
Cars and second order consequences - astigsen
http://ben-evans.com/benedictevans/2017/3/20/cars-and-second-order-consequences
======
gambiting
There's also another consequence not mentioned in the article - right now,
almost all organs for transplants come from accidents. With accidents being
reduced to zero, it will be very hard to get a viable organ for a transplant -
so the medical community is already sounding alarms about the need for
alternative solutions to be found(such as increased investment into
artificially growing new organs).

~~~
Asooka
Aren't most such accidents from people riding motorcycles without helmets? I
don't think that practice will stop with autonomous vehicles.

~~~
Zigurd
Motorcycle miles are <10% car miles in the US. Also, autonomy will make roads
safer for motorcycles, bicycles, and pedestrians.

~~~
E6300
The article talks about "no lanes, no separation, no stopping distances, and
no signals, (except of course for pedestrians to cross)", though. How will no
traffic signals work with manual traffic? For example, in an intersection with
no stop signs and no "invisible traffic lights", how would a constant stream
of automated traffic know that a bicycle is waiting to cross?

~~~
gambiting
I'm guessing it would rely on the cars seeing a bicycle early enough to slow
down. But yeah, I don't think that's going to happen, situations involving
fast moving traffic will always need an extra degree of safety, even with
fully automatic cars.

~~~
rock_hard
We will look back at comments like these in 100 years and cringe :)

------
Yhippa
I enjoyed this article and could see these things come to fruition.

> Where are you willing to live if 'access to public transport' is 'anywhere'
> and there are no traffic jams on your commute? Does an hour-long commute
> with no traffic and no need to watch the road feel better or worse than a
> half-hour commute stuck in near-stationary traffic staring at the car in
> front?

This I think is going to have the biggest impact on a lot of people. If I can
sit in a pod and have a trouble-free and consistent commute to work I would be
willing to commute to more places for work. Having had jobs where I commuted
around an hour in bumper-to-bumper traffic each way was awful. I would take an
equivalent-time commute where I can space out, read, do work, or whatever.

Secondly in this fantasy land I would also be willing to go to more places on
a whim if it were this easy. Lots of cool stuff might not have to be solely
concentrated in big cities if it's more affordable for business to pop up
farther out from centers of population.

In a more weird twist what if this autonomy was so good that you could send
pods containing entire dinners on the road? Looking past how one would keep it
fresh, it would be cool to order food and get it delivered without knowing
there could be a 45+ minute wait until it gets there.

------
jakozaur
One missed point: inequality.

On one hand few companies which will own autonomy tech will get all profits,
while a lot of ppl will lose job. So the transportation cost instead of going
to labour will mostly go to capital owners or decrease.

In long run we should be fine, but in short it may cause a lot of friction.

~~~
eric_h
Or a revolution...

But if the rich control all the robots, who knows what will happen.

~~~
marcosdumay
> who knows what will happen

A cyber-revolution. Dumb robots are not full deterrent against The People (in
fact, they may make revolutions easier).

Artificial superintelligence is a very different matter.

~~~
AnimalMuppet
Dumb robots you manipulate to get them to do what you want. Artificial
superintelligence you have to persuade that it should back your side (or at
least not hinder it).

------
Neliquat
This guy forgets that traffic controls are as much for animals, pedestrians,
and the local setup than they are for actual traffic control. We will not be
getting rid of lanes, even if autonomous cars use them differently.

~~~
surfmike
He does mention that signals are still necessary for pedestrians, but yes
hopefully self driving cars allow us to reclaim more of the city for
pedestrians. That would improve cities and our lives, even if it means less
lanes could be reclaimed from cars.

------
TimJYoung
There are also some demands that will be placed on local governments and
municipalities. For example, what will autonomous vehicles do when
encountering huge potholes ? This is something that is widespread in the
northeast US in the spring. Today, drivers will often swing slightly into the
other lane to avoid them, provided that there is no on-coming traffic. So,
either the autonomous vehicles will be able to deal with them independently,
or local governments are going to need to be a _lot_ more proactive about road
maintenance. That's going to be a hard sell for a lot of municipalities that
simply refuse to raise taxes and often fund most of their operation via
punitive speeding/parking fines and other types of regressive taxation, much
of which will probably _also_ go away, based upon this blog post.

