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Driverless Cars Are Happening, Even If Some in Washington Don’t Get It
In a chat not long ago with me, an influential GOP member of Congress pooh-poohed self-driving cars based on the idea that people wouldn’t be interested in the technology. Voters like their pickup trucks! Apparently this politician didn’t know any parents with teenagers getting ready to get behind the wheel. Certainly some polls show consumer concern.
But I recall someone who rode in a driverless car with great initial apprehension, which later turned to boredom since the car drove like it had downloaded the brain of a driver’s ed instructor. Actually I think the phrase “grandmotherly” may have been used.
To the above point, some relevant analysis from Ben Evans:
Electric and autonomous cars are just beginning – electric is happening now but will take time to grow, and autonomy is 5-10 years away from the first real launches. As they happen, each of these destabilises the car industry, changing what it means to make or own a car, and what it means to drive. Gasoline is half of global oil demand and car accidents kill 1.25m people year, and each of those could go away. But as I explored here, that’s just the start: if autonomy ends accidents, removes parking and transforms what congestion looks like, then we should try to imagine changes to cities on the same scale as those that came with cars themselves. How do cities change if some or all of their parking space is now available for new needs, or dumped on the market, or moved to completely different places? Where are you willing to live if ‘access to public transport’ is ‘anywhere’ and there are no traffic jams on your commute? How willing are people to go from their home in a suburb to dinner or a bar in a city centre on a dark cold wet night if they don’t have to park and an on-demand ride is the cost of a coffee? And how does law enforcement change when every passing car is watching everything?
Anyway, this great Axios chart gives a feel for just how seriously global companies are taking the technology, as well as the many complex linkages between them.
No, it means we shouldn’t adopt a central planning approach to large scale human coordination problems, because central planning rarely leads to better outcomes than decentralized solutions and is prone to abuse by the planners.
Nobody is arguing here against technological innovation. They’re arguing against the claim that allowing whichever large tech company that wins the driverless car race to make decisions about transit for everybody in America is going to be a good thing in practice.
See, this right here is the fatal conceit behind this entire driverless enterprise. That someone, somewhere, can control the faucet, and that the solution they design is going to be better than the one that emerges every day from the complex interactions between people that no one person or entity fully understands. Which is an idea that economists proved incorrect hundreds of years ago, but humans of every generation since still find appealing. AI research, GPS satellites, Silicon Valley technology giants and the associated race for dominance in what could be a new market is just distracting window dressing on what is one of mankind’s most repetitive stories that always ends in large scale failure.
Fortunately, nobody actually has figured out the business model for this, so I doubt it’ll happen.
??? Doesn’t more cars constantly moving create more traffic? I know I must be missing something, but right now I’m stickin’ with my first response. Driverless cars will be great for those who can no longer safely drive themselves. Don’t most people who are able actually like driving?
Yes. And it’s a very good argument. I wouldn’t trust anyone, especially a politician, to have control over any part of my life.
I’m a free man.
When the Cambrian measures were forming, They promised perpetual peace.
They swore, if we gave them our weapons, that the wars of the tribes would cease.
But when we disarmed They sold us and delivered us bound to our foe,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: “Stick to the Devil you know.”
Kipling always has something relevant to say.
Seawriter
I can’t say all in the same way I can’t say the Allegheny lock and dam system will prevent all flooding.
But if we had near 100% driverless cars then we would eliminate all human causes of traffic. Which is nearly all traffic.
So then you don’t drive now either?
People would not have to go to work? People would not need to shop? People would not want to go to museums and theaters?
Wow! Driverless cars are a lot more powerful than I realized. Once we have driverless cars no one is ever going to leave their home. In a generation we won’t have any people.
Seawriter
No.
Of course they would. What a silly thing to ask.
I feel like you intended to make a point, but it escapes me.
Ugh. You realize the implications of that, don’t you? Controlling the faucet means that you are controlling the input. For traffic that means controlling how many cars are allowed onto the road. That sounds even worse. Right now the volume of traffic is determined by thousands of individuals deciding to drive to some personally relevant destination. How do we control that? Locks and Levies in neighborhoods?
You said, “I wouldn’t trust anyone, especially a politician, to have control over any part of my life.”
Given that driving would involve having a state issued license to use a vehicle registered to the state, regulated by the state, powered by state regulated/taxed fuel, on state built roads, insured by state enforced mandatory insurance, in accordance with all state and local laws enforced by police…. well, what I’m saying is…. I guess you don’t drive.
That doesn’t change. The individuals are just cars now. And they are making decisions based on an enormous bank of real time information.
It is no more silly than your contention: “if we had near 100% driverless cars then we would eliminate all human causes of traffic. Which is nearly all traffic.” I listed several human causes of traffic. So how does that square with your contention that driverless cars would eliminate all human causes of traffic?
Seawriter
I think the theory is that because driving will be automated instead of human controlled, that traffic will flow better because of a: better reaction time from automated sensors and b: better predictability of what the other vehicles around you will do because you won’t have the annoying human element.
What this all ignores is that the traffic volume is actually likely to increase, because you’ll now have empty vehicles running around either going to park themselves after dropping off their previous occupant, or going to pick up their next ride.
