16 ms·

Cars and second order consequences

125 points by astigsen 10y ago

gambiting 10y ago
There's also another consequence not mentioned in the article - right now, almost all organs for transplants come from accidents. With accidents being reduced to zero, it will be very hard to get a viable organ for a transplant - so the medical community is already sounding alarms about the need for alternative solutions to be found(such as increased investment into artificially growing new organs).
- Asooka 10y ago
  Aren't most such accidents from people riding motorcycles without helmets? I don't think that practice will stop with autonomous vehicles.
  - onion2k 10y ago
    Aren't most such accidents from people riding motorcycles without helmets? That certainly isn't the case here in the UK.
    - manarth 10y ago
      Worth noting that helmets are mandatory in the UK, but optional in parts of the USA (as a Brit, I found this astonishing, the first time I visited the USA).
      - AnimalMuppet 10y ago
        My brother argues that a helmet makes you more likely to survive an accident, but it also makes you more likely to have an accident, since it cuts down on your awareness of your surroundings (peripheral vision and hearing).
        gambiting 10y ago
        Which should lead to riding slower and being more careful, surely. Experiments have proven time and time again that the more confident we are in our surroundings, the more risks we take - so if a helmet makes it more difficult to know what's around you, it will make you more cautious. If someone riding with a helmet on is not cautious, then surely they wouldn't be cautious without it on, right? I'm clearly playing the devil's advocate here, but I guess assuming what you are saying is true, it would be choosing between "less accidents, but they are more severe" or "more accidents, but they are less severe". Which one is "better"? Is there a "better" here?
  - Zigurd 10y ago
    Motorcycle miles are <10% car miles in the US. Also, autonomy will make roads safer for motorcycles, bicycles, and pedestrians.
    - E6300 10y ago
      The article talks about "no lanes, no separation, no stopping distances, and no signals, (except of course for pedestrians to cross)", though. How will no traffic signals work with manual traffic? For example, in an intersection with no stop signs and no "invisible traffic lights", how would a constant stream of automated traffic know that a bicycle is waiting to cross?
      - gambiting 10y ago
        I'm guessing it would rely on the cars seeing a bicycle early enough to slow down. But yeah, I don't think that's going to happen, situations involving fast moving traffic will always need an extra degree of safety, even with fully automatic cars.
        rock_hard 10y ago
        We will look back at comments like these in 100 years and cringe :)
      - monort 10y ago
        It will probably work like it works in Vietnam now: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gpsybD1MsNQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gpsybD1MsNQ
      - Zigurd 10y ago
        The same way it would know the rubbish pickup dropped a trash can into the street
  - djaychela 10y ago
    Possibly (certainly not here in the UK), but the majority of motorcycle accidents involve another vehicle, and my experience (as someone who's ridden on the roads for nearly 30 years) of other road users is that it's often a lack of awareness of the presence of a motorbike that creates issues. I treat everyone else on the road as if they are actively trying to kill me, and it has worked so far. I'm sure that autonomous vehicles will be much more bike-friendly as they won't fail to look at junctions, and also will be much better at assessing the speed of an oncoming motorcycle (which many have problems with due to the size, apparently). And hopefully bikes will have some of the safety elements added to them by this time, making them inherently safer.
- didgeoridoo 10y ago
  There are other "accidents" besides motor vehicle accidents, but the point stands. Even with major advances in organ preservation (like vitrification), if you eliminate car accidents the rate of people going on the transfer list seems likely to exceed the rate of accidental deaths — if you exclude deaths from falls (likely to be elderly, organs not highly viable) and poisoning. EDIT: this of course does not include the fact that a single organ donor can save multiple lives. I have no idea what the average lives saved per donor is, but presumably it could be raised substantially if organs could be preserved indefinitely.
- carapace 10y ago
  Niven and others wrote sci-fi about "organ-legging". Reality has beaten them all: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Organ_harvesting_from_Falun_Gong_practitioners_in_China https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Organ_harvesting_from_Falun_Go... Much [hard] sci-fi now counts as a kind of scenario planning.
ape4 10y ago
No more accidents to the safety mechanisms in cars can be removed? What could possibly go wrong.
- ealexhudson 10y ago
  It's just a change in safety mechanism. If a car is capable of stopping in a shorter distance (because it has faster reactions, and now weighs less) then the speed of many accidents is going to come right down. If a car is capable of ensuring a collision is directly head-on rather than partial clipping, the types of safety mechanism can change. Nothing is going to change over night, but there's not going to be a need for the plethora of different options to cope with different types of accident that we have now. This will then drive planners to change how roads work - e.g. segment heavy transport maybe - and it will become a virtuous circle. Smaller, light-weight transit will make electric much more economic and work better for large cities. It will be an excellent change for everyone except those wedded to their SUVs.
  - falcolas 10y ago
    > a car is capable of stopping in a shorter distance Stopping distance has more to do with speed than weight, since reducing weight also reduces the frictional force against the road at equal proportions to the reduction of potential energy, whereas the impact of velocity on the energy to be dissipated is squared. Brakes also wear down, steering linkages break, lugnuts are improperly torqued, tires blow out, debris can impact sensors or power packs, roads can be compromised by loose sand or potholes, lightning can strike the vehicle... failure modes are plentiful. You also still need to account for bugs and sensor failures; both of which will result in crashes in "non optimal" ways. As an example, I had a gyro fail in my multirotor; it was a gradual failure which was not immediately obvious (and completely invisible to the controller), and resulted in a couple of pretty spectacular crash that the multirotor (even with human inputs) had no way to recover from. Sure, you can add redundant systems (ideally in batches of three), but at some point there will always be a single point of failure.
