I really want self-driving cars to be widely adopted as soon as possible. There are many reasons, the one that occurred to me today while walking down the street is : look at all the cars on the street. Now imagine all the parked cars disappear, and only the moving cars remain. A lot less clutter, right? What could we do with all that space? That’s the future we could have if SDCs appear (assuming that most people will use services like Lyft/Uber with robotic drivers instead of owning their own car).
The improvement in human productivity would be substantial, just in terms of the time saved while not driving, not to mention the extra man-hours from people not dying in preventable collisions.
I’ve also been thinking that it could cause a big shakeup in the housing market, as living in suburbs would be more appealing when your hour-long commute is reading/working time instead of driving time.
Nah. We’ll own our own SDC’s, and they’ll wait for us like the existing ones do. Uber/Lyft would need to be HUGELY cheaper than owning a car to make up for having to wait for them to arrive to go anywhere.
I sometimes wonder if there is more low hanging fruit in lives that could be saved if car safety was improved. Self driving cars are obviously one way to do that, but I worry that we’re ignoring easier solutions because self driving cars will solve the problem eventually (not that I know what those easier solutions are).
I really want self-driving cars to be widely adopted as soon as possible. There are many reasons, the one that occurred to me today while walking down the street is : look at all the cars on the street. Now imagine all the parked cars disappear, and only the moving cars remain. A lot less clutter, right? What could we do with all that space? That’s the future we could have if SDCs appear (assuming that most people will use services like Lyft/Uber with robotic drivers instead of owning their own car).
The improvement in human productivity would be substantial, just in terms of the time saved while not driving, not to mention the extra man-hours from people not dying in preventable collisions.
I’ve also been thinking that it could cause a big shakeup in the housing market, as living in suburbs would be more appealing when your hour-long commute is reading/working time instead of driving time.
You mean living in suburbs is not appealing? ;)
Nah. We’ll own our own SDC’s, and they’ll wait for us like the existing ones do. Uber/Lyft would need to be HUGELY cheaper than owning a car to make up for having to wait for them to arrive to go anywhere.
I sometimes wonder if there is more low hanging fruit in lives that could be saved if car safety was improved. Self driving cars are obviously one way to do that, but I worry that we’re ignoring easier solutions because self driving cars will solve the problem eventually (not that I know what those easier solutions are).
I don’t know, what? Nothing particularly exciting comes to my mind...
Property prices would fall. Sounds like a job for real-estate entrepreneurs.