
Driverless Hotel Rooms: The End of Uber, Airbnb and Human Landlords - F_J_H
https://hackernoon.com/driverless-hotel-rooms-the-end-of-uber-airbnb-and-human-landlords-e39f92cf16e1
======
so33
So the article talks about three concepts: “Driverless rooms”, “Lego
skyscrapers” that are powered by smart contracts that these driverless rooms
park at, and “decentralized cities” that result because these rooms can
rearrange themselves on demand.

We can already have a “driverless room”; it’s called a Winnebago. Most
prominent politicians, musicians, and celebrities will have well-appointed RVs
that carry them around. Even if you take the driver out of the equation,
logistical issues abound: Where do you do laundry? What about plumbing? Where
do you put out the garbage? I am reminded about that episode in “The Office”
where Dwight crams everyone into an overcrowded bus and has them do work
there.

Second, the article complains about overproduction and waste, but the proposed
solution is to create skyscraper-sized parking lots? Even the picture that is
supposed to idealize this shows the lego skyscraper half-empty. How will Bondi
Beach look when this monstrosity looms over it?

Finally, moving things around isn’t free. Yes, solar energy and electric cars
means that it’s renewable. But doesn’t mean it’s unlimited. We are going to
dedicate a large amount of energy generated in moving “mobile rooms” around
24/7 for lots of people. That power still has to come from a power plant
somewhere. Life isn’t like AWS; you can’t just spin up a solarpanel2.large.

I know this is essentially a piece of utopian fiction, but there are glaring
flaws in this just aesthetically, let alone with other factors.

~~~
Blazespinnaker
The real problem is traffic. Hi density public transit from airport to hotel
makes much more sense.

What we need are residentiala and office skyscrapers built along high density
electric rail. This has always been the solution.

Sadly, people hate hi density public transit, and thus we pay for
inefficiency.

------
scribu
I liked how this piece tied all the trendy emerging tech into one short
narrative. You could play Techcrunch bingo: driverless cars, drones, voice
commands, blockchain etc.

But I couldn’t buy the part about a drone delivering food in 6 minutes to a
vehicle that’s travelling between cities.

At first I figured the food would be prepared in the closest town or city.
Assuming that there could be distances of tens or even hundreads of miles
between adjacent localities, drones would have to cover at least 10 miles
every minute (or 600 mph).

But instead of traditional restaurants, you could have driverless food trucks
everywhere. Presumably, given enough density and clever routing algorithms,
you could significantly cut down on the drone travel distance.

Edit: If the mobile hotel room in the story was only travelling between the
airport and a nearby city, that would make it more plausible, but also less
useful.

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mentos
I don't really think we need all of those amenities constantly flying around
and intercepting your trajectory so that you can always be 'on the move'.

My dream for the future is less density. I'd love to move inland to where land
is cheaper and invest in staying in place. Setting up solar/water to be self
sufficient while I work at home remotely in peace from the constant thunder of
garbage trucks and screaming taxi horns.

I'd still race a Tesla during the day that I charge at night from stored solar
while I watch Netflix on a massive screen hung between two trees outside my
living room.

------
75dvtwin
_> >"The issue of overproduction is a common crisis in Capitalism where more
goods are produced than there are customers to consume them.

In a free market this should result in prices dropping until the excess supply
lowers to meet demand.

But what typically happens is that manufacturers either artificially restrict
supply or resort to simply destroying the unsold goods. "<<_

\---

Seems like a correct observation, pointed out by the article. I had not given
it a thought before.

But, by the same token, isn't setting up this type of 'smart city' with human-
less services, also a significant investment, and also can be overdone. What
will happens when this type of infrastructure is overdone ?

I personally think, that 'de-urbanization' with increased mobility across
cities, 80%+ telecommute work force, and a 4 day work week, is the answer to
many of today's issues in developed and yet-to-be-developed economies (still
corruption, political militarization of law enforcement -- are huge issues
that must be addressed).

