UberFREE: The ultimate advertising experience

As self-driving cars inch closer to reality, numerous articles predicting their future and impact have appeared. But nearly all of these prognostications of the autonomous auto world miss one of the biggest changes: in the future, transportation will be free! Not just hands-free, or driver-free, or free to go wherever you want (in fact, that will be going away a bit). But free as in beer, complimentary, gratis. Free is in free searches and free web content (if you don’t block the ads). Summon a car and travel for free —as long as you are willing to make a stop or two en-route at sponsoring locations.

Fast food restaurants will be prolific sponsors. Realtors will pay to have the cars drive slowly past featured properties for sale, past the nice new elementary school in the slightly more affluent neighborhood. At election time, a candidate’s campaign will route people through run-down areas while a voice-over blames the opponent for this decline. Any ride with a child will stop at the Disney store. And of course, if you happen to mention at some point in the day that you are chilly, or your shoes hurt, or you have a party to go to, Alexa’s grand-daughter will ensure that your next trip’s stops include relevant sponsored solutions.

Free rides will be extremely popular. But are they really free?

As with existing targeted advertising, marketers will insist that this is a win-win, that they are providing a welcome and helpful service. And indeed, it may often seem so. You and your friends want to go to the beach. You can pay $20 and a van will take you all directly there. Or you can go for free, with stops at Amazon Food and at Target. What a great deal, you think as you arrive at the beach. You needed to get snacks anyhow and while you did not need a new beach towel, they had some really nice ones at Target, plus you picked up a cute hat along with the two towels and the new phone case you saw by the register. All this AND a free trip to the beach.

At Christmas-time, you’ll be able to do all your gift shopping this way. It’s so convenient, you feel like you are ripping off the system, getting away with getting free rides in return for being taken to do something you needed (sort of) to do anyhow. Maybe the stores you went to weren’t where you’d have chosen to go yourself, and maybe after three weeks of going Christmas shopping every day after work you realized you’d bought presents for way more people than you usually did — but hey, it’s the Christmas spirit, it’s kind of a nice thing that you’re buying all these gifts, and it’s not the fault of the ride company — they never make you buy anything, just require that you stop there. It was your own free choice to buy all that stuff.

Urban revivalists will praise ride sponsoring for bringing new life to our downtown areas. After decades of decline due to online shopping, brick-and-mortar stores are staging a comeback, with hundreds of thousands of people a day being ferried to a targeted buying experience.

A generation will grow up with the expectation that transportation — convenient, door-to-door transportation — is free. Just like all that content on the web is free. You just have to stop somewhere. And shop.

Why don’t we have this today? The cost of the driver’s time is too high. But once the taxi-equivalents of the future are autonomous, the cost of idle time will plummet. (Though we do have taxi services with underlying commercial agendas, as anyone who has been taken unwillingly to a club or restaurant by an unscrupulous cab driver can attest.)

Advertising gave us “free” online content — at a tremendous price we’re just fully understanding now. It was a development that almost no one predicted in the early days of the Web — a mistake we are making again in thinking about the future of self-driving cars. I’ve touched here on the consumption aspects of this — but there are plenty of other questions about about a world in which you are ferried about by an algorithmic service whose underlying motivations may be markedly divergent from yours.