Have you ever considered how fun it is to just go out for a drive? In my younger days, I did just that, drove sports cars and motorcycles through canyons, and went on road-trips just for the hell of it. Today, the fuel costs and time constraints, traffic and all those traffic rules take all the fun out of it. In the future us real drivers might be a thing of the past, rather we will all be required to be driven everywhere or flown everywhere (in flying cars) by a robotic systems, in an autonomous car.
In fact, we may not own a car at all, rather we will summons a car (flying car) when we have the need to travel. Let’s talk, because there are folks busy planning this future as we speak.
In fact, The International Transport Forum at the OECD put out an interesting research paper recently titled; “Urban Mobility System Upgrade – How shared self-driving cars could change city traffic,” and the research predicted that a fully integrated autonomous transportation system in a large city would eliminate the need for 80% of the on-street parking, and move everyone around with only 10% of the cars. Also, passengers would go more miles but do it much more efficiently, and daily work commutes would be effortless and little if no traffic in and out of major cities.
Of course the study also notes that as things change in the interim there will be challenges and such optimal efficiency would not be much better than without autonomous transportation. However once fully integrated, the benefits would be like night and day. We can already see some of the challenges for instance a recent accident between an autonomous car and another car driven by a human driver in Nevada, turns out the car with the human driver was at fault.
As AI gets better our autonomous cars will be safer, and people will demand them to prevent the 20+ thousand deaths in automobiles each year in the US. Of course, giving up our cars, especially for us diehard drivers who truly love our cars and driving, will be a tough sell. Some people will gladly give up control to a robotic car merely free up time to play on their personal tech devices and save on stress. Imagine the chaos between us drivers and those, at least at first, wealthy autonomous car owners or the Uber type companies with fleets of autonomous cars ready and willing to pick you up and take you anywhere you can afford to go? Please consider all this and think on it.