    - nostoc 10y ago
jakozaur 10y ago
One missed point: inequality. On one hand few companies which will own autonomy tech will get all profits, while a lot of ppl will lose job. So the transportation cost instead of going to labour will mostly go to capital owners or decrease. In long run we should be fine, but in short it may cause a lot of friction.
- eric_h 10y ago
  Or a revolution... But if the rich control all the robots, who knows what will happen.
  - marcosdumay 10y ago
    > who knows what will happen A cyber-revolution. Dumb robots are not full deterrent against The People (in fact, they may make revolutions easier). Artificial superintelligence is a very different matter.
    - AnimalMuppet 10y ago
      Dumb robots you manipulate to get them to do what you want. Artificial superintelligence you have to persuade that it should back your side (or at least not hinder it).
    - andrei_says_ 10y ago
      Relatively dumb drones and other military/security tech can have a lot of impact.
- undersuit 10y ago
  The author doesn't specifically call out inequality but he does address some of the economics, like how selling gas is a low margin business that will go away, on-demand rides will start to compete with public transportation(and I don't see any busing companies massively contributing to existing inequality), and he specifically counters your assessment that autonomy tech will get all the profits. He even quotes himself in the article. >I still think autonomous cars will create more billionaires in real estate and retail than in tech or manufacturing. Just as cars did.
carlob 10y ago
Yet another thing not mentioned in the article is the effect on the energy grid: as we move towards renewables, which are much harder to turn on and off to match demand, we will need to invest a lot more in energy storage. Large scale deployment of electric vehicles might be a way to solve this problem, if one were forced or incentivized to leave their car connected to the grid when parked, the grid could use the cars as a distributed storage system.
- macintux 10y ago
  He did mention the grid and storage.
TimJYoung 10y ago
There are also some demands that will be placed on local governments and municipalities. For example, what will autonomous vehicles do when encountering huge potholes ? This is something that is widespread in the northeast US in the spring. Today, drivers will often swing slightly into the other lane to avoid them, provided that there is no on-coming traffic. So, either the autonomous vehicles will be able to deal with them independently, or local governments are going to need to be a lot more proactive about road maintenance. That's going to be a hard sell for a lot of municipalities that simply refuse to raise taxes and often fund most of their operation via punitive speeding/parking fines and other types of regressive taxation, much of which will probably also go away, based upon this blog post.
- macintux 10y ago
  With the exception of the loss of gas tax revenue, I think potholes become much more manageable in such a world. No lanes and cars constantly talking to each other means that potholes are simply avoided with no meaningful loss of momentum. It's also not hard to envision automated pothole filling vehicles that are constantly roaming, waiting to hear other autonomous vehicles discovering road damage, and then drop their load (colorful metaphors abound) over the hole. Maybe it's a temporary patch for humans to follow up on later, maybe it's a permanent fix. Seems like this could actually lead to the elimination of large potholes entirely. They start small, are detected and reported by autonomous vehicles, and are fixed by other autonomous vehicles running 24x7.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
  - microcolonel 10y ago
    If inter-vehicle communication can be standardized, and human drivers aren't on the road, then what's the point of cars (self-driving or otherwise)? What you're describing is basically a rail system.
    - nitrogen 10y ago
rodionos 10y ago
Enjoyed reading the article. More specific and practical than far-reaching Kurzweilian forecasts. I also liked that each paragraph provided links to associated data sources, e.g. crash stats, convenience store sales etc.
Neliquat 10y ago
This guy forgets that traffic controls are as much for animals, pedestrians, and the local setup than they are for actual traffic control. We will not be getting rid of lanes, even if autonomous cars use them differently.
- surfmike 10y ago
  He does mention that signals are still necessary for pedestrians, but yes hopefully self driving cars allow us to reclaim more of the city for pedestrians. That would improve cities and our lives, even if it means less lanes could be reclaimed from cars.
- Hydraulix989 10y ago
  There's still plenty of efficiency improvements to be made.
TeMPOraL 10y ago
> By implication, in 2030 or so, police investigating a crime won't just get copies of the CCTV from surrounding properties, but get copies of the sensor data from every car that happened to be passing, and then run facial recognition scans against known offenders. Or, perhaps, just ask if any car in the area thought it saw something suspicious. On a more positive / awesome note, maybe we'll get a full 3D crime scene reconstruction from aggregate camera data, like in Continuum (sans holograms)?
- zardo 10y ago
  >(sans holograms)? With virtual entities on a MR platform. Redmond PD at least will be calling them holograms.
nickbauman 10y ago
Enormous parts reduction: Much less labor to assemble, much less ongoing maintenance. I feel like this is so much more critical and has much larger ramifications than other second-order consequences.
- zzzzzzzza 10y ago
  it will come not just from transitioning from ice to electric engines, but also, later, from removing the steering wheel and all associated parts. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cmvCdBufz6U https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cmvCdBufz6U the arcimoto dropped from 1700 lbs to 1000lbs just by going from a steering wheel to a bike handle.
