Of course, many such benefits may not be realized until high
[numbers of self-driving vehicles] are present
FWIW I posted the above comment in the other story submitted on this topic today on insurance. [0]
Let's say I buy a new 2014 Corolla for $16,800 and keep it for 20 years.
My insurance (in BC) would be about $100/month or $24,000
Even according to the Edmunds' calculator, insurance is the largest single cost.
2. Insurance companies: basically, they operate on a margin over the volume of business. Which will go drastically down.
3. Switch over: I'll bet it will be more sudden than anticipated. Think "cash for clunkers", "buckle up your safety belt" and "dont drink and drive" programs all rolled up in one and magnified tenfold. Anything to get the murderous unsafe machines off the roads.
4. The smug, withering, contempt of news writers in twenty years will be something to behold: how could those primitives allow themselves that awful road carnage for so long?
Hopefully the self driving cars will be re-used like driverless Uber cabs. That would reduce the unsightly clutter on so many American streets, colloquially known as "parked cars" and alleviate congestion on city streets, much of which comes from cars circling around the block "looking for a spot to park".
Sure, it would cut into the revenues of parking lots and car manufacturers. But IMHO no one has done more to pollute the environment than the latter. The number of people on the planet has increased and - even as Europe cuta down on its car population thanks to the high price of petrol - we US folk continue to purchase our gas guzzlers and have a car culture in many cities. Some like LA are perpetually covered in smog, so we can see the effects of this car culture.
Thankfully, after decades of polluting the environment for our individual joyrides, things are changing - the younger generation isn't into owning cars as much, and self drivi g cars are on the way. An unfortunate victim of this trend will be the venerable macho tradition of the man picking the lady up in his OWN shiny ride, which he drives. Now it will be about renting the car for the occasion, and both occupants can interact with each other while the car is in motion.
In short:
Less pollution
Less congestion
Less wasting time looking for parking
More equality between sexes in terms of driving
Less unsightly clutter on streets
Less revenues from car manufacturers from producing CARS,
so they can focus on recurring revenues (eg renting stuff
inside their fleet)
I used to be one of those people that would never ever give up his car. Giving up my freedom and pinning me to this city? Never.
After having my car broken into and vandalized a couple of times added to the insane cost of parking where I live, I did eventually give up my car 1 year ago.
I now use a car "sharing" service where a company owns 100's of car throughout the country, all bound to their own (extremely convenient) parking spot. I reserve the car 1 minute in advance, open it up with my phone and drive.
The best thing is: It's not my car.
I don't care what happens to it. I just leave it at its little spot after I'm done and I forget about it. No maintenance, hardly ever have to fill it up with gas, billing takes place at the end of the month.
Now imagine this car not having that parking spot but being automated and just picking me up from my doorstep. Not having to put it back into it's designated spot. I would feel pretty awesome about that.
A car that drives by itself with passengers in it, is one thing. But an unmanned vehicle takes the concept to a whole new level.
It will have an incredibly deflationary effect on the economy. Trucking is a $600 billion business. It employs 3 million people. Over a million of them are long-haul truckers. And that's not counting non-driving support staff. With self-driving trucks, 30% reduction in headcount isn't unrealistic.
That's just one example.
It's a scary prospect for many people.
Right now a large percentage of society is doing "work" that isn't particularly complicated or difficult. I's necessary, of course, but it's the kind of thing that we are - with increasing frequency - starting to think we really should take the very small shell script[1] option.
Many obvious references could be made to Marx at this point, of course. If you want to. I prefer, on the other hand, the idea that our economy is simply taking on some Star Trek-style, post-scarcity traits.
Technology can never replace /all/ jobs, of course. More precisely, Gödel showed us there's always more complicated, more interesting tasks out there. The tasked involved in maintaining the baseline needs a person has in life (food; shelter, basic health-care) and even a few of the "luxuries" (transportation, communication, the general-purpose computer), though, are going to simply be solved problems.
