driverless cars

The Unintended Consequences of Driverless Cars

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This is some interesting food for thoughts about driverless cars, currently being developed and tested by Google:

Google has been working on driverless cars for a few years now. The obvious selling point is that the cars will be much safer without a human behind the wheel.

Currently, a car spends 96% of its time idle. Compare that with planes which spend almost their entire lifetime in operation/airborne. Idle planes aren’t making money, and they need to recoup their hefty $120M price tag. There is an unforgiving economic incentive to make sure it is always in use.

The proliferation of driverless cars will have a similar effect. Cars will spend less time idle: why would a household buy 2 (or even 3) cars, when they only need 1? Ride to work, then send the car home to your spouse. Need to go grocery shopping, but your kid also needs a ride to a soccer game? No problem, a driverless car can handle that.

What will begin as households cutting back to a single car, will expand. Why would a family need an entire car to themselves? That’s crazy! It may start as extended family in the same area sharing cars, then neighbors sharing cars, and then entire apartment/condo complexes in cities offering driverless cars bundled into their HOA/rent.[2]

The operating percent of a car will go from 4% to that 96%. But back to my leading statement: there are unintended consequences. Parked cars will be a relic from the past. What happens to car insurance prices if a driver is no longer part of the equation? And if cars are receiving 20 times more actual use, that would imply that there would be 20 times less cars sold.[1] This is the kind of disruptive change that can reshape the automotive industry. The recent GM/Chrysler bailout may have been for naught.[3]

[1] Of course, this isn’t exactly the case, as the cars would need to be replaced more often due to nonstop usage, but the point stands.
[2] Hell, I’d share a car with my condo complex. I currently don’t own a car, I walk or take taxis basically everywhere.
[3] Of course, car companies realize this. And I can guarantee you, they will lobby against driverless cars.

The brief post is written by . For some reason, I hadn’t even considered that driverless cars would operate without someone in them, but as Dutta explains, it would make sense for families to own fewer cars.

Google X, a Top Secret Lab

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I’ve known that Google has a lot of secret projects up its sleeve, and this New York Times piece provides some further guidance:

It’s a place where your refrigerator could be connected to the Internet, so it could order groceries when they ran low. Your dinner plate could post to a social network what you’re eating. Your robot could go to the office while you stay home in your pajamas. And you could, perhaps, take an elevator to outer space.

These are just a few of the dreams being chased at Google X, the clandestine lab where Google is tackling a list of 100 shoot-for-the-stars ideas. In interviews, a dozen people discussed the list; some work at the lab or elsewhere at Google, and some have been briefed on the project. But none would speak for attribution because Google is so secretive about the effort that many employees do not even know the lab exists.

The driverless cars are a number of years away from formal introduction into the marketplace…But until then, this sounds like a bad idea:

Google could sell navigation or information technology for the cars, and theoretically could show location-based ads to passengers as they zoom by local businesses while playing Angry Birds in the driver’s seat.

Apparently, Google X operates both at Google’s campus in Mountain View, CA and in an undisclosed top-secret location. Hmm.

So who’s involved with Google X?

A leader at Google X is Sebastian Thrun, one of the world’s top robotics and artificial intelligence experts, who teaches computer science at Stanford and invented the world’s first driverless car. Also at the lab is Andrew Ng, another Stanford professor, who specializes in applying neuroscience to artificial intelligence to teach robots and machines to operate like people.

I received an email from Thrun over the weekend, regarding my progress in the online Artificial Intelligence course. Unfortunately, I ended up pursuing other interests in the last couple of weeks and had to drop the course. It was excellent from the three weeks in which I actively participated in it, however.