saosebastiao 10y ago
Traffic waves aren't going away. As long as you have non-zero reaction times and slower acceleration than deceleration, the phantom waves will happen as a pure result of physics. Their discovery and subsequent modeling owe to our understanding of fluid dynamics. Computers aren't magical things that destroy the laws of physics. Faster reaction times reduce propensity, but both higher speeds and closer following distances ameliorate the benefits of the faster reaction times and increase severity. If anything changes they'll become slightly less common but much worse. EDIT: just to add to the criticism of this list of overly fantastical fantasies of autonomous cars, the ideas about traffic disappearing when people don't have to park are trivially disprovable. It's almost as if the author has never been to an airport or school pickup zone or any other place where people don't have to park but traffic still backs up for miles.
- Sharlin 10y ago
  Fluid dynamics is local, and so are the dynamics of human-driven car traffic to a first approximation. Computer-driven cars can react non-locally by communicating with each other via radio even if they don't see each other.
  - andrewflnr 10y ago
    At the very least, waves could be damped by a vehicle that sees it coming from a long way away. But if everyone knows the average speed of the roadway, and doesn't suffer from the moronic impulse to push up against the car in front of them, waves will form less often, if at all.
    - saosebastiao 10y ago
      > and doesn't suffer from the moronic impulse to push up against the car in front of them But see that's the problem. In this piece, we see direct advocacy of that exact moronic impulse under the misguided assumption that computers can will away the laws of physics.
  - saosebastiao 10y ago
revelation 10y ago
It's bizarre. Did every "futurologist" miss that, you know, an autonomous car is still the same size and shape as a normal car? That they still carry most likely 1 person? If you want to have roving fleets of autonomous cars and ban personal traffic, well guess what, ban cars and get a bunch of light rail, you can have that today.
- zzzzzzzza 10y ago
  Did every "futurologist" miss that, you know, an autonomous car is still the same size and shape as a normal car? That they still carry most likely 1 person? 1. an autonomous car will probably be smaller and yes possibly a different shape than current cars. 2. If you have a fleet of on demand autonomous cars, you can have different sizes of cars for different loads: small cars for individual trips, up to vans or buses for ride sharing (which would presumably be cheaper). Also everything from trucks to uhaul to big rigs for rent for moving stuff around.
- cr0sh 10y ago
  Light rail can't go exactly where you want to go. Light rail can't carry packages for you (virtual trailer). Light rail can't deliver packages (imagine being able to shop, pick something up, then put it in a car to have it delivered to your home - and wait for you until you get there). Light rail does work well for intermediate distances - say travel from your house in the suburbs or further out to the middle of the city - or "between cities" (I'm talking about the individual "city areas" that are part of larger metro areas - think "Oakland to San Francisco" - which are part of the "SF Metro Area"). But for certain tasks (getting to-from the light-rail, or delivery service) - self-driving vehicles can work better. Now - if instead of light rail, you used something like Doug Malewicki's SkyTran system (largely unproven, though) - then you can almost (again, theoretically) get the benefits of self-driving personal vehicles, with the benefits of light rail - and without needing the years-long effort and expense to tear up existing streets or what-not. There would still need to be some kind of self-driving vehicles, but they could be in much smaller numbers (I'm still thinking things like delivery - for instance, if you went to Home Depot or something and ordered some sacks of concrete - you're not taking that on a light-rail or other similar system - of course, maybe all of this would be ordered online and delivered in the future - but there's still going to be stuff out there that will only be able to be purchased "on site" - plants, for example - or junkyard parts).
cr0sh 10y ago
Something that I always wonder about, as we move towards self-driving vehicles being common, and electric vehicles being used more - is what is going to happen to the off-road sport community. Right now, there aren't any "real" electric off-road vehicles (at least available to consumers). There's a handful of SUVs, certainly, and most electric vehicles are all-wheel drive - but no one would seriously think you could take one of these, lift it 6 inches, drop some 35's under it, and go off exploring Moab. I'm sure that there are some people experimenting with more capable off-road electric vehicles (if nothing else, taking a Jeep or something and putting in place an electric motor and batteries might be a start), but right now battery technology just isn't there for real electric off-road use (the rest of the technology certainly is, though - if the battery tech can catch up, it might be a renaissance for off-roading due to the tech alone). What I would hope or like to see would be an autonomous electric off-road vehicle that could drive itself to where you want to go, then allow you to "take over" to drive out in the "back 40" area (or whatnot). Perhaps it could have traction and steering assist, plus other methods to keep you safe (or allow you to turn off all of that to let you go at it by the seat of your pants if you want). It could even (perhaps) have a "training mode" where it could help teach you how to handle off-road conditions. Or - for those that want the "off-road" experience but not the effort, just tell it where to go, and it follows a trail using GPS and such to get you there. Once there, charge the car from solar/wind and/or a portable generator. Regardless - all of this is not really talked about, but I do wonder what the effect on such activities will be, both in the short and long terms.
- marchenko 10y ago
  Similarly,I always wonder what will happen to pleasure drivers and motorcyclists under a self-driving regime. Will human operators be confined to tracks by regulations or unaffordable insurance rates?
  - lern_too_spel 10y ago
    The same thing that happened to pleasure horseback riding.
Tiktaalik 10y ago