Autonomous cards are indeed going to be a very scary prospect, and it isn't (primarily) because of any safety concern. The changes to society this technology will cause (such as those 3M truck drivers) is pure, distilled terror for anybody that wants to hold on to current social model.
Worse yet - the self-driving car is just the first of many technologies that are happening right now. Millions of unemployed drivers is nothing compared to /billions/ of bureaucrats, low-level factory workers, fast-food/walmart-type workers, and middlemen of all sorts and the like being made obsolete.
Hmm... what was it that Marx said about revolution?
We better stat getting ready for these changes in the meantime. "The avalanche has already started, it is too late for the pebbles to vote."[2]
[1] http://www.nerdyshirts.com/shell-script-funny-t-shirt No store endorsement (good or bad) intended; the link was an arbitrary google pick for that t-shirt.
[2] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=60loeoblu0M
edit: link formating
Actually, everything would drop in price, including your basic weekly groceries.
> Could automakers prevent hackers from getting into onboard computers?
"Hackers." Modifying their own cars. Terrible.
> And who would be liable in the event of an accident in a self-driving car?
The insurance company.
[1] http://www.ted.com/talks/avi_rubin_all_your_devices_can_be_h...
In any event, the point is that the question of liability is both irrelevant (because insurance company will be the one paying for the loss in the large majority of cases in any event) and obvious (because these are for the most part well-established questions). It's not like a self-driving car is the first instance in the history of time that some piece of property could cause damage in the absence of human action.
Anti-car lobbyists in the dawn of the car era got ridiculous laws about having someone walk in front of the car with a flag put on the books in many places and it still didn't stop car adoption.
Your family only needs one car. You go to work at 8, and your kids go to school on the way so you drop them off. You get to work at 8:15, the car drops you off and heads back home. Your wife heads to work when the car gets back at 8:35, she gets there at 8:45. Your kids get off school at 3, but they have an after school activity so they let the car know it can charge up until 3:30, when it comes to pick them up. It drives there, picks the kids up at 3:45, gets back at 4, drives back to pick you up, brings you back home, drives to pick your SO up at 5, and by the time your SO gets home you have dinner ready.
If you're a single person you could probably split the car 5 ways with your friends. You could probably make a lot of money if you make an app that says "Pick me up here, my current GPS location, and drive me to work 15 minutes away at 8:00 AM every weekday. Bring me from work at 4:30 to a destination of my choosing after work". You could extremely accurately predict the price of transit, you know the probability of accidents. It's cheaper than any taxi, it's convenient.
Few accidents, no traffic jams, courteous to drivers, no speeding or parking tickets (unless you 'opt in' to speed), leisure, take a nap on the way to and from where you're going. The cars return to 'base' which is a parking lot that has a roof outfitted with solar energy, allowing the cars to store energy during the day. When cars weren't being used, if they still have juice, they either share the energy with the other cars that returned, or they compensate for the lack of renewable production at night. Some cars are 'regimented', where they follow the same pattern every day of the week. How much energy they use is known, they know how much energy they need to start the day with, and how much they can contribute back to the grid. There's other cars that are free runners that are always kept charged in case they need to drive to somewhere 4 hours away.
It'd be a little bit of an inconvenience to move things, but If you wanted to go from city A to city B, but needed to recharge halfway, you could just jump out and jump into another car at the charging station. NFC to verify who you are, grab your things and go. When you're driving towards the recharging station, it knows what music you have playing, what temperature everything is at, it preheats or precools the car for you - to ensure that swapping cars doesn't feel like swapping cars. Maybe you go to the bathroom at the rest stop, and when you come out the car is ready to go with all your belongings swapped. Put a little container in the middle that you can stash stuff in, just grab that when you change cars.