~~~
macintux
With the exception of the loss of gas tax revenue, I think potholes become
much more manageable in such a world.

No lanes and cars constantly talking to each other means that potholes are
simply avoided with no meaningful loss of momentum.

It's also not hard to envision automated pothole filling vehicles that are
constantly roaming, waiting to hear other autonomous vehicles discovering road
damage, and then drop their load (colorful metaphors abound) over the hole.
Maybe it's a temporary patch for humans to follow up on later, maybe it's a
permanent fix.

Seems like this could actually lead to the elimination of large potholes
entirely. They start small, are detected and reported by autonomous vehicles,
and are fixed by other autonomous vehicles running 24x7.

~~~
microcolonel
If inter-vehicle communication can be standardized, and human drivers aren't
on the road, then what's the point of cars (self-driving or otherwise)? What
you're describing is basically a rail system.

~~~
nitrogen
Sure, if rails were extended to every single possible destination.

~~~
ollie87
To quote Ali G:

"What if terrorists drove a train into the White House?"

------
Tiktaalik
> Though automatic driving should increase capacity...

Even if the advent of autonomous cars results in any increase of road capacity
there is not likely to be any difference in traffic congestion. Things are
likely to be the same as they are now, if not worse.

In general autonomous cars are a nightmare scenario for people who fight
against the spread of automobile oriented infrastructure and urban sprawl.

The main problem is that autonomous cars massively incentivize car use, and
the result of this will be that more people will choose to drive cars. This
factor, combined with induced demand and combined with the unchangeable
physical constraints of our built environment and car size, means that the
roads will be just as gridlocked as they are now if nothing changes, and
they'll be worse if politicians make the wrong decisions and expand road
capacity.

Some of the main things that discourage car ownership and use are costs, such
as parking costs and insurance costs. The author points out these things are
decreased or go away entirely with autonomous cars. Additionally the total
potential group of drivers is increased, as you no longer need a license to
drive. Now the very young and very old can also drive and the total potential
amount of drivers increases.

Urban politicians are best off pretending autonomous cars don't and won't
exist because it's not going to be a solution to any of their problems.

> What exactly are the differences in traffic dynamics between a Lyft Line
> shuttle with 5 passengers and a municipal bus with an off-peak load of 10?

I'm pretty sure transportation experts already know the answer to this given
that independent small bus transit of the sort Lyft Line replicates is the
norm in many third world countries. Given that first world countries have
universally moved to centralized routes of large capacity buses it's surely
more efficient.

Tech companies should really at least talk with some people in the field they
seek to disrupt before working on reinventing the wheel.

~~~
mikeash
My counter would be: what are the reasons to fight against automobile oriented
infrastructure and urban sprawl?

If it's pollution, the move towards electric vehicles and clean energy will
hopefully put that to rest before too long.

If it's cost or fairness, if autonomous cars really do enable lots of ride
sharing services, that should come way down.

If it's accessibility, all those people who can't drive will be able to use
autonomous cars.

I'm sympathetic to the desire for walkable areas. I love a good walkable area
myself. But cars are great too. People want them, because they want the things
they enable. Even countries that are big on walking and biking and public
transport still have a _ton_ of cars.

A future with sprawling cities where people have lots of space, things are far
apart, and people get around in cheap, efficient autonomous cars sounds pretty
good to me.

~~~
stouset
Regarding pollution, Jevon's paradox comes to mind. Electric cars still
pollute — just less.

But the increased efficiency and decreased cost will drive up use: more people
will be willing to live further away from jobs, more people take long car
trips knowing they don't need to be awake behind the wheel the whole way, and
more people (the young and elderly) will be able to use cars.

Is it totally unrealistic to expect that the net of these two advancements is
an increase, or at least not a decrease, in carbon emissions? This is a
genuine question — I haven't done the math.

I'm also conveniently ignoring the inevitable existence of automated gasoline-
powered cars, which I'm not convinced will be an insignificant fraction of the
market.

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox)

~~~
mikeash
EVs still pollute, for now. How long will that remain true? One way or
another, we need to greatly reduce emissions from electrical generation. EVs
should help a lot with this, both by being a relatively flexible load and by
helping to push energy storage technology.

