
How Uber’s Autonomous Cars Will Reshape the Economy by 2025 - cryptoz
http://zackkanter.com/2015/01/23/how-ubers-autonomous-cars-will-destroy-10-million-jobs-by-2025
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thewarrior
I feel that autonomous cars are extremely oversold and cannot operate in many
real world conditions like snowy roads and places with obscured road signs.

Maybe it can drive around some of the roads in the US after it has been fed
with detailed 3D maps of the whole area along with road signs. But how about
in other places ? Could it ever drive in a place like India ? I don't think
so.

Autonomous vehicles could completely take over in closed areas like Open cast
mines , vast factories and on farms where companies could profit by cutting
the driver out of the loop. From there we would see the technology slowly
improve to start getting traction in the real world. Even then the vehicle
wouldn't be fully automated , it would be a more advanced form of the cruise
control we have today with it falling back to the manual driver especially in
crazy places like India.

Also we'd need laws forbidding people from jumping in front of self driving
cars etc just to f@#$ with them.

This is also a trend with automation stories in general , with several
publications already predicting doom and gloom and claiming that most people
would end up unemployed because of automation of their jobs. The fact is we
don't even have an AI good enough to impersonate a tele marketer yet and it's
decades away at best.

I'm not denying that thesis in the extremely long term but AI and machine
learning are in a very primitive state for any of this to materialize any time
in the next two or three decades.

~~~
chimeracoder
> real world conditions like snowy roads and places with obscured road signs.

Snowy roads are actually much better in many ways for cars (theoretically)
than humans, because cars have much shorter reaction time. As for obscured
road signs, if self-driving cars become the norm, road signs will likely
disappear, because (A) they will use wireless communication to transmit
information to cars, rather than visual scanning, and (B) a lot of information
contained on road signs would simply be irrelevant or redundant for self-
driving cars.

Remember that modern cars are _already_ very autonomous, even though they
"feel" manual. Recently, I drove a car[0] that will actually automatically
steer the car back into a lane if it senses that the driver is veering on the
highway (ie, if he/she falls asleep or is drunk).

We don't think of this as "self-driving" because the improvements are
incremental and the driver is still present and feels like he/she is in
control, but drivers have been slowly giving up control over cars for several
decades now. Self-driving cars are actually much less of a leap from the
status quo than people realize; it's simply[1] the final step in a long series
of incremental automation of automobiles[2].

[0] Subaru, I believe.

[1] Not that it isn't still an impressive feat, of course.

[2] Let's not forget the prefix or etymology of the world _auto_ mobile - it's
not accidental!

~~~
lttlrck
A measured response/judgement is far more important than reaction time in
snowy/icy conditions IMO.

~~~
andyidsinga
yes for sure -- but software can measure & respond 1000s of times more than a
human within a given time frame.

This is what control systems get very good at and apparently the traction
control firmware in many cars that controls anti-lock brakes can include code
that detects incorrect steering in icy scenarios and compensate for it. (sorry
no reference - I heard this on NPR a while back)

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FrankenPC
"It is exciting to be alive, isn’t it?"

It is for those of us who don't rely on the service industry for a living. 10
million jobs lost.

A self driving car is an amazing feat of Human engineering. What would be an
even more amazing feat would be what to do with humans thrown under the bus of
progress. Capitalism is great for anyone with enough mental agility to stay in
the technology power curve, but it's really terrible for everyone else who
simply want to live their lives, raise their family and be happy.

What are we going to do with all those humans displace by automation?

~~~
tommoor
Driving won't be the first job to be displaced by technology, other jobs will
appear - possibly one's we can't even imagine now.

~~~
potatolicious
This is a cop-out - the entire "people will find other things to do" argument
is a total cop-out.

Yes, in aggregate, over long timespans (read: multiple generations), people
will figure out other things to do. But as we've seen from the automation of
manufacturing jobs in the US, a huge number of people _haven 't_ retrained,
nor have magical jobs "we couldn't even imagine" erupted en masse to absorb a
chronically un- or under-employed work force.

I submit that the oversimplified notion that people who lose their jobs to
technology will be fine and find something else to do is mainly a device to
make people like _us_ feel better - it isn't a notion that actually helps the
displaced.

~~~
tommoor
I don't believe it is, history has this repeated this playbook over and over,
from horse power, steam power, electric power - labour intensive repetitive
works have been slowly replaced by automation for hundreds of years now -
driving is just the next in a long list.

