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I've been saying this to anyone who will listen for years. I really believe this technology will touch everything. Real estate markets will shift dramatically

• Joeri 14y ago
  90 percent of those in the transportation sector will lose their jobs. Car companies will go broke when demand plummets. Pizza delivery will not be an entrylevel job. I think the net effect will be hugely positive, but like all paradigm shifts this is going to cause immense social upheaval and initially look like it only makes things worse.
  • chrischen 14y ago
    Borrow money from the future to buy their complacency!
  • jaggederest 14y ago
    Only about 8m people in the US, we've lost more than that from the manufacturing sector over the last couple decades. The big effects will be on other aspects. No more drunk driving. Fractional ownership of cars.
  • visarga 14y ago
    Taxi driving, RIP.
    • deleted 14y ago
      [deleted]
    • rooshdi 14y ago
      Traffic tickets, BIH.
  • cynwoody 14y ago
    > Car companies will go broke when demand plummets. Just because it doesn't have a driver doesn't mean it doesn't need to be manufactured. Car companies will do fine. > Pizza delivery will not be an entrylevel job. Nope. But pizza making still will be. Sebastian, are you listening? > I think the net effect will be hugely positive You got that right. > but like all paradigm shifts this is going to cause immense social upheaval and initially look like it only makes things worse. So, what? You can't make an omelette without breaking eggs. The key is to forbid the government from breaking eggs. Egg breaking should be strictly a private sector activity, judged solely by consumer demand.
    • tluyben2 14y ago
      > Just because it doesn't have a driver doesn't mean it doesn't need to be manufactured. Car companies will do fine. No they won't; every > 1 car family will have 1 car only after this, because, when at work, you just send your car back on it's own for the wife and kids. Big reduction. If your neighbor has different hours than you have, you can combine that by sending the car back when you arrived. I think it'll have a huge impact on car sales; we just don't need many anymore as, unlike now, they are not useless without a driver.
      • MichaelApproved 14y ago
        Take the next leap and see that you don't need to actually own the car at all. No need to send a car back home. No need to negotiate with your neighbor. We all share a fleet of cars like a taxi service. Need a car? Pull out your smartphone app and push the "call" button that sends a nearby car to your location. You could also schedule a pickup for the exact time you get off work. No need to send an empty car back home to your family during the day. No need to let the car sit empty in between rides.
        • lukifer 14y ago
          This will definitely exist, but not everybody will want to give up personalized cars. Too many people see their car as part of their identity. We have the tech right now for every workplace to have open seating and non-personalized computer workstations, and while some companies do this, most people still want their own desk space and personalized computer.
  • tzs 14y ago
    > Pizza delivery will not be an entrylevel job Why not? People are still going to want the pizza delivered to their door, not to their driveway or parking lot.
• visarga 14y ago
  How about terrorism? A terrorist could load a bomb on one of these cars and send it to its destination. It will be a poor man's guided missile. That would have implications on security procedures.
  • lsc 14y ago
    There was a Clint Eastwood move in the '70s wherein Clint and his Chinese (yes, kung-fu was a theme) partner were chased through the streets of San Francisco by a remote-controlled car with a bomb strapped to it. At the end of the chase, the car exploded, with Clint and his partner still in it. It's where the "Dirty Harry" franchise is generally considered to have jumped the shark, but I personally thought it was great fun. Personally, I think the film was clearly a parody, but Clint played is completely straight, which I found pretty amusing. What's my point? "oh no, terrorists!" is about the silliest objection I can think of to self-driving car technology.
  • elchief 14y ago
    I am actually working on software right now for managing the interiors of driverless cars. Forgot your purse? Get a text. Puked in the car? We'll bill you to clean it. Put in a bomb? Call da police.
• bcoates 14y ago
  Driverless cars would be a fantastic improvement to society, but I think you might be underestimating how much people will compensate. Traffic rises to fill roads, and only a small part of public transport budgets are for drivers (it looks like around 10% for LA)
  • surrealize 14y ago
    > only a small part of public transport budgets are for drivers (it looks like around 10% for LA) Well, you also have to consider that bus systems are built around driver scarcity. What if buses were half as large, and run twice as often? They can't now, because that would double driver labor costs. If buses were the size of vans, capital costs might even decrease due to having access to van-market economies of scale (the market for vans presumably being significantly larger than the market for buses).
    • justincormack 14y ago
      Many countries with lower labour costs this eg the Dolmus in Turkey https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dolmu%C5%9F https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dolmu%C5%9F
      • pekk 14y ago
        Also all over Africa and India. It's a very common pattern outside the weird US
    • fulafel 14y ago
      The sensible model seems to be called "flex service" or "demand responsive transit" (1): Dynamically routed small shuttles where customers place trip orders to the transit company, and the routing system figures out paths for the shuttles so customers get where they want to go in reasonable time. (1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demand_responsive_transport https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demand_responsive_transport
    • eli_gottlieb 14y ago
      You mean share-taxis? They're relatively common already in many places.
• bambax 14y ago
  I can't wait to see driverless cars available everywhere, but I'm afraid of the pushback, especially from governments who will inevitably come up with stupid regulations that will make it as cumbersome to use as possible. Also, given that I live in France, I'm sure there won't be any Google car allowed anywhere before the French automakers are able to make one -- which is to say, probably never.
  • Gmo 14y ago
    Right, because, for instance, they prevented Toyota to sell their Prius because none of the French automaker had a plugin hybrid ? You know, it's easy to always blame the government when the real problem is that you start your thought process as if it was hopeless from the beginning ... PS: Yes, I'm French.
    • ekianjo 14y ago
      The french gvrnt will let them reach the market and tax their asses once they are on it. Classic!