You’ll also have increased demand from all of the current non-drivers (elderly, handicapped, people who currently can’t afford or don’t want to own their own vehicles) who are now freed up to move about unhindered by previous restrictions. Carpooling (to the extent it happens now) will become a thing of the past. Heck, the kids have to go to music lessons, swimming lessons, sports. Now mom and dad can drop them in an autonomous vehicle, send them on their way, and now mom and dad are free to go somewhere else, again adding more vehicles to the road.
You can’t have it both ways. If automated transportation becomes cheap and ubiquitous, demand for and usage of transportation will inevitably increase, clogging all the highways that were supposed to be getting emptied out.
Ah, you lack imagination.
Carpooling will increase, because that automated car you called to take you on your shopping trip will be required to stop to pick up three more people along the way. “For progress!”
I didn’t catch the list. Do you mean the whys are wheres in that comment? Because those have nothing to do with traffic.
I can square it like this… with human drivers, you get human driver problems. If you take humans out of the driver seat, then human driver problems wouldn’t happen.
I have found so many occasions to quote this poem over the last few years.
I know you;’re being sarcastic, but you’ve just described my worst nightmare.
If I wanted to ride a bus with random strangers, I’d already be doing so.
And absolutely none of this can be predicted from or improved by feeding lots of GPS data into the big Google Server In The Sky and having it make better decisions for everybody. Because central planning can only beat de-centralized solutions to complex problems in sotuations where everything else relevant is held constant. Which is true for the dam that keeps the river from flooding, because the water’s movement is governed by physics. But not for the movement of people whose movements are governed by economics.
All of this is of course begging the technological question.
I simply don’t believe we’ll get to truly 100% autonomous, no steering wheel, no brake pedal vehicles in my lifetime.
Sarcastic or not, I think he’s right. Well, I suppose you’d be able to pay an increased subscription rate to get a dedicated single-person car.
Ah. Now I understand. But you see, what you meant is not what you said. You said “if we had near 100% driverless cars then we would eliminate all human causes of traffic. Which is nearly all traffic.”
Human causes of traffic are reasons people travel. Traffic is the aggregate travel load. Human driver problems are not traffic – at least as is normally understood by the term “traffic.” It may be defined as such in a universe consisting of one individual, but defining it in an unusual manner almost guarantees that everyone outside that universe will be confused.
Seawriter
In the futuristic film, I Robot, the hero cop (Will Smith) insisted on driving his own car in a society of self-driving cars. And doing so saved his life. I suspect there will be a lot of resistance to handing the keys over to a bot.
I didn’t mean it that way, Drew. I meant that, while it is quite possible that tyranny will be able to make use of driverless cars, human beings will retain a basic ability to resist. And I mean actually resist, not #resist. The #resisters couldn’t resist their way out of a wet paper bag.
What do you think of the idea that driverless cars may make it easier for poor people to get to where the jobs are?
Let me try again:
Before city buses, black people didn’t have to sit at the back of the city bus. After city buses—a convenient improvement over walking, presumably—they did.
In order to protest the humiliation and oppression (real, not fake) they had to give up the convenience and comfort of riding the city bus (which was still more convenient and comfortable than walking, even with the insulting color line). In doing so, they deprived the bus company of a lot of money.
So in the dystopian future wherein we can’t go to the gun store in our government-controlled automatic rent-a-car, couldn’t we walk to the gun store in protest, or use a bicycle? (Could be kind of a cool sci-fi novel, if I wrote sci-fi, which I don’t). Deprive the car companies of their income?
That was the analogy I was trying to make. (Is that still insulting? Hope not.)
Also: this isn’t going to be an all-at-once thing, is it? I pictured some driverless cars on the road, mingled in with regular cars until eventually (maybe?) driverless cars became the norm. With “Driver-Operated Car” lanes instead of HOV lanes.
I’ll be in one of the driverless cars because I want to knit, nap and argue on Ricochet during all the many hours I otherwise spend lowering and raising my right foot and looking at the road instead of the views on either side.
It should, but it will be entirely a function of the cost of the service. Does mass transit make it easier for poor people to get where jobs are? What about taxis? In both cases the answer should be “yes,” but the actual answer is “it depends.”
It has been my experience these types of things are subject to regulatory capture, and generally the poor end up suffering the brunt of the extra inconvenience and expense that results. 1.) They are poor and even a small increase in cost hurts them disproportionately. 2.) They are poor and lack the clout (political and financial) which wealthier individuals have, so it is easier to inconvenience them.
One example: years ago many poor people traveled on unlicensed jitneys, often run by other poor people to make a little money. It cost less than taxis, but were more crowded, and most jitneys of that kind were old beaters. So cities decided they were unsafe and regulated them out of business. That left taxis, which were unaffordable by many poor people.
Will this happen with driverless cars? Who knows? Any individual seeking a good living through rent-seeking will probably see driverless cars as a good opportunity.
Seawriter
I do what I have to do, but I don’t like license plates or drivers licenses either. They are unamerican and antithetical to freedom.