> Though automatic driving should increase capacity... Even if the advent of autonomous cars results in any increase of road capacity there is not likely to be any difference in traffic congestion. Things are likely to be the same as they are now, if not worse. In general autonomous cars are a nightmare scenario for people who fight against the spread of automobile oriented infrastructure and urban sprawl. The main problem is that autonomous cars massively incentivize car use, and the result of this will be that more people will choose to drive cars. This factor, combined with induced demand and combined with the unchangeable physical constraints of our built environment and car size, means that the roads will be just as gridlocked as they are now if nothing changes, and they'll be worse if politicians make the wrong decisions and expand road capacity. Some of the main things that discourage car ownership and use are costs, such as parking costs and insurance costs. The author points out these things are decreased or go away entirely with autonomous cars. Additionally the total potential group of drivers is increased, as you no longer need a license to drive. Now the very young and very old can also drive and the total potential amount of drivers increases. Urban politicians are best off pretending autonomous cars don't and won't exist because it's not going to be a solution to any of their problems. > What exactly are the differences in traffic dynamics between a Lyft Line shuttle with 5 passengers and a municipal bus with an off-peak load of 10? I'm pretty sure transportation experts already know the answer to this given that independent small bus transit of the sort Lyft Line replicates is the norm in many third world countries. Given that first world countries have universally moved to centralized routes of large capacity buses it's surely more efficient. Tech companies should really at least talk with some people in the field they seek to disrupt before working on reinventing the wheel.
- mikeash 10y ago
  My counter would be: what are the reasons to fight against automobile oriented infrastructure and urban sprawl? If it's pollution, the move towards electric vehicles and clean energy will hopefully put that to rest before too long. If it's cost or fairness, if autonomous cars really do enable lots of ride sharing services, that should come way down. If it's accessibility, all those people who can't drive will be able to use autonomous cars. I'm sympathetic to the desire for walkable areas. I love a good walkable area myself. But cars are great too. People want them, because they want the things they enable. Even countries that are big on walking and biking and public transport still have a ton of cars. A future with sprawling cities where people have lots of space, things are far apart, and people get around in cheap, efficient autonomous cars sounds pretty good to me.
Yhippa 10y ago
I enjoyed this article and could see these things come to fruition. > Where are you willing to live if 'access to public transport' is 'anywhere' and there are no traffic jams on your commute? Does an hour-long commute with no traffic and no need to watch the road feel better or worse than a half-hour commute stuck in near-stationary traffic staring at the car in front? This I think is going to have the biggest impact on a lot of people. If I can sit in a pod and have a trouble-free and consistent commute to work I would be willing to commute to more places for work. Having had jobs where I commuted around an hour in bumper-to-bumper traffic each way was awful. I would take an equivalent-time commute where I can space out, read, do work, or whatever. Secondly in this fantasy land I would also be willing to go to more places on a whim if it were this easy. Lots of cool stuff might not have to be solely concentrated in big cities if it's more affordable for business to pop up farther out from centers of population. In a more weird twist what if this autonomy was so good that you could send pods containing entire dinners on the road? Looking past how one would keep it fresh, it would be cool to order food and get it delivered without knowing there could be a 45+ minute wait until it gets there.
Tiktaalik 10y ago
The gas tax is a good point. It's going to become less and less effective over time. Regions will need to move to comprehensive road pricing and tolling to make up the lost revenue and to not induce demand.
Nomentatus 10y ago
A wonderful article in many ways. Kudos. But... I think the title should read "secondary" or "resultant" or "follow-on" or maybe even "chain-reaction" (maybe) but NOT "second order" - as there's nothing meta about the run-on consequences. Just "future" would do. Not least because second order or meta-computation will likely have to be incorporated into autonomous car design. Such cars shouldn't be programmed to do things that are perfectly legal but outside the ability of human drivers, thus startling the hell out of human drivers, or literally colliding with their well-worn habits (habits based on past behavior of other human drivers, not ideal machine behavior.) For example, my too-quick reading of the recent Uber accident suggests that the car did something perfectly legal, but which a human wouldn't do, because we can't react to the color of a traffic-light changing within nano-seconds, and so create edge-case decisions and behavior. To prevent such accidents, either the machine or the designer of it, has to do some second-order thinking which models what humans can and can't do with a car (cognitively) in order to help the autonomous car fit in with and be more predictable to human drivers. It's no good for an autonomous car to drive legally in a way that's so unusual it just about guarantees a crash with a driver who's never seen that done before, such as predicting light changes with extreme accuracy and then exploiting that, or reacting to a light change far faster than any human ever has or ever will. (These human-friendly "features" could be dropped once humans are legally barred from driving on public roads, of course.) I can't swear I'm guiltless, but, to return to the original point: The general rule is, that if you use a word "because it makes you sound smart", you are only sounding smart to someone more ignorant than yourself, or equally ignorant. You risk proving yourself both ignorant and pompous to everyone who actually knows the meaning of the term. So please don't appropriate technical terms. (Note that a quick google may not rescue you from this fate if a degraded usage has already begun to spread.)