~~~
gnicholas
> _But what typically happens is that manufacturers either artificially
> restrict supply or resort to simply destroying the unsold goods._

Note that the link regarding destruction of unsold goods has nothing to do
with cars. It's about H&M clothing. In an article that's all about
cars/housing, it's a bit off-topic to use this as support. Including a
parenthetical noting that the citation is about clothes, not cars, would be
less misleading. Most people won't read every linked piece, and those who
don't shouldn't be misled. This was in a section called "Crisis of Car
Manufacturing" and was preceded and followed by paragraphs solely focused on
cars and auto manufacturing.

~~~
AstralStorm
Really old unsold cars do get recycled. however car manufacturing is switching
to even more on demand and bespoke pattern. Toy get to put in Amb order for a
car with options A-F in your colour of choice. Only typical serious and a few
of those are available on hand.

------
imgabe
Why do I need to be moving around constantly? Where is the office going while
I work and then have the gym connect to it? It seems like most people pretty
much stay in place. They live in one place and work in another place. They
travel between them, but they don't need to move much while they're in one or
the other. So what's the point of making my home or my office move and why
waste all the energy to move my home from one city to another, when I only
really need to move my body and make use of other homes that are already in
the place I'm going to?

~~~
dgreensp
Indeed, turning your hotel room or your office at work into a vehicle so that
it can pick you up just seems like saving a commute by merging it with “being
at your destination.”

So your commute takes on properties of already being at your destination, and
being at your destination takes on properties of your commute or taxi ride —
being in a space-constrained vehicle in motion, consuming power, creating and
experiencing traffic, etc, not just en route but all day or all night!

------
staltz
The article is okay, but I'm disappointed about a lack of larger big-picture
thinking. It _assumes_ (instead of questioning) that we will live in cities or
often visit cities. The internet economy already decentralized cities by
making visiting them less relevant than before, you can work from anywhere.
Snowden has given many conference talks without leaving his middle-of-nowhere
cabin in Russia.

Even if this vision were true, what about other problems like motion sickness
when working (or reading books) in a moving vehicle? That's just one question
of many.

~~~
Eridrus
I think most people who look at self-driving tech focus on aggregate numbers
too much. Cars might be idle 95% of the time, but our lives are in sync in
such a way that peak demand is significantly higher than the 5% utilisation
number suggests.

People focus on the cost of the car without a driver, but forget that roads
are not infinite and as demand for driverless cars increases, congestion will
only get worse.

I don't think we're going to get to a future where everyone works remotely any
time soon, but I do feel like self-driving cars will favor cities that look
more like LA than NYC.

~~~
AstralStorm
Well, there are some efficiencies in routing and spacing to be mined with
centrally controlled cars.

Not as many as with real public transport though.

------
baybal2
What to say, other than "sensationalistic, clickbaity, clickfarmy medium.com
crowd yada yada" the criticism of the idea is following - there are no such
thing as a self driving car on sale, nor will be in coming years.

Car sales are down because of demand side issues, nothing else: the potential
car buyer demographic of this generation is comparatively poorer, average
second hand car lasts longer, public transport in Western countries is slowly
getting better, road congestions are hitting developing countries where there
were no such issues before. That's it.

------
woolvalley
I doubt this will work on a plain economics standpoint. A pallet container
housing tower would be incredibly expensive in comparison to a normal
skyscraper or wooden medium rise. Most housing cost issues stem from policy
than from actual price.

A lot of the costs of driving and parking commons is subsidized through
government policy and taxes. If the commons gets abused even more easily
because driverless electrics reduce the friction of doing so, cities and
government will react through policy and user fees.

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drivingmenuts
The driverless [insert accommodation here] thing is a great idea, but no one
ever discusses how the hell these things are cleaned.

One thing that keeps me from being all about car-sharing is the idea of having
to sit in someone else's funk. Humans are nasty and disgusting and constantly
outgassing, consciously or unconsciously, and some of those emanations are
downright hazardous.

So why is everyone completely ignoring how we clean all these driverless,
shared things?

~~~
seanmcdirmid
How do you handle taxis?