It seems like it comes down to this: if we can get transportation cleaned up,
then having more of it is good. If we can't, we're screwed regardless. Either
way, autonomy doesn't change the larger outcome much.

------
rodionos
Enjoyed reading the article. More specific and practical than far-reaching
Kurzweilian forecasts. I also liked that each paragraph provided links to
associated data sources, e.g. crash stats, convenience store sales etc.

------
nickbauman
Enormous parts reduction: Much less labor to assemble, much less ongoing
maintenance. I feel like this is so much more critical and has much larger
ramifications than other second-order consequences.

~~~
zzzzzzzza
it will come not just from transitioning from ice to electric engines, but
also, later, from removing the steering wheel and all associated parts.
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cmvCdBufz6U](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cmvCdBufz6U)
the arcimoto dropped from 1700 lbs to 1000lbs just by going from a steering
wheel to a bike handle.

------
TeMPOraL
> _By implication, in 2030 or so, police investigating a crime won 't just get
> copies of the CCTV from surrounding properties, but get copies of the sensor
> data from every car that happened to be passing, and then run facial
> recognition scans against known offenders. Or, perhaps, just ask if any car
> in the area thought it saw something suspicious._

On a more positive / awesome note, maybe we'll get a full 3D crime scene
reconstruction from aggregate camera data, like in Continuum (sans holograms)?

~~~
zardo
>(sans holograms)?

With virtual entities on a MR platform. Redmond PD at least will be calling
them holograms.

------
carlob
Yet another thing not mentioned in the article is the effect on the energy
grid: as we move towards renewables, which are much harder to turn on and off
to match demand, we will need to invest a lot more in energy storage.

Large scale deployment of electric vehicles might be a way to solve this
problem, if one were forced or incentivized to leave their car connected to
the grid when parked, the grid could use the cars as a distributed storage
system.

~~~
macintux
He did mention the grid and storage.

------
cr0sh
Something that I always wonder about, as we move towards self-driving vehicles
being common, and electric vehicles being used more - is what is going to
happen to the off-road sport community.

Right now, there aren't any "real" electric off-road vehicles (at least
available to consumers). There's a handful of SUVs, certainly, and most
electric vehicles are all-wheel drive - but no one would seriously think you
could take one of these, lift it 6 inches, drop some 35's under it, and go off
exploring Moab.

I'm sure that there are some people experimenting with more capable off-road
electric vehicles (if nothing else, taking a Jeep or something and putting in
place an electric motor and batteries might be a start), but right now battery
technology just isn't there for real electric off-road use (the rest of the
technology certainly is, though - if the battery tech can catch up, it might
be a renaissance for off-roading due to the tech alone).

What I would hope or like to see would be an autonomous electric off-road
vehicle that could drive itself to where you want to go, then allow you to
"take over" to drive out in the "back 40" area (or whatnot). Perhaps it could
have traction and steering assist, plus other methods to keep you safe (or
allow you to turn off all of that to let you go at it by the seat of your
pants if you want). It could even (perhaps) have a "training mode" where it
could help teach you how to handle off-road conditions. Or - for those that
want the "off-road" experience but not the effort, just tell it where to go,
and it follows a trail using GPS and such to get you there. Once there, charge
the car from solar/wind and/or a portable generator.

Regardless - all of this is not really talked about, but I do wonder what the
effect on such activities will be, both in the short and long terms.

