10 ms·

Autonomous vehicles could contribute $1.3T a year to the U.S. economy

40 points by troydavis 11y ago

x5n1 11y ago
Is that contribute 1.3T or cost the economy 1.3T. Those "savings" is money not going to other people and businesses.
- newjersey 11y ago
  As with any automation, I understand it frees people up so they can do other productive things.
  - x0054 11y ago
    But at some point we run out of productive things to do. And then what? Well, if we play our cards right, utopia. But what are the chances of that.
    - stale2002 11y ago
      Why do you believe we are anywhere near that point? The same thing has been going on too the last 300 years due to industrialization, and things have turned out great. Why is THIS innovation going to be any different?
      - zanny 11y ago
        Workforce participation is at a 20 year low, considering the introduction of women into the workforce (who previously were a sleeper population of housekeepers and caretakers of children and elderly, which are now just general businesses) it is the lowest it has ever been. Likewise, the glut of minimum wage labor (and the gradual transition of most of the populace into low level service workers) and the lack of well paying careers outside tech going forward, with the propensity to attempt to automate all of it as soon as we are able, means it will keep getting worse. Point me to any use we will have in the next ten years for just a human being without any specialized training that will see significant enough gains to offset all these obviously continuing declines in workforce participation and available work. And even beyond that - how many tasks are we going to have for anyone but programmers? Is any industry going to grow rather than shrink? We are going to try our hardest to automate as much of every industry there is as we can. We won't eliminate your doctor in 10 years, but Watson and similar AI will replace 90% of his job, so that one doctor can handle 10 times as many patients as they do now. You might insist on a meatbag barista, but once a barista bot can sense your phone is nearby and makes your coffee for you before you even get to the counter just the way you like it at any location anywhere, most people will much prefer that convenience, and the cheaper coffee is just a nice perk. All professions are under threat - even programmers are being threatened, not the forward thinkers who found startups or push new ideas, but the cogs that work in big inefficient bureaucratic business software - it is often solving the same problem, that better languages, frameworks, and general solution are working to replace. Local IT admins have died an unsung death in the last five years as cloud infrastructure has taken over the industry, for example.
        newjersey 11y ago
        Absolutely. There is a challenge here and we must acknowledge it. The challenge is how do we ensure people can sustain themselves? One part should be universal basic income so we can ensure people don't physically starve to death. There is a second part here as well though. People need to feel they are doing something worthwhile, that they are productive. Basic income won't solve that. My hope is as we reduce inefficiencies in the labor force, we will be able to put more towards infrastructure building and repairing as well as (like someone else said above) taking care of the very young, the very old, and those in need.
    - conradk 11y ago
      Maybe we'll be able to take better care of the elderly. Or maybe we could spend more time educating children, with more teachers per class. Maybe we will have more time to teach people surfing. Maybe we will have more time to play cards, that may mean more need for coffee places to be open. The list goes on and on.
  - knieveltech 11y ago
    Like draw unemployment. Edit: ok smart-asses. You're an OTR trucker. This has been your sole career for 25 years. You're laid off because self-driving trucks have eliminated demand for your profession. Now what? Get a job as a Social Media manager?
    - zanny 11y ago
      When the unemployment runs out you don't have much of a choice.
      - knieveltech 11y ago
        It's true. Which brings to mind the follow up question: who's getting hired for a Social Media manager job? A college grad who's been navigating social media since they were 8 (or younger) or our 40-something trucker who's got six months to figure out what to do for a paycheck before the nasty phonecalls start coming in and the power gets turned off?
  - oconnore 11y ago
    This is a very commonly repeated assumption, and it has been true in the past. I wonder if you and the other people repeating it really can't see any possible differences between washing machines or bulldozers, and humanoid machines that can walk, drive, win complex games, operate machinery in real time, and communicate with relatively nuanced written and spoken human languages.
teach 11y ago
This is a really interesting article, but I still haven't heard a convincing argument why people will suddenly want to share/rent rather than own cars. Can anyone sketch the logic for me?
- n0us 11y ago
  lower insurance cost, not paying for parking, shared maintenance fees, no car loans, not getting stuck when the car is broken, lower transaction costs surrounding buying / selling. Basically all breaks down to capturing more utility from the vehicle. 95% of the time my car sits in a parking spot, 4% of the time I am driving by myself. There are upsides to owning a car but underutilization is not one of them.
  - XorNot 11y ago
