Autonomous is Coming

Fully automated cars are coming. It’s not just Tesla. There are a number of other startups and small companies getting in the game. So are the giants. General Motors has entered the field, as have the likes of Ford, Nissan, and Honda. The writing is on the wall: Fully autonomous cars are coming. The big buzz right now is on robo-taxis. These are autonomous fleets of cars that you summon via app just like Uber and Lift, except there’s no human driver. Automobile-as-a-Service.

The investment is there. We are now inexorably heading for a driverless future.

The Good

Latent Demand

Life is hard and getting harder for many folks. Reliable transportation is listed as a job requirement on many jobs and is simply outside of the reach of some people. Owning a car is expensive and complicated. Insurance, maintenance, inspections, taxes. It adds up. Even those of us with cars might sometimes question the reliability of our cars and avoid long hauls for fear of getting stranded somewhere.

All that is about to change.

Individual transit autonomous EVs are expected to get down to 5 cents per passenger-mile. That means a thirty-mile commute (sixty for round trip) will cost you a whopping $3 per day. Let’s say that rate is absurdly low and off the mark by a factor of 3. That’s still only $9 per day to get to and from work with no further risk or expenses. Even though these cars will be getting much more use, reliability is not a concern. Why? The car itself can request a replacement automatically if it breaks down. Worst case scenario: You summon another replacement with your phone.

This will result in far more people gaining access to work that may otherwise be presently unavailable. Mass transit models of autonomous EVs are expected to get as low as 1 cent per passenger-mile. Suddenly transport is no longer a barrier for most people. I suspect th is will have many knock-on effects on the economy. Imagine dozing off every commute. Or reading, or continuing to work. Suddenly, a longer commute doesn’t sound like a bad idea. Now you can buy a rural dream house and still have the urban job. Moving across the country is suddenly more feasible. Just summon a bigger truck!

Stress will decrease for millions of people, access to goods, services, and jobs will increase. This is a huge win for everyone.

Climate Change

It goes without saying that getting off fossil fuels is a good thing. There are a few caveats, namely that we have to deploy enough renewables and batteries to go completely carbon neutral. That also means reducing the carbon intensity of producting renewable hardware and batteries. I consider this a problem that will inevitably be solved for economic reasons. Rare and conflict minerals are intrinsically more expensive. It just makes economic sense to find abundant alternatives.

A more immediate impact will be increased cardiopulmonary health, particular in dense urban regions. This will decrease health costs and increase quality of life for millions of people.

More Automotive Jobs

American motorists presently drive about 13,000 miles per year on average. I think that could easily double due to cheaper and safer travel, as well as that aforementioned latent demand. More miles means more wear and tear. You know what else that means?

More mechanics.

A lot more. Sure, EVs are a bit cheaper to maintain, but EVs are going to rack up miles far faster than ICE vehicles. The only thing fundamentally different is the power train. Everything else is still just an ordinary car. Brakes and tires wear out. Electric windows and ACs fail. Windows and windshields break. Calipers and bearings all need replacing. While a lot of things will change with EVs, there’s a lot that won’t when you look at the nuts and bolts.

The aforementioned latent demand, I think, will see the total passenger-miles per year skyrocket. The same thing happened when electricity became cheaper - people just used a lot more of it. I would argue that electricity still has a lot of unmet demand. I think that the EV repair shops are going to be hopping busy. This will bode will for the presently-declining automotive tech industry. By extension, I think this could be a boon to the autoparts industry as well.

A more speculative new job that could be created would be remote drivers. These are folks who work in a remote call-center of sorts and can remotely control vehicles that are in distress.

Childcare and School

The NYC subway MTA says that children as young as 12 can ride by themselves. I suspect that EVs, with their plethora of cameras, could allow for children much younger to ride without supervision. This could be a game-changer for childcare and education. Instead of waiting for the schoolbus in the morning, a vehicle is summoned for the kids, taking them to the school that is best suited to their needs, not where they happen to be geographically constrained. This yields the possibility of building more schools in cheaper areas.

An extension of this includes access to after-school programs. I think this will be particularly important for children in high-risk neighborhoods. Suddenly, it becomes a lot easier for a kid to stay somewhere safer and more accomodating for studying after school, rather than going straight home to the rougher neighborhoods. This extra mobility could very well be the difference in getting more children out of the cycle of poverty.

