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If You Think the Cabbies Are Mad Now…
Buckle your seat belts, everybody. We’ve reached peak disruption: a story of the gig economy intersecting with the rise of the robots. From Thomas Lee in the San Francisco Chronicle:
From taxicab unions and package couriers to politicians and regulators, a growing crowd of people would like to destroy Uber. Add one more name to the list: Uber founder and CEO Travis Kalanick.
Somewhere lost in the scrum over whether Uber drivers are employees or contractors, or whether the company conducts proper background checks, is the simple fact that Kalanick wants to eventually replace all Uber drivers with software and computers. Like Google and Tesla, Uber is trying to develop a car that can drive without a human operator.
The piece, of course, dedicates a fair amount of time to what Lee perceives to be Uber’s hypocrisy: the company’s current PR strategy partially revolves around arguing that it offers drivers a better deal than cab companies, while its long-term strategy would remove drivers from the equation altogether.
I’m inclined to go a little easier on the company then that. If they think this is the way the market is inevitably going to move, I don’t know that they have much of a choice. How are you going to compete if your price has to include labor costs that your competitors aren’t shouldering?
What’s more interesting to me is the fact that the vision here is bigger than Uber. Indeed, what Kalanick and company have in mind is nothing more than the destruction of the idea of personal automobiles. From the Guardian piece by Alex Hern linked in the quote above:
While a full move to driverless cars would be Uber’s dream scenario, letting it cut the cost of a ride to little more than fuel plus wear and tear, it could very well be a nightmare for car manufacturers. Self-driving cars could prove the death-knell for private car ownership, with services like Uber offering a cheap substitution while avoiding the wastefulness of leaving an asset worth thousands of pounds sit unused on the side of the road. A self-driving car can carry someone from home to work, head off to a different office and pick up someone going to the airport, even take a package in the boot to be delivered to a client – all while a conventional car would be sitting in its owner’s car park.
Perhaps because of that, the focus from the conventional auto industry has been less on driverless cars, and more on using self-driving technology as a safety feature to augment traditional driving. For instance, a number of cars already on the market are able to maintain a steady cruising speed, stay in lane, stay a safe distance away from cars in front, and even park themselves, all without human intervention. In a patchwork fashion, those cars could eventually build up to almost full automation – but the signals coming from the industry indicate that the final step might be something they are loathe to take.
I own one of these “AI vehicles,” and I have to admit that this technology is very cool (though not yet reliable enough that you would rush out to get the fully automated version). Still, I’m conflicted — and I wonder if you are too.
I’m largely receptive to the intellectual case for driverless cars. But I’m emotionally resistant.
Now, granted, I’m an outlier when it comes to romanticizing driving. In just the past year or so, I’ve piloted my SUV through 42 states. For tax purposes, my official residence is the interstate highway system. But I don’t think you have to be as much of a road warrior as I am to be a little uneasy about this. (Please note before you jump into the comments that this in no way means I think we should attempt to arrest technological progress on this front.)
Here are my questions: Are those of us who feel like we’d be losing some ineffable freedom by having the wheel taken away from us just sentimental luddites? Should we just chill out and await the brave new world of driverless cars and hyperloops? Will personal automobiles become indulgences rather than necessities? For that matter, to what extent can they coexist with driverless vehicles?
I realize I’m getting perilously close to “Get off my lawn” territory. I’m just hoping I’m not the only one.
Published in Economics, Science & Technology
You are confusing the self-driving car with cab/uber replacements. (Troy’s fault. The title and all…)
Today you had to walk across the lot to get your car. Tomorrow a car will drive across the lot get you. If you want. Or you can ask a car to go get groceries for you and bring them to the door. There will be a car at the store who specializes in such deliveries and he’ll bring it to you in 10 minutes. That’s much faster.
But if you OWNED your self-driving car, you could comment on Ricochet during the whole trip.
A small example of the non-usefulness of driverless cars.
On Labor Day weekend, we went camping with some friends up in the Sierras. It involved driving to Vermilion Campground at 7686 ft and then hiking up to Devil’s Bathtub at 9186 ft.