    It does depend fairly heavily on the shared service provider doing it right though. Those cars are going to have to be spotless when they turn up, because there's a big difference between the stain I put on the upholstery and know the history of and the one which was there when it arrived. Innovation in quick remove interiors seems like it'll be needed.
    - n0us 11y ago
      It bothers me less when I don't have any equity in the car. When I get a rental car and it isn't in perfect condition it really doesn't bother me so much, or when the uber driver shows up and it isn't a nice car it doesn't bother me so much. I agree though that by and large companies will have to get it right. If the car shows up dirty every time that would get old. How will they handle users who are more likely to leave the car dirty (ie have a bunch of young kids) and will there be "premium" levels where you are guaranteed a certain brand/level of quality? Then again I am driving a 99 volvo so not exactly living in the lap of luxury. My view on this might be skewed.
- patrickburke 11y ago
  If you live in the city, the compelling use is that you never have to park. And on long enough timeline, if a enough people were doing this, much of the parking footprint of the city could be liberated. "The right to access every building in the city by private motorcar, in an age when everyone owns such a vehicle, is actually the right to destroy the city." -Lewis Mumford
ZoeZoeBee 11y ago
Contribute should really be "save" as most of the contributions $563 Billion from auto-accidents and $422 Billion in "efficiency gains" are merely taken away from Collision and Auto Repair shops as well as the Millions of Professional Drivers which are never mentioned in the article.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
gaelenh 11y ago
Last week in my robotics classes, the 4th grade students built and programmed simple "self-driving" cars with LEGO EV3's. My students are mostly 1st generation immigrants in Brooklyn. Many of their families' main source of income is through driving for a car service. Looking at one of the charts from OP, these kids' parents are horses. What will they do when those jobs don't exist anymore? Will the new "horse" population be reduced? How will they fit into the new economy? Other than providing childcare for upper middle class families (subsidized by sending their own kids to substandard preschools), most of their jobs will be replaced through automation in less than 10 years. Most of these families are working 40+ hour weeks on minimum wages and still need WIC and other benefits to get groceries and low end govt/city childcare for their kids. I know basic income is an (the?) answer, however I don't see the US getting on board with that idea in the next 10 years.
- JonFish85 11y ago
  "most of their jobs will be replaced through automation in less than 10 years." I sincerely doubt that this timescale is close to true. Even 25 years seems aggressive. Maybe some long distance trucking jobs will be replaced, but I doubt if all that many livery jobs will be replaced within your timeframe.
  - gaelenh 11y ago
    I have strong doubts too. Tech luminaries and the media that feed off them seem pretty constant with their predictions, so I think for worst case scenarios (at least in terms of the families / demo I serve, not in society as a whole).
  - timr 11y ago
    I've been saying for a while now that "self-driving" is the 2016 equivalent of flying cars. It's not that I think the technology won't happen -- it's clearly on the way -- I just think it's far more likely to happen as incremental advancements to existing auto technology (e.g. "lane assist", "self parking", etc.), while all of the various regulatory and societal problems sort themselves out. It's already becoming clear that the major automakers are deploying bits and pieces of self-driving tech faster than Google is getting to the glorious, all-robot future. When you stop to think about all of the things that would have to change in our society to make a "sudden" transition to robot cars (of which the unemployment of a huge number of people is just one factor), it seems wildly implausible, even on a ten-year timeframe. We'll probably go through decades of refinement and expansion of car automation features before the first truly driverless cars roll off the assembly line.
matheweis 11y ago
Maybe ... before that happens, however, there will be a major shift in the most common vocation in nearly every state in the US. 3 million truckers will need major vocational re-training, and that doesn't even begin to count the many other services and industries that are dependent on truckers. See https://medium.com/basic-income/self-driving-trucks-are-going-to-hit-us-like-a-human-driven-truck-b8507d9c5961 https://medium.com/basic-income/self-driving-trucks-are-goin...
pschastain 11y ago
But where does this wealth go? I love the idea of autonomous vehicles - I drive A LOT - but I also agree with Prof. Hawking and what he's said about technology and the wealth/opportunities it generates serving the few vs. the many.
abalone 11y ago
This article is a bit sloppy. Just because we use our cars 5% of the time does not mean we only need 5% as many self-driving cars. That assumes there is no overlap in when we want to use them. Also, all those words and not one mention of the liability shift to the manufacturer when cars go fully autonomous. That's one of the biggest issues with the transition. Software will have to be near perfect to avoid bankrupting manufacturers through tort suits. (It's not just an insurance premium shift, it's liability for major tort damages in fatal accidents that often bankrupt the responsible party.) So we are more likely to be in a semi-autonomous, driver-assistance world for quite some time. And that invalidates pretty much all of the article which is predicated on driverless vehicles.

