Self driving cars and beyond
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Self driving cars and beyond
1–10 of 120 posts
Re: Self driving cars and beyond
#2It’s great to explore this topic. You can have a lot of fun in picking a random industry and imagining the effect that self driving will have.
Health - beyond the obvious effects on the emergency room, what else? Ambulances willl quite clearly be affected. Why would someone wait minutes for one to arrive when they can just hop in an autocar to go the hospital? Or would the entire emergency room itself be on wheels? (Less likely.)
Will seniors stay at home for longer? Absolutely. How will this affect the need for aged care nurses? Will their doctors come to them?
But we can go even deeper. How will autocars affect people’s desire to exercise? Will more people ride bikes as a result of the increased safety of the roads?
Education - at first glance, it’s hard to see. But this is the one I’m currently most excited about. Primary and high school education are both built on cars - we just don’t realise it, but a crucial underpinning factor for parents using a local school is its convenience for them in dropping their kids off and picking them up. When that goes away, what happens next?
The demand for better public high schools will explode as the friction in going to a high school 25 minutes away in an awkward direction evaporates...
This makes for much more fertile territory for new schooling concepts - if I want to start a new kind of high school, one where the kids spend a bit of time each day tending to farm animals or perhaps studying entrepreneurship, it now becomes 10x easier to build critical mass. And given how much people care about their kids educations, I expect the movements in this space to be highly disruptive.
Those are two. On health, I’ve barely scratched the surface.
Then there is - tourism - logistics - distribution (imagine Amazon’s FBA on steroids) - housing (what happens to all those garages? Do we build shipping-container sizes homes that fold it wherever they park?)
The best way to understand the depth of the upcoming changes is to pick a seemingly unrelated industry and explore how current car-related assumptions underpin it. It becomes clear, to me, that the internet of vehicles will be even more disruptive then the internet itself.
Re: Self driving cars and beyond
#3The presentation doesn't take long to leap from inevitable market forces to totalitarian restructuring of public life in the US by city planners to provide those market forces with a chance of inevitability.
All those cell phones didn't require drastic changes to public space. They didn't come about by massive new principles of public policy. They came about because cell phones layered on top of existing lives and policies in a generally unobtrusive way. The cell phone created market forces that didn't require the displacement of large swaths of humanity. It was a rising tide that lifted ships other than those of venture capital.
Re: Self driving cars and beyond
#4A couple of years ago there was a new article on the front page pretty much every day about the great new thing that will change our lives--3D printing. I'm worried that whatever happened to 3D printing is about to happen to self driving. What did happen to 3D printing?
Re: Self driving cars and beyond
#5A couple of years ago there was a new article on the front page pretty much every day about the great new thing that will change our lives--3D printing. I'm worried that whatever happened to 3D printing is about to happen to self driving. What did happen to 3D printing?
I have a 3D printer and never use it simply because I have more money than time. It can take hours to print anything useful. One problem and you have to start all over.
Re: Self driving cars and beyond
#6This is kind of a meta comment, but I’ve been lurking on HN for a while on car posts in particular.
I have the impression that HN in general doesn’t like cars all that much, and in fact we would be much better of without them.
I can’t argue with the facts: congestion and pollution in large cities, such as London, have never been higher where almost all on-road public transport is still run on diesel.
However, I think driving for a lot of people is a liberating and pleasurable experience. and, before we go there, I’m not talking about being stuck in traffic, which is often a issue with poor planning and lack of infrastructure investment rather than an issue with cars themselves, but the pure pleasure of driving.
I’m quite concerned that self driving cars will take this simple pleasure and satisfaction from us, and perhaps that’s just a selfish opinion. I don’t know?
Re: Self driving cars and beyond
#7It’s great to explore this topic. You can have a lot of fun in picking a random industry and imagining the effect that self driving will have. Health - beyond the obvious effects on the emergency room, what else? Ambulances willl quite clearly be affected. Why would someone wait minutes for one to arrive when they can just hop in an autocar to go the hospital? Or would the entire emergency room itself be on wheels? (…
People already take.an Uber rather than wait for an ambulance if they are stable enough. You call an ambulance when moving is dangerous.
Re: Self driving cars and beyond
#8This is kind of a meta comment, but I’ve been lurking on HN for a while on car posts in particular. I have the impression that HN in general doesn’t like cars all that much, and in fact we would be much better of without them. I can’t argue with the facts: congestion and pollution in large cities, such as London, have never been higher where almost all on-road public transport is still run on diesel. However, I think…
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Re: Self driving cars and beyond
#9A couple of years ago there was a new article on the front page pretty much every day about the great new thing that will change our lives--3D printing. I'm worried that whatever happened to 3D printing is about to happen to self driving. What did happen to 3D printing?
It’s the same thing that’s happening to VR and lots of other things that are getting hyped before the hard problems are solved.
There’s been a serious epidemic in the last decade or so of mistaking solving the low hanging fruit for being “almost there.”
3D printing works ok for prototyping in certain scenarios, but it got hyped up for things it was nowhere near doing. Similarly everyone jumped all over VR assuming solving the hard problems that have always plagued it were just around the corner. Willfully ignorant over-optimism has been way too prevelant and I hope it is replaced with measured, informed pragmatism with lofty goals instead.
Re: Self driving cars and beyond
#10It’s great to explore this topic. You can have a lot of fun in picking a random industry and imagining the effect that self driving will have. Health - beyond the obvious effects on the emergency room, what else? Ambulances willl quite clearly be affected. Why would someone wait minutes for one to arrive when they can just hop in an autocar to go the hospital? Or would the entire emergency room itself be on wheels? (…
>Health - beyond the obvious effects on the emergency room, what else? Ambulances willl quite clearly be affected. Why would someone wait minutes for one to arrive when they can just hop in an autocar to go the hospital?
Besides ambulances (which should be used for emergencies where medical/paramedical assistance is needed on the spot),I mean you can take a taxi (or Uber) to go to the hospital if you can move and don't need immediate assistance, consider the amount of "periodic" (daily, weekly or bi-weekly) transporting of (otherwise healthy, but not enough to be self-sufficient) patients that cannot drive or walk for long distances, like - as an example - people under dialysis or chemioterapy.
Right now (at least here in Italy) usually the service is assured by volunteers that drive an ordinary car supplied by the (public or private) assistance, in most (not all) cases the patient can get into the car (and get out of it) without any assistance, and the time the volunteers provide could well be used for a number of other (needed) chores in assistance.