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Excellent questions regarding autonomous vehicles. Instead of a city center being two hours away at rush hour, it could be a half hour trip. But also living i

Excellent questions regarding autonomous vehicles. Instead of a city center being two hours away at rush hour, it could be a half hour trip. But also living in the city is going to get a lot easier because of robotic transportation. It won't be necessary to haul anything home from a store, for example. A lot of cabs could just have one or two seats and no trunk. We'll see tiny vehicles delivering dinner, handling dry cleaning. And parking woes disappear. But the biggest change will be in how easy it will be to move from one place to another. Yes, robots will be able to move all your stuff cheaply. But they also might just procure comparable stuff in your new city instead. And most of your stuff you don't use all the time, so maybe it's in long term remote/cheap storage until you do. Maybe its okay if those table leafs are at your house for Thanksgiving dinner. Maybe you move every month or live in one place during the week and another on the weekends.

roymurdock 9y ago
This sounds good in theory because it correlates with trends in the IT industry. Centralized compute/storage/app delivery on an IaaS but in the real world, with our actual physical stuff instead of data. In practice I'd wager that this lifestyle of moving constantly and having robots move your stuff around for you would be prohibitively expensive. Also, who wants to containerize their life? How could this ever be sustainable for someone with kids. I think we should be less focused on autonomous driving, and more focused on reforming our tax code, infrastructure spend (too little), and healthcare spend (too much).
- stretchwithme 9y ago
  I know a guy that travels constantly and has no permanent address. And there are a few families that spend years on the road because they want to teach their kids that life is an adventure. They haven't found it prohibitively expensive or unsustainable. It's worth it to them. Making that lifestyle cheaper and easier will expand the number of people for whom that is true. Automation, as it has always done, will make our infrastructure cheaper and more robust. It will slash the cost of healthcare and dramatically increase the amount of resources we have available and our quality of life. So, no, I don't think we should focus more on nibbling around the edges of what is possible. Those things can all be fixed, but that takes political will and convincing the majority of people. And most of them are stuck in the analogies of the past.
kayoone 9y ago
Robotic transportation could also greatly increase the demand for cars and actually increase traffic on the roads, even though less total cars would exist because they would be better utilised. Even public transport could disappear if robotic cars could meet demand, if they can't, they will probably stay more expensive than public transport.

roymurdock 9y ago

This sounds good in theory because it correlates with trends in the IT industry. Centralized compute/storage/app delivery on an IaaS but in the real world, with our actual physical stuff instead of data. In practice I'd wager that this lifestyle of moving constantly and having robots move your stuff around for you would be prohibitively expensive. Also, who wants to containerize their life? How could this ever be sustainable for someone with kids. I think we should be less focused on autonomous driving, and more focused on reforming our tax code, infrastructure spend (too little), and healthcare spend (too much).

stretchwithme 9y ago
I know a guy that travels constantly and has no permanent address. And there are a few families that spend years on the road because they want to teach their kids that life is an adventure. They haven't found it prohibitively expensive or unsustainable. It's worth it to them. Making that lifestyle cheaper and easier will expand the number of people for whom that is true. Automation, as it has always done, will make our infrastructure cheaper and more robust. It will slash the cost of healthcare and dramatically increase the amount of resources we have available and our quality of life. So, no, I don't think we should focus more on nibbling around the edges of what is possible. Those things can all be fixed, but that takes political will and convincing the majority of people. And most of them are stuck in the analogies of the past.

kayoone 9y ago

Robotic transportation could also greatly increase the demand for cars and actually increase traffic on the roads, even though less total cars would exist because they would be better utilised. Even public transport could disappear if robotic cars could meet demand, if they can't, they will probably stay more expensive than public transport.