~~~
marchenko
Similarly,I always wonder what will happen to pleasure drivers and
motorcyclists under a self-driving regime. Will human operators be confined to
tracks by regulations or unaffordable insurance rates?

~~~
lern_too_spel
The same thing that happened to pleasure horseback riding.

------
Nomentatus
A wonderful article in many ways. Kudos. But...

I think the title should read "secondary" or "resultant" or "follow-on" or
maybe even "chain-reaction" (maybe) but NOT "second order" \- as there's
nothing meta about the run-on consequences. Just "future" would do.

Not least because second order or meta-computation _will_ likely have to be
incorporated into autonomous car design. Such cars shouldn't be programmed to
do things that are perfectly legal but outside the ability of human drivers,
thus startling the hell out of human drivers, or literally colliding with
their well-worn habits (habits based on past behavior of other human drivers,
not ideal machine behavior.)

For example, my too-quick reading of the recent Uber accident suggests that
the car did something perfectly legal, but which a human wouldn't do, because
we can't react to the color of a traffic-light changing within nano-seconds,
and so create edge-case decisions and behavior. To prevent such accidents,
either the machine or the designer of it, has to do some second-order thinking
which models what humans can and can't do with a car (cognitively) in order to
help the autonomous car fit in with and be more predictable to human drivers.
It's no good for an autonomous car to drive legally in a way that's so unusual
it just about guarantees a crash with a driver who's never seen that done
before, such as predicting light changes with extreme accuracy and then
exploiting that, or reacting to a light change far faster than any human ever
has or ever will. (These human-friendly "features" could be dropped once
humans are legally barred from driving on public roads, of course.)

I can't swear I'm guiltless, but, to return to the original point: The general
rule is, that if you use a word "because it makes you sound smart", you are
only sounding smart to someone more ignorant than yourself, or equally
ignorant. You risk proving yourself both ignorant and pompous to everyone who
actually knows the meaning of the term. So please don't appropriate technical
terms. (Note that a quick google may not rescue you from this fate if a
degraded usage has already begun to spread.)

------
ape4
No more accidents to the safety mechanisms in cars can be removed? What could
possibly go wrong.

~~~
ealexhudson
It's just a change in safety mechanism. If a car is capable of stopping in a
shorter distance (because it has faster reactions, and now weighs less) then
the speed of many accidents is going to come right down. If a car is capable
of ensuring a collision is directly head-on rather than partial clipping, the
types of safety mechanism can change.

Nothing is going to change over night, but there's not going to be a need for
the plethora of different options to cope with different types of accident
that we have now. This will then drive planners to change how roads work -
e.g. segment heavy transport maybe - and it will become a virtuous circle.
Smaller, light-weight transit will make electric much more economic and work
better for large cities. It will be an excellent change for everyone except
those wedded to their SUVs.

~~~
falcolas
> a car is capable of stopping in a shorter distance

Stopping distance has more to do with speed than weight, since reducing weight
also reduces the frictional force against the road at equal proportions to the
reduction of potential energy, whereas the impact of velocity on the energy to
be dissipated is squared.

Brakes also wear down, steering linkages break, lugnuts are improperly
torqued, tires blow out, debris can impact sensors or power packs, roads can
be compromised by loose sand or potholes, lightning can strike the vehicle...
failure modes are plentiful.

You also still need to account for bugs and sensor failures; both of which
will result in crashes in "non optimal" ways. As an example, I had a gyro fail
in my multirotor; it was a gradual failure which was not immediately obvious
(and completely invisible to the controller), and resulted in a couple of
pretty spectacular crash that the multirotor (even with human inputs) had no
way to recover from.

Sure, you can add redundant systems (ideally in batches of three), but at some
point there will always be a single point of failure.

~~~
nostoc
Stopping distance has mostly to do with two things : reaction time and weight.