The road after a certain point was through the wilderness on poorly mapped single lane, gravel roads. Dozens of times we had to find places to pull out and let oncoming drivers pass, while negotiating severe slopes, large potholes, missing sections of road, and narrow, unimproved shoulders on cliffsides. Google Maps didn’t know about half the intersections with other backroads we encountered and we did a lot of improvising along the route based on the apparent maintenance conditions and direction of travel.
At least once Google maps directed us toward an unknown dead-end, through deep sand along a “road” which it erroneously thought crossed a river but for which there was no bridge. So we had to go offroad in a clearing in the woods to turn around and double back, then make up our own route from there.
I’d hate to have been “helped” on this trip by a “smart” car. Or should I say helpless, if we were unlucky enough to get one with no steering wheel and pedals.
Are driverless forklifts already in wide use (if they exist at all)? If cars are a cinch then forklifts on the shipping and receiving dock ought to be even easier.
I don’t know where anonymous is but he’s going to be upset that you think you can OWN a car.
Amazon uses this kind of thing I think.
Oh, you’ll still be able to drive your own car in the future, Larry, but your insurance will cost ten times more than it does now due to greatly increased liability.
It’s my understanding that the only accidents involving the 5 million miles Google’s driverless cars have driven is due to human driven cars hitting them.
Store? No need for those. Only uber-wharehouses and a boatload of delivery vehicles are needed.
Of course, I’m assuming you were running out for a bite for yourself and not for groceries. Because calling a car for groceries would be ridiculous. The fridge can do that for himself.
Just wait till men start owning robot wives…
There seems an assumption driverless cars are going to be like guided missiles, with no man-in-the-loop. I believe that is an error. Rather, I suspect it will be more like an autopilot, which can be engaged and disengaged.
On a modern aircraft you can have an auto-takeoff and auto-land in your autopilot. The Shuttle, for example, had an auto-land capability allowing the vehicle to be landed without human intervention. It was never fully tested because crews always found “reasons” to intervene manually (the main real reason being “no way I am gonna let a machine land this beast when I will be lucky to really land it less than four times”).
Similarly I suspect auto-control of your automobile will be a switch allowing engagement of the autopilot, something you can set the starting and stopping point for, but which can be overridden if desired.
Certainly that is how I see it. Starting point – work parking lot . Stopping point – home driveway. Engage. Halfway home Quilter texts me to pick up milk at the grocery. I either enter the location of the store, and reset or I disengage auto-drive and take over manually.
Also, since the physical plant of an auto-drive system is mostly electronic, building one million units will not cost that much more than building several thousand – it will be an option adding the price of a fancy radio.
Seawriter
(ubber is the company Penfold started to compete with Uber. He’s currently fighting a nasty trademark battle)
Initially, but the savings in terms of accidents and traffic will lead us to rely on it in an ever increasing fashion.
Keep your fantasies to yourself, Soto
Robot wives are so emotional.
Yes but 95% of driving isn’t this. There will most likely always be hybrid cars that will drive you till the road runs out and then let you go from there.
While this is the type of pessimism I can normally get behind, by the time these things are wide spread, traffic fatalities will be closer to 4.
Frank’s right – there’s no way the company that owns an expensive driverless car is going to let some teenage goofball crash it.
I can well imagine categories of people who will be forced into driverless automobiles. Drunken drivers. Some of the elderly. People with too many accidents or too many tickets. I probably haven’t identified them all.
Cars now are able to identify if someone has driven them too fast. I learned that reading about Buick. Buick wants to know why things happen and that chip will let them.
Soon auto manufacturers will be able to identify sleeping beauty and take over the driving.
If the maps are consistent and the speed does not change, GPS will let the car go where it is intended. Changing speeds? Road work, accidents, the unforeseen event that the GPS won’t be able to identify. Hopefully the driver will be able to take over and avoid a problem.
I don’t think anyone has ever said they will be a cinch. They are going to be hard….really hard, but we do hard things all the time.
