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A lot of what you mention was raised in a recent discussion between Paul Krugman and cutting-edge Sci-fi author Charlie Stross. Here's a copy of the transcript

A lot of what you mention was raised in a recent discussion between Paul Krugman and cutting-edge Sci-fi author Charlie Stross. Here's a copy of the transcript, which is also well worth a read http://sites.google.com/site/strosskrugmantranscript/ http://sites.google.com/site/strosskrugmantranscript/ Sample Charlie Stross: It’s going to be one of these things where there is going to be a sudden step change. ... When the automatic self-driving vehicles get sufficiently good that they are less likely to be in a collision than a human driver, your premium will go up if you insist on driving manually. Yeah, that’s going to go up steeply a few years later. I think we may be seeing the end of human beings allowed to drive the public highways within 30 years

Retric 17y ago
Insurgence companies are profitable with the current level of risk, so some of them would be happy and profitable to keep selling inshurance at the current rate. The only driver for machine drivers is going to be cheaper premiums and boredom. Once machines drivers become really popular we might end up with specific high speed lanes which only they can enter etc. But, it's going to take at least 20 years to really go from mostly human to hardly any human drivers.
- StrawberryFrog 17y ago
  it's going to take at least 20 years to really go from mostly human to hardly any human drivers. Right, and if it starts 10 years from now that's consistent with Stross's "30 years from now". In time-scale, if not in exact outcome.
- barrkel 17y ago
  Insurance is profitable because the risk is spread across a wide base, including risk-averse people. If the default is high-safety automatic vehicles, only the reckless and adrenaline-junkies are likely to drive, forcing up rates disproportionately.
  - Retric 17y ago
    If anything a large number of the risk adverse are going to be the last holdouts to keep driving.
  - nradov 17y ago
    There isn't a whole lot of risk spreading in car insurance. They adjust rates heavily based on age and driving record. Most of the reckless adrenaline junkies are young, and have a history of collisions and moving violations, so it's fairly easy to identify them.
    - barrkel 17y ago
      Without actually being an actuary, and having access to the raw data, it's rather hard to tell IMHO whether the rate adjustments are really sufficient to cover the risk. Since risky customers are "pay big now, maybe payout big later" - and young customers get older and more experienced - it seems to me that there may be a human tendency to slightly underprice the risk of customers who pay large premia. The analogous situation with health insurance, of course, is even more deeply skewed. Insurance companies love having healthy young people on their plans because they almost never have to pay out - young healthy people overpay by quite a bit on health insurance.
    - anamax 17y ago
      > There isn't a whole lot of risk spreading in car insurance. Actually, there is. It just isn't simple. If you charge each person a bit more than their expected loss and you get that right, you'll have spread the risk and made a bit of money. The problem comes when you don't charge each person appropriately.
- onreact-com 17y ago
  "Insurgence companies"? Do you use a Che Guevara spell-checker?
  - Retric 17y ago
    yes
  - xiaoma 17y ago
    defiantly
- deleted 17y ago
  [deleted]
sethg 17y ago
When I read about step changes, I think about cell phones. I was studying in Israel during 1997-98, in a school where almost all the students were twentysomethings from the US or UK. At one point, one of the students came in with a cellphone on his belt, and he got teased for it, because carrying around a cell phone was a stereotypically Israeli thing to do. He'd gone native, so to speak. Flash forward five years, maybe less, and of course I and my wife have cellphones. Who, in the US, doesn't?
- DannoHung 17y ago
  Carrying it on your belt was the problem. And I still tease people that carry crackberries on their belts.
  - StrawberryFrog 17y ago
    The solution is that they got small enough to pocket.
  - sethg 17y ago
    Uh-oh.
  - shrughes 17y ago
    What happens nowadays is that people will at first carry them in their pockets, but as they get further from their youth, their thighs get flabbier. Soon enough they find it more comfortable to have the phone on the belt, because their pockets are smaller.
mnemonicsloth 17y ago
It's just a first impression (I'm still reading), but the discussion seems kind of sad to me. Krugman once wrote an academic paper on interstellar trade, Stross is famous on his way to notorious for far-out concepts, and they both seem to have this vaguely pessimistic view of the future. Somewhere in the middle of that conversation, Stross mumbles something about "Eric Drexler's pixie dust". I guess that's a cool attitude to cop if you're a science fiction writer. Nanotechnology is so obviously too good to be true that it isn't interesting and so must be hokum. But the actual research that's now getting published -- in Science and Nature, no less -- promises that we'll probably see radical change sooner rather than later. No one in the scientific community talks about it in those terms, of course. That would be... un-serious, and in a research field that was saturated with nutjobs before it formally came into existence, that's a kiss of death. Drexler posts the article citations on his blog, though: Here's a Map of China, assembled from a fabric of interlinked single strands of DNA: http://metamodern.com/2009/08/06/asia-and-the-elements-of-innovation/ http://metamodern.com/2009/08/06/asia-and-the-elements-of-in... DNA Origami for nanoscale 3D structures: http://metamodern.com/2009/05/22/a-third-revolution-in-dna-nanotechnology/ http://metamodern.com/2009/05/22/a-third-revolution-in-dna-n... DNA Origami Box (with locking hinged lid and DNA sequence "key") http://metamodern.com/2009/05/10/a-dna-origami-box/ http://metamodern.com/2009/05/10/a-dna-origami-box/ A big-picture post: http://metamodern.com/2008/11/10/modular-molecular-composite-nanosystems/ http://metamodern.com/2008/11/10/modular-molecular-composite... Software tools for protein design continue to improve: http://www.nanorex.com http://www.nanorex.com etc, etc.
- cstross 17y ago
  WRT the "Eric Drexler's pixie dust" remark, what I meant was _not_ that molecular nanotechnology won't work and totally revolutionize materials science, structural engineering, and a bunch of other disciplines ... but in the context of the conversation we were having at the time, nanobots with quasi-magical powers have become the lazy SF writer's magic wand _du_ _jour_, sketched into fictional life with remarkable information processing and medicinal powers that go way beyond anything we're likely to see in the short term. Sort of like "electricity" or "vital force" in the fiction of the early 19th century.
tocomment 17y ago
I think we might have the technology for cars to drive themselves in 15-20 especially if there is demand for it. However I just don't see a way to get from here to there. Even with a working system, what company could produce it and take on that kind of product liability?
- nradov 17y ago
  In the US it will probably have to be pushed forward by the federal government. Once the technology is good enough to significantly cut crash death rates then it becomes a public health issue. I expect they will establish some sort of certification program for automatically driven cars. And manufacturers will receive liability protection for certified products.
- 0x44 17y ago
  The kind of company with a fat contract with the US Military.