And carpooling - if you have 10 people that go to to work 15 minutes away, get some sort of carpool system going. First person gets on, the car drives to the next house, waits 2 minutes for the person to come, if they do great, if not they take off towards the next house. You say what time you want to be picked up, and a time within 10,20,30 minutes that you'd like to get there. Cheaper service if you have a bigger window of availability. Car texts you when it's outside (you can follow it on the map once it engages your current location).
I like thinking about electric cars.
The average family uses their car probably less than 10% of the time. The rest of that time could be used by others.
Once self-driving cars are ubiquitous, I expect that an Uber-like service will be the norm. You either subscribe or rent per trip and schedule when and where you want to be picked up.
The service you subscribe to has a fleet of cars and knows when people want to be picked up and where they want to be dropped off, as well as whether you're willing to carpool on the way (for a discount). They can optimize the scheduling of their fleet in the same way that FedEx and UPS optimize their driving routes now.
The future is going to feel a little strange and I can't wait.
I hope we one day see a future where you will only be allowed to own a vehicle for inter-city and rural travel. Suburbs and cities should all be serviced by one collectively fleet for all citizens of that city.
Before then I had never thought about the biggest game changer of the self-driving car: The car driving around with NO ONE in it!!
That is huge and once the technology is good enough to be safer than our current state of affairs with human drivers, it is a complete and utter game changer. You would no longer need drivers for 18-wheelers and would not have issues with tired drivers pushing their limits to drive 12, 14, 16 hours...instead a truck could drive all day and all night at 55mph or whatever speeds were safe, only stopping for refueling or maintenance issues.
You could also have driverless taxis, school buses (maybe repurpose the drivers into chaperones who actually pay attention to what is going on in the bus?!), Greyhound-type bus lines, etc, etc.
Plus, as you pointed out, lots and lots of families would only need one car. Or several people could share a car together. Or services such as Zipcar could really take off because you don't have to go to where the car is — you could just find the nearest one and request that it come to you!
On top of all that, a huge benefit is that you can do other things while getting to your destination. Let the car drive while you read a book, catch up on email, text your friends, watch a movie — whatever.
I don't think the biggest impediments will be technological—they will be governmental and legal. Who is at fault in an accident of two driver-less cars? Do you still need a "license" to operate? What happens if they get hacked? Etc.
Totally agree with you that it is interesting and amazing to think about!
Until they get spoofed. That will be fun.
link to paper: https://www.enotrans.org/wp-content/uploads/wpsc/downloadabl...
* a Google car will have been on that road before (many times) and never seen a stop sign (and Google can probably tap into the government data for new stop sign installments anyway)
* looking at a map the car can establish what the prior probability of a stop signing being there is (probably low if it's not an intersection)
* the car can look at cars in front of it and observe what they are doing
Beyond this a simple look ahead will solve the problem: the car can extrapolate what will happen if it does or does not stop. If stopping suddenly at the stop sign means causing a rear end accident, but not stopping at the sign has no negative effects (because there is no cross traffic), then the car can safely ignore the sign, especially if it has assigned a non-negligible chance to the sign being fake.
Google's cars use Bayesian reasoning. — How does that change anything? What's an alternative to "bayesian reasoning?"
Google can probably tap into the government data for new stop sign installments anyway — such a thing (an accurate government database of new stop signs) does not exist.
the prior probability of a stop signing being there — scenario: a construction worker with a rotating STOP/SLOW hand sign during road work. Or, manual traffic overrides with police standing in the road with hands up or hands waving to manually control traffic.
the car can look at cars in front — assumes said cars exist and the motion of forwardness is more important than any potential cross traffic being stopped for.
RISK: Since each AV in the fleet represents an access point into such systems, it may be infeasible to create a system that is completely secure.
MITIGANT: "Fortunately, robust defenses should make attacks even more difficult to stage. The <U.S.> has demonstrated that it is possi ble to maintain and secure large, critical, national infrastructure systems, including power grids and air traffic controlsystems."
This is a combination of an assumption and non-sequiter.
Besides being an apples to oranges comparison.
Basically a "trust me"...