My personal long-term view (beyond just automated cars) is that we _will_
automate away millions of jobs - but that's fantastic as it probably doesn't
make sense for everyone to work anyway, a basic income guarantee can allow
people to live lives with much more time for leisure, creativity and
enjoyment.

~~~
potatolicious
> _" history has this repeated this playbook over and over, from horse power,
> steam power, electric power - labour intensive repetitive works have been
> slowly replaced by automation for hundreds of years now"_

Yes, and we've never suitably addressed the problem of displaced labor.

You're mistaking aggregate, macro-scale changes in the economy for micro-scale
effects on people.

Bob the factory worker loses his job because of automation, the economy at the
same time creates new jobs in other categories. From an aggregate scale the
economy is still humming along - a contraction of labor demand on one side is
offset by an expansion in labor demand on another side.

But what about Bob? Is Bob qualified to take one of these newly created jobs?
How will he gain the qualifications to work this new job? Are these new jobs
in Bob's geographic area, or does Bob have the financial means to move to new
job centers to pursue work?

This is the problem - you've mistaken "there are new jobs" for "there are new
jobs for the displaced workers". The assumption that there is even much of an
intersection between these two things is pure supposition - supposition that
gets trotted around a lot because we don't like to think about the notion that
maybe Bob - who has 30-40 years left on his lifespan - may simply be
chronically unemployed or underemployed for the entire rest of it.

In reality there are going to be millions - if not tens of millions - like
Bob, who have lost their jobs and are unable to retrain into a field that the
economy has created. _Others_ will take those new jobs, but Bob and his cohort
are just plain fucked. The invention of new job categories does not remove the
reality that Bob, and millions of others like him, are permanently out of
work.

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downandout
_" PricewaterhouseCoopers predicts that the number of vehicles on the road
will be reduced by 99%, estimating that the fleet will fall from 245 million
to just 2.4 million vehicles."_

This isn't remotely close to possible. While it is technically true that cars
spend most of their time sitting idle, the demand for transportation is lumpy.
A huge percentage of the population works, sleeps, shops, and eats at
approximately the same time. That means that with only 2.4 million cars
available for use at any one time, the US economy would almost completely shut
down. If the majority of those were Uber cars, surge pricing would be in
effect most nomral hours....literally only the reviled "1%" could afford to go
to work or do anything else from sunrise to sunset.

~~~
rogerbinns
You are thinking of one person per car per commute. And also cars only. As a
simple example lets say you commute 30 miles to work and it costs $10. Shortly
after your journey starts the car can say: "Would you accept a 3 minute longer
journey in return for a discount of $3?" Instant on-demand car pooling as it
picks up someone else.

Similarly the car can take you to some point 3 miles away, you switch to a
larger car ("bus"), get within a few miles of your destination where another
car takes you to you final destination. The wait times can be very small, and
again you'll have a financial incentive (discount) or can pay full whack for a
completely private experience. The time and places where there are the highest
demands on transport are the ones where self driving vehicles and financial
incentives will be most effective.

Deliveries will become way cheaper too. Instead of each place managing their
own delivery as currently happens, a delivery company can pick up things from
multiple unrelated places. Suddenly there is no need for businesses like fast
food to all be in high traffic areas.

~~~
downandout
Unless financially constrained, most people will not ride the bus to wherever
they are going, today or in the future. Autonomous cars are real. The idea
that humans will change their attitudes or behaviors because of them is not.
Individuals will still own cars, they will just be autonomous. Car ownership
may go down somewhat, but not by 99% or anywhere close to it.

~~~
mercer
I'm not sure about that. Humans adjust pretty well and relatively quickly to
changes when the incentives are right. Where I live I see people from many
walks of life use buses or other forms or public transport without
trepidation. Sure, it's possible that people will never travel in a 'normal'
car with complete strangers, but if that's the case I'm sure we'll find ways
to make 'cars' more amenable to co-traveling so that the _significant_
advantages will be worth the slight inconvenience of traveling in one vehicle
with strangers.

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krschultz
I think it's unlikely that an autonomous car will be $25,000. It is far more
likely early autonomous vehicles will be $150,000.

However, this just slants the playing field in favor of an Uber-ish business
model even more. When the utilization of the car nears 100%, you can justify
that capital expense. It doesn't make sense for the average person to own a
very expensive autonomous car, because they probably only use it two hours a
day at most. When it is running 24/7 except for maintenance, that is a totally
different story.