Savings for Everyone

People who own cars spend anywhere from 10% to over 30% of their income on their cars. Once car ownership becomes optional, that’s a LOT of money that folks can spend elsewhere. That reallocation of funds will likely have dramatic effects on other segments of the economy.

Safety for Everyone

It’s true that autonomous cars make mistakes. It’s also true that they make far fewer mistakes than humans already, and that will only get better as the technology improves. Presently, about 38,000 people die each year from traffic accidents and another 4 million are seriously injured. That’s a lot of avoidable death and injuries. Traffic fatalities and injuries are incredibly traumatic. They don’t just create permanent loss of life and limb, but permanent emotional harm to survivors and family. I suspect traffic deaths will fall off exponentially over the coming years.

The Bad

Millions of Jobs Gone

There are currently about 4 million driving jobs in America. Machines tend to be more reliable and safer than humans once the kinks are worked out. They can also work tirelessly, hence why industrial robots have been assembling cars for several decades now. This reliability and safety translates to one thing: better bottom lines. Before long, human drivers are going to be antiquated - a privilege for concierge-level services only. Pizza delivery? Gone. Long-haul truckers? Gone. Amazon Prime drivers? Gone. FedEx, UPS, and USPS? All gone. It will become economically infeasible to hire humans for these jobs.

Petroleum figures into a lot more than just automobiles. Figures vary wildly depending on who you ask, but the petroleum industry supports somewhere between 2 million and 10 million jobs. Any significant disruption in that domain can have huge knock-on effects. It’s difficult to imagine a simple antidote to this problem. With the rise of automation, I suspect many of these folks will permanently transition out of the workforce. These jobs include oil and gas workers, as well as gas station employees.

With so many people permanently unemployed, I don’t see any solution other than redistribution of wealth via Universal Basic Income.

Rare and Conflict Minerals

Batteries, cameras, motors, and deep learning hardware all require some exotic elements to manufacture. Presently, that presents a huge humanitarian and moral dilemma. We don’t want to fund crimes against humanity, slave labor, human trafficking, and child labor. Unfortunately, we have few other options at present. Some of the rarest minerals on the planet are controlled by some of the most despotic people. As the demand of autonomous EVs rises, those despots will become even worse to maximize their own profits.

The only solution is to develop alternative materials through things like nanotechnology and other advanced materials science. This takes time and, more importantly, a lot of investment.

Privacy Goes Out the Window

Busses and other public transit already have cameras. EVs and autonomous cars are going to have even more. I am willing to bet that the EULA of every autonomous car service includes signing over your data. This probably includes biometrics about your body specifically as well as your destinations and pickups. If push came to shove, I bet this could be used to harm individual liberty.

One way to mitigate this would be something akin to GDPR. I would expect to see legislation coming before too long that restricts what kinds of data car companies can collect, or require some kind of compensation or ability to pay extra to opt-out.

In Conclusion

The cost savings for people will all but guarantee the transition from manual ICE vehicles to autonomous EVs. The increase in safety paired with decrease in per-mile cost makes this a no-brainer.

Reallocation

The cost-savings to individuals will get allocated elsewhere. Where exactly? I can’t say. Perhaps home ownership? I suspect that cheaper homes in less desirable areas will become more popular with the rise of autonomous EVs. Perhaps we will see some folks setup a trucker-to-homebuilder training pipeline? Perhaps we will see a huge rise in demand for electricians, plumbers, and general purpose handymen to build and maintain these houses.

Academics predict that jobs requiring improvisation, manual dexterity, and creative problem solving will be the last to get automated away. This supports the idea that plumbers, electricians, and repairmen jobs will be robust against automation.

Other types of jobs that will remain robust against automation include teaching, childcare, therapy, massage, nursing, and other human-oriented caregiving services. I think it would be wonderful to see classrooms with fewer than 10 students per teacher.

Relocation

With reliable transportation a solved problem, and more money in people’s pockets, we could see a surge to rural life. This may have additional knock-on effects in terms of physical and mental health. Allergies and auto-immune disease are reduced by increased contact with nature. More time in nature means better mental health. Smaller communities also promote more regular human connection.

Health And Safety

The one-two punch of increased physical safety and decreased environmental hazards will do wonders for the loss of human life. I expect there will come a time that people aren’t allowed to drive manually and that ICE vehicles are banned outright. This won’t be seen directly, but rather will be felt as an absence - like how we don’t have to worry about polio today.