  • scaphandre 14y ago
    France is a democracy. Traffic accidents are a main cause of death. Self-driving cars appear to be safer already. Let's make it an issue and make government change.
• thisiswei 14y ago
  glad im learning cs373 (self-driving-car) by the the sebastian thrun
• rimantas 14y ago
  How about first asking: why do we have to commute at all?
  • Cushman 14y ago
    That's a great question, and my trivial answer is: Because people want to sleep in a different place from where they spend the day. Now, is it good for us, abstracting out travel time, for those to be in very different places? That's a whole other issue. I do imagine communities will see many of the same benefits as individuals; that is, lower transport costs will mean its possible to build affordable, self-contained communities farther away from urban centers without sacrificing quality of life (including the ability to go to the city if you want to). But that's behind the event horizon to me; hard to speculate.
• timedoctor 14y ago
  This is combined with more people working from home ... more people ordering on the Internet. Generally the use of cars is going to continue to go down substantially.
• pkorzeniewski 14y ago
  You're missing one important factor - many people, me included, just like to drive cars and they don't treat them as "transport vehicle only". I would refuse to use a driverless car even if it would be more economic, more safe and would transport me faster.
  • VBprogrammer 14y ago
    I'm sure you feel that way. But I'm certain plenty of people felt that way when horses were replaced by cars. There is no arguing with better. As likely as not the government will eventually force your hand with driverless only lanes / roads. Anyway, if you really want to enjoy a driving experience get a motorcycle!
  • greiskul 14y ago
    That's what people said about the horse probably.
  • lucian1900 14y ago
    Would you use an optionally driverless car? On long trips you could just take a nap, but you could have your fun driving any time. However, at some point the safety factor may force you to stop driving. I wouldn't want you to be driving, when a machine could do it better.
    • sopooneo 14y ago
      Many will not take such a rational approach to the safety issue. Every driverless car fatality will get huge press. No one I know has ever died in an airplane, but quite a few I know are afraid to fly.
      • lucian1900 14y ago
        Indeed, public perception will be an issue. I still have hope that people will get over it.
  • deleted 14y ago
    [deleted]
• tokenadult 14y ago
  I'm with you in thinking that this technology will be quite revolutionary. When I was in elementary school, the school year before the moon landing, my classmates and I made a time capsule, filling it with our predictions of the world of 2001. The time capsule was opened that year (I was overseas at the time, so I missed the big ceremony for that), and our predictions could then be tested against reality. We all recognized that exhaust emissions of cars would have to be reduced, and they were, but by incremental improvements in Otto-cycle engine designs rather than by switching to electric cars, as we predicted. What we didn't anticipate was truly personal, individual vehicles that could drive themselves even within within twenty years of 2001. I thought that the world would move toward more fixed-path public transportation solutions, like the monorails that always featured in 1960s visions of the future. The comments below your comment on use cases are very interesting. This whole subthread is food for thought. My thought, as a married man with three children still at home, and one grown child in another state who might still join us on family trips from time to time, is that we will probably buy ONE more car that isn't self-driving, to replace the older of our two cars in the next few years, and then ONE self-driving car to be my wife's main commuting car, with her stuff stashed inside. For all other trips, we will subscribe to an on-call car service, which will surely be cheaper per use than full ownership of a second car. The car service cars can be parked all over town for instant availability. They will be intelligently dispatched by algorithms that balance speed of arrival with passenger preferences such as whether or not the car has child safety seats, whether or not the passenger prefers to work or to relax with a great sound system during the drive, and so on. I greatly look forward to this lifestyle. I substitute a lot of walking and bicycling for car driving already, and just knowing that eventually (not REAL soon) all the cars sharing the road and street with me will have competent robot drivers is a huge improvement. The Wall Street Journal article "Why Driverless Cars Are Inevitable--and That's a Good Thing" http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10000872396390443524904577651552635911824.html http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000087239639044352490457765... from a few months ago has more about the economy-changing dynamics of driverless cars. I can't wait--but I'll observe the speed limit while I'm driving as I attempt to wait. AFTER EDIT: Responding to comments elsewhere in this interesting thread, why I think Google Maps will probably be licensed into most self-driving car packages, even if the hardware is built mostly by other companies, is that Google Maps is relentless in adding data to its geographic database. SEP 6 2012, Alexis Madrigal's column in The Atlantic, shared previously to HN, "How Google Builds Its Maps—and What It Means for the Future of Everything" http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/09/how-google-builds-its-maps-and-what-it-means-for-the-future-of-everything/261913/ http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/09/how-go... September 27, 2012, David Pogue's column in the New York Times: "What Makes Google’s Maps So Good" http://pogue.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/09/27/what-makes-googles-maps-so-good/ http://pogue.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/09/27/what-makes-googles... The Google Street View photography of my former neighborhood in Panchiao, Taiwan is PHENOMENAL, and data like that are being gathered all over the world. If I like, I can take a photo in 3-D view with my Nexus 4 phone, GPS geolocation turned on, and add data to the database any time. Generally, any time anyone is on a drive with a Google device turned on, Google gets some of the data that helps it predict current driving times for differing routes to the destination--an enormously helpful feature of Google Maps for drives during rush hour in the Twin Cities.
• jinushaun 14y ago
  And I can't believe people honestly told Google to dump the project and "focus". Oh Wall Street... They worry about tomorrow's profits, but Google is thinking about next year's profit.
• fudged71 14y ago
  The road network is society's circulatory system. Everything we do is touched by roads. They have essentially created remote realtime monitoring systems for society. Human traffic, weather, parking, etc. As well as solving the biggest optimization problem that exists today. Truck shipments can now be done overnight without worrying about driver fatigue. Emergency vehicles can take the most efficient route, as well as efficient avoidance of other vehicles. And traffic lights can be optimized as well.