------
Someone
_" PricewaterhouseCoopers predicts that the number of vehicles on the road
will be reduced by 99%, estimating that the fleet will fall from 245 million
to just 2.4 million vehicles."_

I do not believe that. For freight, more efficient use of freight vehicles
will decrease the number of vehicles needed, but I guess that will be
compensated for by more demand for freight transport because it will get
cheaper.

As to personal transport:
[http://traveltrends.transportation.org/Documents/CA10-4.pdf](http://traveltrends.transportation.org/Documents/CA10-4.pdf),
page 5 shows that about 120 million people travel to work by car each day in
the USA. To get them there in those 2.4 million vehicles, each vehicle would
have to drive 50 people to work each morning and back each evening.

Picking a optimistic average car sharing load of 2 persons (the PDF puts
carpooling at about 10%), that would be 25 trips. At a moderate 5 minutes a
trip, it would take those cars 250 minutes to do that. That's about 4 hours,
so the first people would arrive at work at 07:00 and the last ones at 11:00.

With realistic figures, those number will easily blow up to over 8 hours. So,
it will require huge other changes (job los, working from home or highly
increased car sharing) to get down to that 2.4 million number.

I also think those who can afford a car now will want to own a driverless car,
too. Reason? If you do not need to drive, your car can become more of a living
room: you will want to keep your favourite books and games in it. That in
itself will slow down a decrease in the number of vehicles, but there is a
second factor: once your car is your living room, chances are people will be
less bothered about long commute trips.

------
xivzgrev
This is really bullish. I wonder what skin he has in game? As author states,
uber can do best where owner drives fewer than 10k miles per year.

What about all the rural locations, or people who like to go on long trips?

And I think 50 cents per mile is extremely generous I think uber will charge
more than that. Isn't IRS reimbursement rates something like 55 cents per
mile? That's basically to cover costs not make any profit.

~~~
jerf
Just strip out the word Uber. I wouldn't assume it will be "Uber" that wins
either. Once the self-driving space heats up it's going to be piled into by a
ton of entities and there's no guaranteeing the outcome.

For that matter I won't promise you 2025. But I will say that if self-driving
cars truly do become practical it will rewrite the economy in a lot of ways,
and that if you stop and think and analyze, a lot of them aren't that
difficult to guess, IMHO. For instance, that the nature of the capital
expenditures will heavily favor "renting" over "owning" once we can easily
rent on-demand is just obvious. A lot of this other stuff is too, really.

Of course, painting a full picture or correctly guessing timelines is
essentially impossible. But some of the broad sketch isn't that hard.

------
brighten
Some of the numbers in this article don't make sense to me.

Today "cars are driven just 4% of the time". If you assume for a moment that
people's transportation usage time stays the same, and "the number of vehicles
on the road will be reduced by 99%", then the average car must be used 400% of
the time. That would be possible if every self-driving car is carrying 4
passengers 100% of the time, 24 hours a day 7 days a week, which seems very
unlikely. What am I missing?

I also don't see the justification for saying "90% reduction of vehicles in
operation would reduce our overall emissions by" 90% of their greenhouse gas
emissions. There might be 90% fewer vehicles, and you certainly save on
environmental impact of vehicle production, but they will be used more per
vehicle.

In fact, per-person transportation usage time may _increase_. If catching a
ride is easy, fast, and cheap and allows us to work, sleep or play while
riding, then many people will ride more often, or might buy a house that means
a longer commute.

~~~
zkanter
We're going to see an increased average number of passengers per vehicle.
Current average in a city like San Francisco is 1.3 passengers/vehicle. An
average of 4 is conceivable (67% decrease in number of vehicles on the road).