This differs from how airline pilots rely on their autopilots in an ever-increasing fashion how? We would only rely on them if they add convenience.
Seawriter
Ubber – The Car Made of Flubber
There won’t be a company owning the car. The car owns itself. The car won’t let a teenage goofball crash it. And if they don’t settle down back there he’s gonna turn himself right around!
The car will know long before the driver knows. The other cars will tell him.
Yeah, but nobody will know how to drive anymore, so that kind of driving will be that much more difficult or disappear altogether, and man’s foray out of safe, urban cores into nature will retreat even more.
(A previous version of this comment quoted the wrong text by 1967mustangman.)
We aren’t going to see widespread automated driving for decades at the earliest. And maybe not in our lifetimes.
It’s easy to be fooled into thinking that prototypes or successful controlled experiments are signs that a new technology is ‘just around the corner’. But in engineering, the devil is in the details. The last 20% of a project takes 80% of the time. And the last 20% of the last 20% takes 80% of that time.
Even engineers and project managers fall prey to assuming that the early speed of a project is indicative of how long it will take to finish – which is why so many projects come in over budget and over schedule.
We can solve the problem of steering a car down a known road with known obstacles. We can even give the car some rules to make decisions about unknown events like a sudden stoppage in front of it. Google’s cars can do that – so long as they are driving on a road that’s been pre-mapped to a high level of detail.
But the uncontrolled environment of the larger world has millions of unknowns. The car has to thread its way through an environment filled with hostile drivers, roads of unknown quality, thieves, vandals, pedestrians, and other hazards. This is very different than driving down a known, mapped road under controlled conditions.
Then there is the matter of public acceptance. How many accidents will it take before no one will want to drive in such a vehicle? What if it becomes socially unacceptable to have one?
On paper, the Segway was a revolutionary device. And many futurists predicted that it would be so successful that it would change the way cities are built. But it was sunk before it ever got going because a couple of accidents caused cities to force them off the sidewalks onto the roads, where they turned out to be much inferior to bicycles. The idea of riding your segway into your building, into the elevator, then parking it beside your desk was technically feasible, but a social nightmare.
Google glass is another example. It met its technical requirements and was quite useful, but Google never factored in the social disapproval of the technology, and soon early adopters went from proudly wearing their Google glasses as a status symbol to hiding them away in a drawer in embarrassment.
There have been ‘flying cars’ in various stages of development for decades, and once in a while someone rolls out a shiny prototype and the media goes gaga and pronounces the age of the flying car is almost upon us. They have always ignored the very real engineering and logistical problems that have kept widespread flying cars a fantasy that will always remain a fantasy.
And don’t get me started on hyperloop…
That assumes cars are just sitting around waiting to deliver items from every store. What’s more likely is there will be some transit time waiting for the car to get to the store. You’re assuming someone will pick out the items I want. I don’t trust someone else at the store not to give me the bag of chips that got crushed in the truck on the way to the store or the grapes that were starting to turn to mush right before they expired. I could order from the store, but that now requires the store to be completely digitized and have accurate, real-time inventories online (completely unrealistic if you’ve worked retail). None of that is an improvement on me going to the store on the spur of the moment and getting exactly what I want. How much extra am I going to be charged for this delivery service? I can almost guarantee it will be more than what it costs me to drive myself because I consolidate multiple stops into one trip without having to schedule multiple cars.
Not seeing a difference.
The two fallacies in the statement are (1) some company owns the car (rather than an individual) and (2) driverless cars will end up significantly more expensive than manually-driven cars.
A car-rental company today won’t rent to teenagers (or allow teenage drivers for their rentals in many cases), so that is not an argument against driverless cars.
Also, why will an autodrive system be an outrageously expensive add-on? People used to say automatic transmissions would never sell because they are too expensive. And, when I was in high school people laughed at the idea of home computers because computers cost at least $100,000 (and filled a room).
An autodrive system is going to be a computer hooked up to steering, accelerator and brake. Cheap, once mature. You can add one to your car for the cost of a fancy radio.
Seawriter
Not seeing a difference.