40 points by troydavis 11y ago

x5n1 11y ago

Is that contribute 1.3T or cost the economy 1.3T. Those "savings" is money not going to other people and businesses.

newjersey 11y ago
As with any automation, I understand it frees people up so they can do other productive things.
- x0054 11y ago
  But at some point we run out of productive things to do. And then what? Well, if we play our cards right, utopia. But what are the chances of that.
  - stale2002 11y ago
    Why do you believe we are anywhere near that point? The same thing has been going on too the last 300 years due to industrialization, and things have turned out great. Why is THIS innovation going to be any different?
    - zanny 11y ago
      Workforce participation is at a 20 year low, considering the introduction of women into the workforce (who previously were a sleeper population of housekeepers and caretakers of children and elderly, which are now just general businesses) it is the lowest it has ever been. Likewise, the glut of minimum wage labor (and the gradual transition of most of the populace into low level service workers) and the lack of well paying careers outside tech going forward, with the propensity to attempt to automate all of it as soon as we are able, means it will keep getting worse. Point me to any use we will have in the next ten years for just a human being without any specialized training that will see significant enough gains to offset all these obviously continuing declines in workforce participation and available work. And even beyond that - how many tasks are we going to have for anyone but programmers? Is any industry going to grow rather than shrink? We are going to try our hardest to automate as much of every industry there is as we can. We won't eliminate your doctor in 10 years, but Watson and similar AI will replace 90% of his job, so that one doctor can handle 10 times as many patients as they do now. You might insist on a meatbag barista, but once a barista bot can sense your phone is nearby and makes your coffee for you before you even get to the counter just the way you like it at any location anywhere, most people will much prefer that convenience, and the cheaper coffee is just a nice perk. All professions are under threat - even programmers are being threatened, not the forward thinkers who found startups or push new ideas, but the cogs that work in big inefficient bureaucratic business software - it is often solving the same problem, that better languages, frameworks, and general solution are working to replace. Local IT admins have died an unsung death in the last five years as cloud infrastructure has taken over the industry, for example.
      - newjersey 11y ago
        Absolutely. There is a challenge here and we must acknowledge it. The challenge is how do we ensure people can sustain themselves? One part should be universal basic income so we can ensure people don't physically starve to death. There is a second part here as well though. People need to feel they are doing something worthwhile, that they are productive. Basic income won't solve that. My hope is as we reduce inefficiencies in the labor force, we will be able to put more towards infrastructure building and repairing as well as (like someone else said above) taking care of the very young, the very old, and those in need.
  - conradk 11y ago
    Maybe we'll be able to take better care of the elderly. Or maybe we could spend more time educating children, with more teachers per class. Maybe we will have more time to teach people surfing. Maybe we will have more time to play cards, that may mean more need for coffee places to be open. The list goes on and on.
- knieveltech 11y ago
  Like draw unemployment. Edit: ok smart-asses. You're an OTR trucker. This has been your sole career for 25 years. You're laid off because self-driving trucks have eliminated demand for your profession. Now what? Get a job as a Social Media manager?
  - zanny 11y ago
    When the unemployment runs out you don't have much of a choice.
    - knieveltech 11y ago
      It's true. Which brings to mind the follow up question: who's getting hired for a Social Media manager job? A college grad who's been navigating social media since they were 8 (or younger) or our 40-something trucker who's got six months to figure out what to do for a paycheck before the nasty phonecalls start coming in and the power gets turned off?
- oconnore 11y ago
  This is a very commonly repeated assumption, and it has been true in the past. I wonder if you and the other people repeating it really can't see any possible differences between washing machines or bulldozers, and humanoid machines that can walk, drive, win complex games, operate machinery in real time, and communicate with relatively nuanced written and spoken human languages.

teach 11y ago

This is a really interesting article, but I still haven't heard a convincing argument why people will suddenly want to share/rent rather than own cars. Can anyone sketch the logic for me?

