Model T & Star Trek’s Borg
What if I told you of a conspiracy… a secret society of industry leaders who plot to build great, powerful, machines, but to save on the cost of development and components, they will make these machines totally brainless. Instead of an embedded CPU, the design will include an insert, a seat, where a live person will be plugged to serve as the main unit of processing and control. These machines will be tasked with missions in the most dangerous environments, which will require every bit of the human’s sensory system, processing power, reflex, and attention. The people will get basic training for controlling the machine, but yet, even a momentary lack of focus, a glitch of attention, could lead to catastrophic results…. For the geek that I am, this reminds of the Star-Trek story of the Borg, the cybernetic organisms that assimilate organic brains into their distributed computing network (the Collective). In the real world, we can just call it — DRIVING.
If the Borg were real, they would resent the analogy. The borg utilizes the ever-growing computing cloud to evolve its civilization and strive for perfection, we humans use our “borg” just to get around. One cannot even fathom the amount of brainpower spent at every given moment to enable modern transportation.
Did you ever stop to wonder about life in the old days? when people spent days and weeks, on boats and trains, just to get from one place to another.
You must feel pretty good about your life when thinking of these hurdles, and if so — I urge you to reconsider. These people didn’t have to enslave their brains for the duration of the journey, they were resting, reading, drinking, dining, sleeping, and socializing, today we call this “a vacation”. I bet some of the people of the time even wished that some trips lasted longer. So, if this is the trendline, does it mean that travel will only get worse? No, your grandkids will have autonomous vehicles or even better, good public transportation.
To conclude, it is you, who were born in this rediculous, brain-enslaving century, who suffer the most from transportation, more than anyone before you, and more than anyone in the future (if you want to stop reading, I totally understand).
Could it be that future generations will view our addiction to car ownership as redundant as the addiction to cigarettes?
The things we love are not necessarily good for us, our parents tried to teach us this lesson when we were kids. Maybe, if we were more attentive to such teaching, we could have avoided the second amendment. To build on the analogy of cigarettes, which are popular, heavily taxed, and not good for our health, can you imagine a world without cigarettes? maybe there are still cigars, and cigar clubs, but not the mass-produced, economically accessible, widely available, 20 pack version. In a way, cigarettes were the model T of cigars; What if Ford’s Model T was not a private car? what if T was for Transporter (or Transit-Connect in Ford terminology), how would our world look like if MAAS was the default mode of transportation? Well, the theory of a non-consumer model T has more holes in it than swiss cheese, and the dividends of this engineering milestone are too many to count. Having said that, being thankful for what we have, and appreciating history does not contradict wishing for a better future.
Are AVs the antidote?
Whatever brought us to where we are today, AVs might bare the promise of getting us off our car ownership addiction. If AVs are safer, and they relieve one’s brain to run her private computing tasks, the intuitive inclination might be to desire a private AV, and here comes the trick — while buying your AV rides might be cheaper than ownership, owning an AV will be much more expensive than owning a car today, both in money and hassle (I sure don’t want to start my day with 10 minutes of sensors calibration in the garage). You could use the train twice a day, for decades, without ever thinking about buying it, right? so maybe, the diffusion of innovations — ridesharing, AVs, and social trends such as urbanization, will lead to a paradigm shift, similar to the way in which Airbnb changed our view of vacation apartments. If an AV provides most of the benefits of a private car — door-to-door, availability, privacy, and for the missing benefits — kids stuff and camping gear in the trunk, we get these little compensations — safer rides, cognitive freedom, no parking overhead, few more dollar in the pocket, this just might be a deal-breaker for car ownership.
You should have stopped reading when I gave you the chance, the maturing of the scenario I described will take decades, but on the flip side — we (the transportation-hell generation) get a special opportunity which is almost worth the pain — be the people who made this future happen : )