Retric 17y ago

Insurgence companies are profitable with the current level of risk, so some of them would be happy and profitable to keep selling inshurance at the current rate. The only driver for machine drivers is going to be cheaper premiums and boredom. Once machines drivers become really popular we might end up with specific high speed lanes which only they can enter etc. But, it's going to take at least 20 years to really go from mostly human to hardly any human drivers.

StrawberryFrog 17y ago
it's going to take at least 20 years to really go from mostly human to hardly any human drivers. Right, and if it starts 10 years from now that's consistent with Stross's "30 years from now". In time-scale, if not in exact outcome.
barrkel 17y ago
Insurance is profitable because the risk is spread across a wide base, including risk-averse people. If the default is high-safety automatic vehicles, only the reckless and adrenaline-junkies are likely to drive, forcing up rates disproportionately.
- Retric 17y ago
  If anything a large number of the risk adverse are going to be the last holdouts to keep driving.
- nradov 17y ago
  There isn't a whole lot of risk spreading in car insurance. They adjust rates heavily based on age and driving record. Most of the reckless adrenaline junkies are young, and have a history of collisions and moving violations, so it's fairly easy to identify them.
  - barrkel 17y ago
    Without actually being an actuary, and having access to the raw data, it's rather hard to tell IMHO whether the rate adjustments are really sufficient to cover the risk. Since risky customers are "pay big now, maybe payout big later" - and young customers get older and more experienced - it seems to me that there may be a human tendency to slightly underprice the risk of customers who pay large premia. The analogous situation with health insurance, of course, is even more deeply skewed. Insurance companies love having healthy young people on their plans because they almost never have to pay out - young healthy people overpay by quite a bit on health insurance.
  - anamax 17y ago
    > There isn't a whole lot of risk spreading in car insurance. Actually, there is. It just isn't simple. If you charge each person a bit more than their expected loss and you get that right, you'll have spread the risk and made a bit of money. The problem comes when you don't charge each person appropriately.
onreact-com 17y ago
"Insurgence companies"? Do you use a Che Guevara spell-checker?
- Retric 17y ago
  yes
- xiaoma 17y ago
  defiantly
deleted 17y ago
[deleted]