~~~
drivingmenuts
I don't. I don't recall ever having ridden in a taxi. I have ridden the bus,
but was kind of grossed out by the experience.

~~~
seanmcdirmid
I guess you are American then right? I'm not sure how a life of private
transportation would be possible otherwise...because that doesn't happen in
the rest of the world.

------
Fricken
Autonomous vehicles can be a useful tool for making the tragedy of the commons
vastly more tragic without smart policies in place to direct their
implementation.

~~~
scribu
Could you elaborate? _Any_ technology can create severe downsides if not
properly regulated.

~~~
Tiktaalik
Autonomous cars incentivize car use, which increases traffic. The problem is
that the roads are fixed and expanding them is expensive and undesirable.

This entire scenario dreamed up in this article is wholly unworkable due to
the physical constraints of cars and roads.

~~~
glenra
>Autonomous cars incentivize car use, which increases traffic.

Don't you have this backwards? Cars driven by fallible humans need lots of
separation to avoid collision but cars driven by computers should get by with
thinner lanes closer together and less room between cars. Cars driven by
fallible humans have to stop at stoplights creating backups that restrict flow
whereas cars driven by computers probably don't need to do as much of that -
they can coordinate and interleave instead. Cars driven by computers don't
have to circle the block looking for a nearby parking place (this factor alone
accounts for a substantial fraction of peak city driving), which also means we
could convert some downtown street parking into extra traffic lanes. Cars
driven by computers don't create freeway traffic jams due to clumsy lane
merging or due to the drivers rubbernecking at accident scenes.

In short, switching from mostly human drivers to mostly autonomous drivers
should substantially _increase_ road capacity. We should be able to get at
least several times as many cars - possibly 10x or more - in the same amount
of road area. (Over time I'd expect road area to shrink.)

~~~
Tiktaalik
Everything you said is very possibly true, and could increase road capacity,
but these improvements are marginal and dominated by the fact that autonomous
cars will cause more people to drive.

Simply put adding another car on the road immediately kills whatever savings
may be had by reducing the space between cars and clumsy lane merging.

Right now reasons people don't drive include:

\- Parking too expensive

\- No license/ability to drive

\- Car too expensive to purchase.

Autonomous cars sharing removes all those deterrents, and so this would cause
an increase in drivers and cars on the road.

------
gremlinsinc
I'd love this to exist, BUT -- the road infrastructure I don't think does...
cars take up enough road real estate, this would be like self-driving truckers
or mobile homes there's not enough room on roads as there is... Maybe if we
level all the high rises and office buildings in lieu of mobile ones, but that
just doesn't seem feasible.

~~~
philipodonnell
What if the cities re-orientated themselves into wide rings that surrounded
vast areas of low-height commercial and wide open leisure space, with that
distance covered by various forms of rail?

------
Something1234
I can see living in a vehicle, but I can't see having a board room drive to
me, as that would be a waste of resources. It should take me to the nearest
rent able space or the nearest gym. Still a really cool idea, and I would
totally do one of these rooms if I had the chance.

------
da_chicken
Interesting idea, but...

> As such it’s predicted that by 2025 all new vehicles produced will be 100%
> electric[.]

This seems grossly unrealistic.

~~~
gnicholas
My thought as well. The linked piece refers to one person's prediction. That
person also predicts that by 2022, EVs will be as cheap as $22k. Not sure
what's going to happen to anyone who wants to buy a car for less than $22k.
Perhaps he thinks that those people will all buy used cars?

------
compsciphd
While, I'm not a fan of ready player one, this could be how "the stacks" would
form in real life.

------
gukov
I do like the idea of a mobile, driverless hotel room: it picks you up at the
airport, drives you around the city to visit the next site while you shower,
and so on. Hotels of the future won't have a single physical address. Instead,
they will become fleets of driverless rooms.

~~~
vidarh
Maybe at the very low end. Hotels above the very low end are more than just a
room - they're a whole experience and set of support services.