125 points by astigsen 10y ago

There's also another consequence not mentioned in the article - right now, almost all organs for transplants come from accidents. With accidents being reduced to zero, it will be very hard to get a viable organ for a transplant - so the medical community is already sounding alarms about the need for alternative solutions to be found(such as increased investment into artificially growing new organs).

Asooka 10y ago
Aren't most such accidents from people riding motorcycles without helmets? I don't think that practice will stop with autonomous vehicles.
- onion2k 10y ago
  Aren't most such accidents from people riding motorcycles without helmets? That certainly isn't the case here in the UK.
  - manarth 10y ago
    Worth noting that helmets are mandatory in the UK, but optional in parts of the USA (as a Brit, I found this astonishing, the first time I visited the USA).
    - AnimalMuppet 10y ago
      My brother argues that a helmet makes you more likely to survive an accident, but it also makes you more likely to have an accident, since it cuts down on your awareness of your surroundings (peripheral vision and hearing).
      - gambiting 10y ago
        Which should lead to riding slower and being more careful, surely. Experiments have proven time and time again that the more confident we are in our surroundings, the more risks we take - so if a helmet makes it more difficult to know what's around you, it will make you more cautious. If someone riding with a helmet on is not cautious, then surely they wouldn't be cautious without it on, right? I'm clearly playing the devil's advocate here, but I guess assuming what you are saying is true, it would be choosing between "less accidents, but they are more severe" or "more accidents, but they are less severe". Which one is "better"? Is there a "better" here?
- Zigurd 10y ago
  Motorcycle miles are <10% car miles in the US. Also, autonomy will make roads safer for motorcycles, bicycles, and pedestrians.
  - E6300 10y ago
    The article talks about "no lanes, no separation, no stopping distances, and no signals, (except of course for pedestrians to cross)", though. How will no traffic signals work with manual traffic? For example, in an intersection with no stop signs and no "invisible traffic lights", how would a constant stream of automated traffic know that a bicycle is waiting to cross?
    - gambiting 10y ago
      I'm guessing it would rely on the cars seeing a bicycle early enough to slow down. But yeah, I don't think that's going to happen, situations involving fast moving traffic will always need an extra degree of safety, even with fully automatic cars.
      - rock_hard 10y ago
        We will look back at comments like these in 100 years and cringe :)
    - monort 10y ago
      It will probably work like it works in Vietnam now: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gpsybD1MsNQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gpsybD1MsNQ
    - Zigurd 10y ago
      The same way it would know the rubbish pickup dropped a trash can into the street
- djaychela 10y ago
  Possibly (certainly not here in the UK), but the majority of motorcycle accidents involve another vehicle, and my experience (as someone who's ridden on the roads for nearly 30 years) of other road users is that it's often a lack of awareness of the presence of a motorbike that creates issues. I treat everyone else on the road as if they are actively trying to kill me, and it has worked so far. I'm sure that autonomous vehicles will be much more bike-friendly as they won't fail to look at junctions, and also will be much better at assessing the speed of an oncoming motorcycle (which many have problems with due to the size, apparently). And hopefully bikes will have some of the safety elements added to them by this time, making them inherently safer.
didgeoridoo 10y ago
There are other "accidents" besides motor vehicle accidents, but the point stands. Even with major advances in organ preservation (like vitrification), if you eliminate car accidents the rate of people going on the transfer list seems likely to exceed the rate of accidental deaths — if you exclude deaths from falls (likely to be elderly, organs not highly viable) and poisoning. EDIT: this of course does not include the fact that a single organ donor can save multiple lives. I have no idea what the average lives saved per donor is, but presumably it could be raised substantially if organs could be preserved indefinitely.
carapace 10y ago
Niven and others wrote sci-fi about "organ-legging". Reality has beaten them all: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Organ_harvesting_from_Falun_Gong_practitioners_in_China https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Organ_harvesting_from_Falun_Go... Much [hard] sci-fi now counts as a kind of scenario planning.

ape4 10y ago

No more accidents to the safety mechanisms in cars can be removed? What could possibly go wrong.

ealexhudson 10y ago
It's just a change in safety mechanism. If a car is capable of stopping in a shorter distance (because it has faster reactions, and now weighs less) then the speed of many accidents is going to come right down. If a car is capable of ensuring a collision is directly head-on rather than partial clipping, the types of safety mechanism can change. Nothing is going to change over night, but there's not going to be a need for the plethora of different options to cope with different types of accident that we have now. This will then drive planners to change how roads work - e.g. segment heavy transport maybe - and it will become a virtuous circle. Smaller, light-weight transit will make electric much more economic and work better for large cities. It will be an excellent change for everyone except those wedded to their SUVs.
- falcolas 10y ago
  > a car is capable of stopping in a shorter distance Stopping distance has more to do with speed than weight, since reducing weight also reduces the frictional force against the road at equal proportions to the reduction of potential energy, whereas the impact of velocity on the energy to be dissipated is squared. Brakes also wear down, steering linkages break, lugnuts are improperly torqued, tires blow out, debris can impact sensors or power packs, roads can be compromised by loose sand or potholes, lightning can strike the vehicle... failure modes are plentiful. You also still need to account for bugs and sensor failures; both of which will result in crashes in "non optimal" ways. As an example, I had a gyro fail in my multirotor; it was a gradual failure which was not immediately obvious (and completely invisible to the controller), and resulted in a couple of pretty spectacular crash that the multirotor (even with human inputs) had no way to recover from. Sure, you can add redundant systems (ideally in batches of three), but at some point there will always be a single point of failure.
  - nostoc 10y ago

jakozaur 10y ago

One missed point: inequality. On one hand few companies which will own autonomy tech will get all profits, while a lot of ppl will lose job. So the transportation cost instead of going to labour will mostly go to capital owners or decrease. In long run we should be fine, but in short it may cause a lot of friction.

