An Autonomous Future
A lot has been made of self-driving cars and its impact on our lives. It’ll take time but it’s going to truly revolutionize all the little things we take for granted in our everyday life. We’ve been seeing a lot of the efforts being made by major companies and startups alike on both the consulting and the investment front and wanted to share our thoughts on where we think things are headed.
Short Term
The Ubers and Lyfts of the world (and even Google) will have their own autonomous fleet of vehicles — this is already starting to roll out in Pittsburgh and it’s only a matter of time before cars, trains and buses will all move towards being completely autonomous. The impact this will have on safety, efficiency, productivity and cost will be tremendous.
Safety will be the effect most felt on a day to day basis — the technology isn’t quite there yet but it’s already proving to be safer than humans because calculations can be done in microseconds instead of milliseconds. The hurdle is far more psychological and mental than logical. When every vehicle on the road has an optimal path towards reaching its destination, including knowing how long lights are, when they change, where traffic is building up, and it knows how to adapt to it, time spent in vehicles will go down dramatically. This added time of not having to drive will enable people to do more work, take care of more errands, take a nap, all things that can increase overall productivity
Insurance, however, is going to need to be rethought as the driver’s no longer at fault and liability coverage is the often times the costliest portion of their auto insurance.
Trucks and freight will be dominated by automated shipping and logistics from coast to coast and it will be safer than ever, particularly when one of the biggest issues with drivers is sleep deprivation (see the issue with Tracy Morgan and the Walmart driver that hadn’t slept for more than 24 hours). This entire concept of last mile delivery (i.e. from the local UPS warehouse to your door) is going to be done almost autonomously with either drones, which is starting to look less likely, or delivery robots that can wheel around and have the range to deliver anything within a couple mile radius. It can become so precise that consumers can instead request when they want something delivered in the next 5–10 minutes to make sure they’re home to open the door. Daimler just invested in a company, Starship, doing exactly that, with their future autonomous vans being the “mothership” that these robots shuttle out of to make deliveries and return back to base.
Long Term
Thinking beyond just what we normally consider self-driving vehicles, the next wave is going to also come in self-piloting airplanes. There’s a far higher psychological hurdle to cross here though since completely relinquishing control will be a frightening thought for many people. Although airplanes today are already considered 19x safer than driving, we’re in an intermediate state where pilots are becoming worse because they’re relying too much on the automation but the technology isn’t quite there yet to make them fully autonomous. Once the technology catches up, flying in an airplane will be even safer than it is now. Cross-continent freight that is normally done via air cargo can now also be done autonomously and act as an alternative option over sea freight in terms of speed but still being cheaper than air freight.
Societal Impact
This is where we as a society really need to assess how we move forward from here with technology that’s going to significantly improve the lives of those who can afford it and upend the lives of those who can’t. The elderly and young adults now have complete freedom to do what they want and where they want which should make a substantial positive impact to our GDP. Traditional service jobs such as taxi drivers and truck drivers will be almost entirely eliminated though, shifting towards higher human capital jobs like engineering which could create a huge problem for unemployment unless a rethink of how the country approaches education is done. Productivity and efficiency should increase dramatically for those that stand to benefit from what will initially be considered a luxury but it will make life worse for those who don’t have the skills to succeed in this new autonomous age and the concept of the social safety net needs to be revisited very soon.
It’s going to be a pretty incredible world to be living in within the next few years but we need to take all the right steps to make sure society as a whole isn’t worse off as a result.