sethg 17y ago

When I read about step changes, I think about cell phones. I was studying in Israel during 1997-98, in a school where almost all the students were twentysomethings from the US or UK. At one point, one of the students came in with a cellphone on his belt, and he got teased for it, because carrying around a cell phone was a stereotypically Israeli thing to do. He'd gone native, so to speak. Flash forward five years, maybe less, and of course I and my wife have cellphones. Who, in the US, doesn't?

DannoHung 17y ago
Carrying it on your belt was the problem. And I still tease people that carry crackberries on their belts.
- StrawberryFrog 17y ago
  The solution is that they got small enough to pocket.
- sethg 17y ago
  Uh-oh.
- shrughes 17y ago
  What happens nowadays is that people will at first carry them in their pockets, but as they get further from their youth, their thighs get flabbier. Soon enough they find it more comfortable to have the phone on the belt, because their pockets are smaller.

mnemonicsloth 17y ago

It's just a first impression (I'm still reading), but the discussion seems kind of sad to me. Krugman once wrote an academic paper on interstellar trade, Stross is famous on his way to notorious for far-out concepts, and they both seem to have this vaguely pessimistic view of the future. Somewhere in the middle of that conversation, Stross mumbles something about "Eric Drexler's pixie dust". I guess that's a cool attitude to cop if you're a science fiction writer. Nanotechnology is so obviously too good to be true that it isn't interesting and so must be hokum. But the actual research that's now getting published -- in Science and Nature, no less -- promises that we'll probably see radical change sooner rather than later. No one in the scientific community talks about it in those terms, of course. That would be... un-serious, and in a research field that was saturated with nutjobs before it formally came into existence, that's a kiss of death. Drexler posts the article citations on his blog, though: Here's a Map of China, assembled from a fabric of interlinked single strands of DNA: http://metamodern.com/2009/08/06/asia-and-the-elements-of-innovation/ http://metamodern.com/2009/08/06/asia-and-the-elements-of-in... DNA Origami for nanoscale 3D structures: http://metamodern.com/2009/05/22/a-third-revolution-in-dna-nanotechnology/ http://metamodern.com/2009/05/22/a-third-revolution-in-dna-n... DNA Origami Box (with locking hinged lid and DNA sequence "key") http://metamodern.com/2009/05/10/a-dna-origami-box/ http://metamodern.com/2009/05/10/a-dna-origami-box/ A big-picture post: http://metamodern.com/2008/11/10/modular-molecular-composite-nanosystems/ http://metamodern.com/2008/11/10/modular-molecular-composite... Software tools for protein design continue to improve: http://www.nanorex.com http://www.nanorex.com etc, etc.

cstross 17y ago
WRT the "Eric Drexler's pixie dust" remark, what I meant was _not_ that molecular nanotechnology won't work and totally revolutionize materials science, structural engineering, and a bunch of other disciplines ... but in the context of the conversation we were having at the time, nanobots with quasi-magical powers have become the lazy SF writer's magic wand _du_ _jour_, sketched into fictional life with remarkable information processing and medicinal powers that go way beyond anything we're likely to see in the short term. Sort of like "electricity" or "vital force" in the fiction of the early 19th century.

tocomment 17y ago

I think we might have the technology for cars to drive themselves in 15-20 especially if there is demand for it. However I just don't see a way to get from here to there. Even with a working system, what company could produce it and take on that kind of product liability?

nradov 17y ago
In the US it will probably have to be pushed forward by the federal government. Once the technology is good enough to significantly cut crash death rates then it becomes a public health issue. I expect they will establish some sort of certification program for automatically driven cars. And manufacturers will receive liability protection for certified products.
0x44 17y ago
The kind of company with a fat contract with the US Military.