eric_h 10y ago
Or a revolution... But if the rich control all the robots, who knows what will happen.
- marcosdumay 10y ago
  > who knows what will happen A cyber-revolution. Dumb robots are not full deterrent against The People (in fact, they may make revolutions easier). Artificial superintelligence is a very different matter.
  - AnimalMuppet 10y ago
    Dumb robots you manipulate to get them to do what you want. Artificial superintelligence you have to persuade that it should back your side (or at least not hinder it).
  - andrei_says_ 10y ago
    Relatively dumb drones and other military/security tech can have a lot of impact.
undersuit 10y ago
The author doesn't specifically call out inequality but he does address some of the economics, like how selling gas is a low margin business that will go away, on-demand rides will start to compete with public transportation(and I don't see any busing companies massively contributing to existing inequality), and he specifically counters your assessment that autonomy tech will get all the profits. He even quotes himself in the article. >I still think autonomous cars will create more billionaires in real estate and retail than in tech or manufacturing. Just as cars did.

carlob 10y ago

Yet another thing not mentioned in the article is the effect on the energy grid: as we move towards renewables, which are much harder to turn on and off to match demand, we will need to invest a lot more in energy storage. Large scale deployment of electric vehicles might be a way to solve this problem, if one were forced or incentivized to leave their car connected to the grid when parked, the grid could use the cars as a distributed storage system.

macintux 10y ago
He did mention the grid and storage.

TimJYoung 10y ago

There are also some demands that will be placed on local governments and municipalities. For example, what will autonomous vehicles do when encountering huge potholes ? This is something that is widespread in the northeast US in the spring. Today, drivers will often swing slightly into the other lane to avoid them, provided that there is no on-coming traffic. So, either the autonomous vehicles will be able to deal with them independently, or local governments are going to need to be a lot more proactive about road maintenance. That's going to be a hard sell for a lot of municipalities that simply refuse to raise taxes and often fund most of their operation via punitive speeding/parking fines and other types of regressive taxation, much of which will probably also go away, based upon this blog post.

macintux 10y ago
With the exception of the loss of gas tax revenue, I think potholes become much more manageable in such a world. No lanes and cars constantly talking to each other means that potholes are simply avoided with no meaningful loss of momentum. It's also not hard to envision automated pothole filling vehicles that are constantly roaming, waiting to hear other autonomous vehicles discovering road damage, and then drop their load (colorful metaphors abound) over the hole. Maybe it's a temporary patch for humans to follow up on later, maybe it's a permanent fix. Seems like this could actually lead to the elimination of large potholes entirely. They start small, are detected and reported by autonomous vehicles, and are fixed by other autonomous vehicles running 24x7.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- microcolonel 10y ago
  If inter-vehicle communication can be standardized, and human drivers aren't on the road, then what's the point of cars (self-driving or otherwise)? What you're describing is basically a rail system.
  - nitrogen 10y ago

rodionos 10y ago

Enjoyed reading the article. More specific and practical than far-reaching Kurzweilian forecasts. I also liked that each paragraph provided links to associated data sources, e.g. crash stats, convenience store sales etc.

Neliquat 10y ago

This guy forgets that traffic controls are as much for animals, pedestrians, and the local setup than they are for actual traffic control. We will not be getting rid of lanes, even if autonomous cars use them differently.

surfmike 10y ago
He does mention that signals are still necessary for pedestrians, but yes hopefully self driving cars allow us to reclaim more of the city for pedestrians. That would improve cities and our lives, even if it means less lanes could be reclaimed from cars.
Hydraulix989 10y ago
There's still plenty of efficiency improvements to be made.

TeMPOraL 10y ago

> By implication, in 2030 or so, police investigating a crime won't just get copies of the CCTV from surrounding properties, but get copies of the sensor data from every car that happened to be passing, and then run facial recognition scans against known offenders. Or, perhaps, just ask if any car in the area thought it saw something suspicious. On a more positive / awesome note, maybe we'll get a full 3D crime scene reconstruction from aggregate camera data, like in Continuum (sans holograms)?

zardo 10y ago
>(sans holograms)? With virtual entities on a MR platform. Redmond PD at least will be calling them holograms.

nickbauman 10y ago

Enormous parts reduction: Much less labor to assemble, much less ongoing maintenance. I feel like this is so much more critical and has much larger ramifications than other second-order consequences.