n0us 11y ago
lower insurance cost, not paying for parking, shared maintenance fees, no car loans, not getting stuck when the car is broken, lower transaction costs surrounding buying / selling. Basically all breaks down to capturing more utility from the vehicle. 95% of the time my car sits in a parking spot, 4% of the time I am driving by myself. There are upsides to owning a car but underutilization is not one of them.
- XorNot 11y ago
  It does depend fairly heavily on the shared service provider doing it right though. Those cars are going to have to be spotless when they turn up, because there's a big difference between the stain I put on the upholstery and know the history of and the one which was there when it arrived. Innovation in quick remove interiors seems like it'll be needed.
  - n0us 11y ago
    It bothers me less when I don't have any equity in the car. When I get a rental car and it isn't in perfect condition it really doesn't bother me so much, or when the uber driver shows up and it isn't a nice car it doesn't bother me so much. I agree though that by and large companies will have to get it right. If the car shows up dirty every time that would get old. How will they handle users who are more likely to leave the car dirty (ie have a bunch of young kids) and will there be "premium" levels where you are guaranteed a certain brand/level of quality? Then again I am driving a 99 volvo so not exactly living in the lap of luxury. My view on this might be skewed.
patrickburke 11y ago
If you live in the city, the compelling use is that you never have to park. And on long enough timeline, if a enough people were doing this, much of the parking footprint of the city could be liberated. "The right to access every building in the city by private motorcar, in an age when everyone owns such a vehicle, is actually the right to destroy the city." -Lewis Mumford

ZoeZoeBee 11y ago

Contribute should really be "save" as most of the contributions $563 Billion from auto-accidents and $422 Billion in "efficiency gains" are merely taken away from Collision and Auto Repair shops as well as the Millions of Professional Drivers which are never mentioned in the article.

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

gaelenh 11y ago

Last week in my robotics classes, the 4th grade students built and programmed simple "self-driving" cars with LEGO EV3's. My students are mostly 1st generation immigrants in Brooklyn. Many of their families' main source of income is through driving for a car service. Looking at one of the charts from OP, these kids' parents are horses. What will they do when those jobs don't exist anymore? Will the new "horse" population be reduced? How will they fit into the new economy? Other than providing childcare for upper middle class families (subsidized by sending their own kids to substandard preschools), most of their jobs will be replaced through automation in less than 10 years. Most of these families are working 40+ hour weeks on minimum wages and still need WIC and other benefits to get groceries and low end govt/city childcare for their kids. I know basic income is an (the?) answer, however I don't see the US getting on board with that idea in the next 10 years.

JonFish85 11y ago
"most of their jobs will be replaced through automation in less than 10 years." I sincerely doubt that this timescale is close to true. Even 25 years seems aggressive. Maybe some long distance trucking jobs will be replaced, but I doubt if all that many livery jobs will be replaced within your timeframe.
- gaelenh 11y ago
  I have strong doubts too. Tech luminaries and the media that feed off them seem pretty constant with their predictions, so I think for worst case scenarios (at least in terms of the families / demo I serve, not in society as a whole).
- timr 11y ago
  I've been saying for a while now that "self-driving" is the 2016 equivalent of flying cars. It's not that I think the technology won't happen -- it's clearly on the way -- I just think it's far more likely to happen as incremental advancements to existing auto technology (e.g. "lane assist", "self parking", etc.), while all of the various regulatory and societal problems sort themselves out. It's already becoming clear that the major automakers are deploying bits and pieces of self-driving tech faster than Google is getting to the glorious, all-robot future. When you stop to think about all of the things that would have to change in our society to make a "sudden" transition to robot cars (of which the unemployment of a huge number of people is just one factor), it seems wildly implausible, even on a ten-year timeframe. We'll probably go through decades of refinement and expansion of car automation features before the first truly driverless cars roll off the assembly line.

matheweis 11y ago

Maybe ... before that happens, however, there will be a major shift in the most common vocation in nearly every state in the US. 3 million truckers will need major vocational re-training, and that doesn't even begin to count the many other services and industries that are dependent on truckers. See https://medium.com/basic-income/self-driving-trucks-are-going-to-hit-us-like-a-human-driven-truck-b8507d9c5961 https://medium.com/basic-income/self-driving-trucks-are-goin...

pschastain 11y ago

But where does this wealth go? I love the idea of autonomous vehicles - I drive A LOT - but I also agree with Prof. Hawking and what he's said about technology and the wealth/opportunities it generates serving the few vs. the many.

abalone 11y ago

This article is a bit sloppy. Just because we use our cars 5% of the time does not mean we only need 5% as many self-driving cars. That assumes there is no overlap in when we want to use them. Also, all those words and not one mention of the liability shift to the manufacturer when cars go fully autonomous. That's one of the biggest issues with the transition. Software will have to be near perfect to avoid bankrupting manufacturers through tort suits. (It's not just an insurance premium shift, it's liability for major tort damages in fatal accidents that often bankrupt the responsible party.) So we are more likely to be in a semi-autonomous, driver-assistance world for quite some time. And that invalidates pretty much all of the article which is predicated on driverless vehicles.