------
digi_owl
Toyota's new e-pallet concept, anyone?

~~~
andruby
It's mentioned in the article.

------
tlholaday
Infancy?

------
DoreenMichele
So, in this imagined utopia where you talk to a driverless room and, boom!,
food arrives while you are on your way to some destination or other, what
happens if you talk to yourself habitually? What happens if you get on the
phone? What happens if you speak American English and you touch down in
Australia and your room understands some American expression completely
differently?

This sounds like it has very serious pitfalls for mere mortals who don't know
exactly what they want every minute of the day and for real world scenarios
where language is not static nor universal. In fact, the same word or
expression can mean many different things.

~~~
tarboreus
I think the scarier part of this isn NLP related, but instead that we've
gotten to a point in our path dependency on car infrastructure that people are
imagining replacing housing with cars.

~~~
DoreenMichele
I tend to talk to myself, especially if I am tired or feverish or grumpy. I
think of recent stories in the news about someone dying because of a
_swatting_ call. You can now deploy a SWAT team with a single phone call and
this is being abused by some people and innocent people are ending up dead.

With the internet, you run into situations where an old person with cognitive
issues is spending money online in a problematic fashion and similar. For
people who don't really understand how such systems work, the lack of friction
between every random desire that passes through their head and the ability to
make it happen actually causes problems.

So I read this story of frictionless everything and I wonder where it goes
wrong. Actual reality for many modern systems is some form of crazy making
frustration. You call and get an automated system and spend forever going
through a menu, unable to get through to a live person or find the option you
need.

The scenario posited that you casually state a two item food order and you
have it 6 minutes later. Reality would probably include 10 minutes of
aggravating back and forth while the room lists all options for beer brand,
size of the beer, did you want condiments with that, etc.

You can argue they are just trying to give a nutshell version of the concept,
but either it is inaccurate or there is a great deal of room for you to speak
and something to promptly happen because of it and that something not being
what you really had in mind. This can be as minor as getting a brand of beer
you don't like, but it also has potential to result in much more serious
problems.

The author did not include any provisos that, of course, the room knows which
brand and size of beer you meant because it automatically logged you in
through your Apple account and it has a list of default definitions for what
exactly you mean when you say, for example, that you want _a beer._

I can't believe my comment is being dismissed and downvoted. Yes, it is
pedantic. But automated systems don't function if someone doesn't ask all
these pedantic questions and find answers for properly handling real world
scenarios.

~~~
jamesrcole
The article is positing a potential future, and you seem to be assuming AI and
voice-recognition technologies will never advance beyond today's level of
sophistication.

Of course we don't know how much better they will get, and at what rate they
may improve, but there's good reasons to think they will get better.

~~~
DoreenMichele
No, that isn't my point at all. It is positing a future where you casually say
something and, voila, like magic, real world things happen. And it isn't
explaining why that does not go awry.

We can currently order food online. Domino's saves a default order for you so
you don't have to fill it out every single time. If you change any details at
all, that takes extra time.

There is no verification at all in the story. There is no mention of how and
why there is no verification, yet the order of food is what was wanted and he
isn't cussing about the brand of beer he got.

The only way you get exactly what you want with such a short sentence
specifying what you want is if you are a creature of habit, go to your usual
eatery and someone with a long history of serving you asks "Your usual?"
Otherwise, no, saying you want _a beer_ is simply not enough information.

Is it in a can? Is it in a bottle? Is it from a tap and served in a tall
glass? What brand is it? Was that a regular bottle or a 40 ounce?

Etc etc.

Even with humans involved, "I want X food and X drink" isn't enough
information. The story in no way explains how that somehow is enough info.

~~~
jamesrcole
Why do you assume that future AI couldn't handle this issue in the same way
people handle this issue, by things like asking questions to check that it got
the intended meaning?

If your response to this is "but the article didn't mention anything like
that", that article was obviously just outlining a high-level vision. Just
because details weren't mentioned in the article doesn't mean they therefore
could not possibly be handled in some fashion.