zzzzzzzza 10y ago
it will come not just from transitioning from ice to electric engines, but also, later, from removing the steering wheel and all associated parts. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cmvCdBufz6U https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cmvCdBufz6U the arcimoto dropped from 1700 lbs to 1000lbs just by going from a steering wheel to a bike handle.

saosebastiao 10y ago

Traffic waves aren't going away. As long as you have non-zero reaction times and slower acceleration than deceleration, the phantom waves will happen as a pure result of physics. Their discovery and subsequent modeling owe to our understanding of fluid dynamics. Computers aren't magical things that destroy the laws of physics. Faster reaction times reduce propensity, but both higher speeds and closer following distances ameliorate the benefits of the faster reaction times and increase severity. If anything changes they'll become slightly less common but much worse. EDIT: just to add to the criticism of this list of overly fantastical fantasies of autonomous cars, the ideas about traffic disappearing when people don't have to park are trivially disprovable. It's almost as if the author has never been to an airport or school pickup zone or any other place where people don't have to park but traffic still backs up for miles.

Sharlin 10y ago
Fluid dynamics is local, and so are the dynamics of human-driven car traffic to a first approximation. Computer-driven cars can react non-locally by communicating with each other via radio even if they don't see each other.
- andrewflnr 10y ago
  At the very least, waves could be damped by a vehicle that sees it coming from a long way away. But if everyone knows the average speed of the roadway, and doesn't suffer from the moronic impulse to push up against the car in front of them, waves will form less often, if at all.
  - saosebastiao 10y ago
    > and doesn't suffer from the moronic impulse to push up against the car in front of them But see that's the problem. In this piece, we see direct advocacy of that exact moronic impulse under the misguided assumption that computers can will away the laws of physics.
- saosebastiao 10y ago

revelation 10y ago

It's bizarre. Did every "futurologist" miss that, you know, an autonomous car is still the same size and shape as a normal car? That they still carry most likely 1 person? If you want to have roving fleets of autonomous cars and ban personal traffic, well guess what, ban cars and get a bunch of light rail, you can have that today.

zzzzzzzza 10y ago
Did every "futurologist" miss that, you know, an autonomous car is still the same size and shape as a normal car? That they still carry most likely 1 person? 1. an autonomous car will probably be smaller and yes possibly a different shape than current cars. 2. If you have a fleet of on demand autonomous cars, you can have different sizes of cars for different loads: small cars for individual trips, up to vans or buses for ride sharing (which would presumably be cheaper). Also everything from trucks to uhaul to big rigs for rent for moving stuff around.
cr0sh 10y ago
Light rail can't go exactly where you want to go. Light rail can't carry packages for you (virtual trailer). Light rail can't deliver packages (imagine being able to shop, pick something up, then put it in a car to have it delivered to your home - and wait for you until you get there). Light rail does work well for intermediate distances - say travel from your house in the suburbs or further out to the middle of the city - or "between cities" (I'm talking about the individual "city areas" that are part of larger metro areas - think "Oakland to San Francisco" - which are part of the "SF Metro Area"). But for certain tasks (getting to-from the light-rail, or delivery service) - self-driving vehicles can work better. Now - if instead of light rail, you used something like Doug Malewicki's SkyTran system (largely unproven, though) - then you can almost (again, theoretically) get the benefits of self-driving personal vehicles, with the benefits of light rail - and without needing the years-long effort and expense to tear up existing streets or what-not. There would still need to be some kind of self-driving vehicles, but they could be in much smaller numbers (I'm still thinking things like delivery - for instance, if you went to Home Depot or something and ordered some sacks of concrete - you're not taking that on a light-rail or other similar system - of course, maybe all of this would be ordered online and delivered in the future - but there's still going to be stuff out there that will only be able to be purchased "on site" - plants, for example - or junkyard parts).

cr0sh 10y ago

Something that I always wonder about, as we move towards self-driving vehicles being common, and electric vehicles being used more - is what is going to happen to the off-road sport community. Right now, there aren't any "real" electric off-road vehicles (at least available to consumers). There's a handful of SUVs, certainly, and most electric vehicles are all-wheel drive - but no one would seriously think you could take one of these, lift it 6 inches, drop some 35's under it, and go off exploring Moab. I'm sure that there are some people experimenting with more capable off-road electric vehicles (if nothing else, taking a Jeep or something and putting in place an electric motor and batteries might be a start), but right now battery technology just isn't there for real electric off-road use (the rest of the technology certainly is, though - if the battery tech can catch up, it might be a renaissance for off-roading due to the tech alone). What I would hope or like to see would be an autonomous electric off-road vehicle that could drive itself to where you want to go, then allow you to "take over" to drive out in the "back 40" area (or whatnot). Perhaps it could have traction and steering assist, plus other methods to keep you safe (or allow you to turn off all of that to let you go at it by the seat of your pants if you want). It could even (perhaps) have a "training mode" where it could help teach you how to handle off-road conditions. Or - for those that want the "off-road" experience but not the effort, just tell it where to go, and it follows a trail using GPS and such to get you there. Once there, charge the car from solar/wind and/or a portable generator. Regardless - all of this is not really talked about, but I do wonder what the effect on such activities will be, both in the short and long terms.

marchenko 10y ago
Similarly,I always wonder what will happen to pleasure drivers and motorcyclists under a self-driving regime. Will human operators be confined to tracks by regulations or unaffordable insurance rates?
- lern_too_spel 10y ago
  The same thing that happened to pleasure horseback riding.

