more freaked are they going to be that - due to liability concerns and legal defense needs - every auto auto will be covering front/sides/rear views with multiple cameras?
It's not every angle but you only have to look at Russia to see a society that has embraced the dashcam for "liability concerns and legal defense needs" (read: fuckers jumping in front of your car). That's why there was so much footage of the 2013 Chelyabinsk meteor explosion.
These job losses would be real but the 'disaster' of this this has all been predicted before. See the 1977 BBC Horizon programme https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HW5Fvk8FNOQ which looks at the new technology of microprocessors which have put us all out of work. The discussion which follows the episode is of more relevance than the programme itself.
"...train youngsters for life not for work..." It was wrong then and it will be wrong now - low value jobs disappearing is only of temporary upheaval for those affected.
Jobs from the 1970s like filing clerks and typists have long disappeared and nobody laments those jobs.
I seem to remember hearing that nobody wanted to drive a bus (stress, hours and abuse) and that Reading buses was actively recruiting ex convicts (not ones for violent acts).
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2025
