4 ms·
The author also is very naive when he says "no more bus drivers, taxi drivers, limo drivers". It may happen eventually, but not before a few decades. There are
by molmalo 14y ago
The author also is very naive when he says "no more bus drivers, taxi drivers, limo drivers". It may happen eventually, but not before a few decades. There are a lot of power struggles and political interests that will make this happen in a very very long time frame. Most probably, it will happen as it happens today with lots of aircraft's. While they can do lots of things autonomously, there must be a human to takes certain decisions and as a backup.
What I can see instead, is lots of truck drivers watching TV or just sleeping at the steering wheel, while their trucks do the job.
- mc32 14y agoBus drivers and those represented by unions and assciations will take a while to be eliminated from being necessary. It hasn't been necessary to have train operartors/conductors for a few decades but they persist, despite trains being by their nature of prescribed, unchanging, predictable routes with preditable stops, prime candidates for automation. Monorails, for some reason are an exception.
- snogglethorpe 14y agoOne reason is that trains are hugely more efficient in terms of passengers carried per operator: On a bus carrying 50 people, the driver is a much more significant portion of the cost than a driver and a conductor on a train carrying 2000 people. So even though it's much easier to automate a train, there's less incentive to do so, and doing so still requires investment. It'll slowly happen anyway, of course, but there's no real rush.