Tiktaalik 10y ago

> Though automatic driving should increase capacity... Even if the advent of autonomous cars results in any increase of road capacity there is not likely to be any difference in traffic congestion. Things are likely to be the same as they are now, if not worse. In general autonomous cars are a nightmare scenario for people who fight against the spread of automobile oriented infrastructure and urban sprawl. The main problem is that autonomous cars massively incentivize car use, and the result of this will be that more people will choose to drive cars. This factor, combined with induced demand and combined with the unchangeable physical constraints of our built environment and car size, means that the roads will be just as gridlocked as they are now if nothing changes, and they'll be worse if politicians make the wrong decisions and expand road capacity. Some of the main things that discourage car ownership and use are costs, such as parking costs and insurance costs. The author points out these things are decreased or go away entirely with autonomous cars. Additionally the total potential group of drivers is increased, as you no longer need a license to drive. Now the very young and very old can also drive and the total potential amount of drivers increases. Urban politicians are best off pretending autonomous cars don't and won't exist because it's not going to be a solution to any of their problems. > What exactly are the differences in traffic dynamics between a Lyft Line shuttle with 5 passengers and a municipal bus with an off-peak load of 10? I'm pretty sure transportation experts already know the answer to this given that independent small bus transit of the sort Lyft Line replicates is the norm in many third world countries. Given that first world countries have universally moved to centralized routes of large capacity buses it's surely more efficient. Tech companies should really at least talk with some people in the field they seek to disrupt before working on reinventing the wheel.

mikeash 10y ago
My counter would be: what are the reasons to fight against automobile oriented infrastructure and urban sprawl? If it's pollution, the move towards electric vehicles and clean energy will hopefully put that to rest before too long. If it's cost or fairness, if autonomous cars really do enable lots of ride sharing services, that should come way down. If it's accessibility, all those people who can't drive will be able to use autonomous cars. I'm sympathetic to the desire for walkable areas. I love a good walkable area myself. But cars are great too. People want them, because they want the things they enable. Even countries that are big on walking and biking and public transport still have a ton of cars. A future with sprawling cities where people have lots of space, things are far apart, and people get around in cheap, efficient autonomous cars sounds pretty good to me.

Yhippa 10y ago

I enjoyed this article and could see these things come to fruition. > Where are you willing to live if 'access to public transport' is 'anywhere' and there are no traffic jams on your commute? Does an hour-long commute with no traffic and no need to watch the road feel better or worse than a half-hour commute stuck in near-stationary traffic staring at the car in front? This I think is going to have the biggest impact on a lot of people. If I can sit in a pod and have a trouble-free and consistent commute to work I would be willing to commute to more places for work. Having had jobs where I commuted around an hour in bumper-to-bumper traffic each way was awful. I would take an equivalent-time commute where I can space out, read, do work, or whatever. Secondly in this fantasy land I would also be willing to go to more places on a whim if it were this easy. Lots of cool stuff might not have to be solely concentrated in big cities if it's more affordable for business to pop up farther out from centers of population. In a more weird twist what if this autonomy was so good that you could send pods containing entire dinners on the road? Looking past how one would keep it fresh, it would be cool to order food and get it delivered without knowing there could be a 45+ minute wait until it gets there.

Tiktaalik 10y ago

The gas tax is a good point. It's going to become less and less effective over time. Regions will need to move to comprehensive road pricing and tolling to make up the lost revenue and to not induce demand.

Nomentatus 10y ago

A wonderful article in many ways. Kudos. But... I think the title should read "secondary" or "resultant" or "follow-on" or maybe even "chain-reaction" (maybe) but NOT "second order" - as there's nothing meta about the run-on consequences. Just "future" would do. Not least because second order or meta-computation will likely have to be incorporated into autonomous car design. Such cars shouldn't be programmed to do things that are perfectly legal but outside the ability of human drivers, thus startling the hell out of human drivers, or literally colliding with their well-worn habits (habits based on past behavior of other human drivers, not ideal machine behavior.) For example, my too-quick reading of the recent Uber accident suggests that the car did something perfectly legal, but which a human wouldn't do, because we can't react to the color of a traffic-light changing within nano-seconds, and so create edge-case decisions and behavior. To prevent such accidents, either the machine or the designer of it, has to do some second-order thinking which models what humans can and can't do with a car (cognitively) in order to help the autonomous car fit in with and be more predictable to human drivers. It's no good for an autonomous car to drive legally in a way that's so unusual it just about guarantees a crash with a driver who's never seen that done before, such as predicting light changes with extreme accuracy and then exploiting that, or reacting to a light change far faster than any human ever has or ever will. (These human-friendly "features" could be dropped once humans are legally barred from driving on public roads, of course.) I can't swear I'm guiltless, but, to return to the original point: The general rule is, that if you use a word "because it makes you sound smart", you are only sounding smart to someone more ignorant than yourself, or equally ignorant. You risk proving yourself both ignorant and pompous to everyone who actually knows the meaning of the term. So please don't appropriate technical terms. (Note that a quick google may not rescue you from this fate if a degraded usage has already begun to spread.)