I expect an autonomous car to have a far better reaction time than a human.

~~~
falcolas
Reaction time, I can kind of get. But weight, especially when compared to
velocity and the coefficient of friction - i.e. the road conditions - has
negligible impact. Sure, it increases your traction when stopping, but it also
increases the amount of energy which has to be dissipated by the vehicle _to_
stop.

Something that has a much greater impact than either would be the road
conditions. Wet, dry, icy, sandy, gravel, oily... all have much more impact
than either weight or reaction speed.

Have a look at this review:

[http://www.caranddriver.com/features/the-power-to-
stop](http://www.caranddriver.com/features/the-power-to-stop)

The quality of the brakes had a much greater impact than the weight of the
compared vehicles (a SUV had a stopping range of 355 ft, whereas a coupe had a
stopping distance of 365).

------
Tiktaalik
The gas tax is a good point. It's going to become less and less effective over
time. Regions will need to move to comprehensive road pricing and tolling to
make up the lost revenue and to not induce demand.

------
revelation
It's bizarre. Did every "futurologist" miss that, you know, an autonomous car
is still the same size and shape as a normal car? That they still carry most
likely 1 person?

If you want to have roving fleets of autonomous cars and ban personal traffic,
well guess what, ban cars and get a bunch of light rail, you can have that
today.

~~~
cr0sh
Light rail can't go exactly where you want to go. Light rail can't carry
packages for you (virtual trailer). Light rail can't deliver packages (imagine
being able to shop, pick something up, then put it in a car to have it
delivered to your home - and wait for you until you get there).

Light rail does work well for intermediate distances - say travel from your
house in the suburbs or further out to the middle of the city - or "between
cities" (I'm talking about the individual "city areas" that are part of larger
metro areas - think "Oakland to San Francisco" \- which are part of the "SF
Metro Area").

But for certain tasks (getting to-from the light-rail, or delivery service) -
self-driving vehicles can work better.

Now - if instead of light rail, you used something like Doug Malewicki's
SkyTran system (largely unproven, though) - then you can almost (again,
theoretically) get the benefits of self-driving personal vehicles, with the
benefits of light rail - and without needing the years-long effort and expense
to tear up existing streets or what-not.

There would still need to be some kind of self-driving vehicles, but they
could be in much smaller numbers (I'm still thinking things like delivery -
for instance, if you went to Home Depot or something and ordered some sacks of
concrete - you're not taking that on a light-rail or other similar system - of
course, maybe all of this would be ordered online and delivered in the future
- but there's still going to be stuff out there that will only be able to be
purchased "on site" \- plants, for example - or junkyard parts).

------
saosebastiao
Traffic waves aren't going away. As long as you have non-zero reaction times
and slower acceleration than deceleration, the phantom waves will happen as a
pure result of physics. Their discovery and subsequent modeling owe to our
understanding of _fluid dynamics_. Computers aren't magical things that
destroy the laws of physics.

Faster reaction times reduce propensity, but both higher speeds and closer
following distances ameliorate the benefits of the faster reaction times _and_
increase severity. If anything changes they'll become slightly less common but
much worse.

EDIT: just to add to the criticism of this list of overly fantastical
fantasies of autonomous cars, the ideas about traffic disappearing when people
don't have to park are trivially disprovable. It's almost as if the author has
never been to an airport or school pickup zone or any other place where people
don't have to park but traffic still backs up for miles.

~~~
Sharlin
Fluid dynamics is local, and so are the dynamics of human-driven car traffic
to a first approximation. Computer-driven cars can react non-locally by
communicating with each other via radio even if they don't see each other.

~~~
cr0sh
There seems to be a confusion among people that self-driving cars are going to
fully self-contained, with no interaction or communication between them. At
first they probably will - but the greater gains in safety, efficiency, speed,
and utility will only happen when they all can communicate with each other -
to inform each other about traffic pattern changes, as well as to coordinate
on local issues.

~~~
saosebastiao
There's no confusion here. It will be possible, but relying on it to stop
traffic waves is an untenable fantasy. Even directly connected fiber optic
communication has levels of unreliability that would make it untenable to
drive closer than you can stop from visual sensory alone...and you want to
rely on wireless communication?

At it's best, wireless communication may help traffic miles from an incident,
by communicating problems (most likely with some central management system)
and routing traffic around it. Visual range sensors will dominate all local
interactions, just like they do with swarm coordination systems in both nature
and robotics.