Autonomous vehicles will likely be electric - this is the other component that
will reduce our need for fossil fuels.

~~~
brighten
Autonomous cars probably make transit optimization easier, but there's a
tradeoff here that doesn't have very much to do with autonomy: The more people
in the car, the less convenient for each rider, both because of comfort and
delaying the trip with stops. It's basically the difference between a cab and
a shared ride van today. It's certainly _conceivable_ that cabs mostly
disappear and are replaced by shared ride vans, but lots of things are
conceivable...

Autonomous vehicles will be electric but so will some (perhaps a smaller
fraction of) non-autonomous vehicles. Anyway, that doesn't save the
calculation. It's clear all these benefits are there but maybe not to the
degree you claim, at least not in such a simple way.

------
dpflan
Yes, an interesting prognostication: a future with 'Total Recall' Johnny Cabs,
a transportation circulatory system for cities. The gradual adoption would
make most sense through the growth of closed systems where there are almost
zero human drivers. Will the cars be like small public transit or are they
single ride and not picking up random passengers along the way for the sake of
efficiency (for the companies providing the rides surely electric cars and
more single rides will yield greater monetary gains)? The social impact would
be interesting - I've had good experiences meeting and talking with Uber
drivers. That human element would certainly be removed, and now I am alone and
robotically chauffeured around town staring at other people through the
window. I'm intrigued at how it would feel to use such a system.

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saosebastiao
I agree that self driving cars will be a huge savings in terms of resources
spent on cars and the ecosystem surrouding them, but it won't be a huge
benefit to disposable income. With cars taking up a huge chunk of the
expenditure of humans, and with Inflation metrics being primarily driven by
past concerns as opposed to future concerns (it took complete extinction of
VHS for VCRs to be removed from the CPI), and with the general pervasiveness
of monetarism (which, for some odd reason associates 0.0000001% deflation with
the apocalypse) in central banking institutions, there is little doubt that
any improvement in the average person's finances will be promptly inflated
away.

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SEJeff
Everyone talks about passenger vehicles as the killer market for self driving
cars, but it isn't. One of my friends is a Paramedic and he told me the
overwhelming majority of traffic fatalities he sees are a result of big rig
truck drivers falling asleep. It would suck to put a whole industry of workers
out of a job, but if you could reliably and cheaply transport large amounts of
cargo with a self driving vehicle which never slept, that is pretty amazing.
It would certainly up the profit of the distributors moving tons upon tons of
cargo around the world every day.

~~~
mercer
You're probably right. If I understand correctly, they recently passed laws
that make it easier to test self-driving vehicles in Holland, and one of the
first experiments will be 'convoys' of self-driving trucks.

~~~
Someone
[http://www.channelnewsasia.com/news/technology/dutch-
approve...](http://www.channelnewsasia.com/news/technology/dutch-approve-
large-scale/1611880.html)

The law hasn't passed yet, but apparently, Scania will start testing trucks in
February. I am not sure that will be fully autonomous vehicles, though. It may
be trucks that can follow a lead truck driven by humans.

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free2rhyme214
Do you trust software with your life?

Obviously 2025 software will be better than 2015 software but this question
will still have to be answered strongly for mainstream adoption.

~~~
untog
Do you trust people with your life?

I do understand your point, but I think a lot of people would trust software
over a completely unknown person behind the wheel.

~~~
jacquesm
I think a lot of people would trust people over a completely disembodied piece
of software with no skin in the game.

Drivers are careful because of others, but also because they too will suffer
in an accident.

As one of my teachers used to joke: 'If you want to see an enormous
improvement in the accident rate put a very sharp stainless steel spike on the
steering wheel and remove the seatbelt from the drivers seat'.

------
andyidsinga
I might be driving around in autonomous cars by 2025 - but they won't be uber
autonomous cars (assuming it still exists as a business). My impression of
Uber and how it conducts business is not good - and that connection with a
company and it's brand will be important when people start putting their lives
in the hands of its software and hardware.

Tesla -- now thats another story (for me).

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srinivasan
It's not just Uber that will kill jobs. This video -
[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Pq-S557XQU](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Pq-S557XQU)
\- explains how many others jobs will be eliminated.

Re this article, I think the numbers are a bit drastic, but using less drastic
numbers does not weaken the central point of the argument.

------
free2rhyme214
Do you remember toll takers at the golden gate bridge?

Replacing them was slow because of the government.

The private sector will have no problem replacing taxi drivers when the
technology is available from Google and every car manufacturer.

------
FrankenPC
The 6D exponential growth pattern is appearing everywhere.

Once a market becomes "Digitizable" or under computer control, it appears to
grow slowly then it hits the elbow of the exponential growth curve and becomes
Distuption. From there, old analog business artifacts are digitized
(Dematerialization) and monetarily re-adjusted to compensate for the much
cheaper costs of production (Demonitization). Then it's a simple matter to
connect the service to everyone through the web and social media
(Democratization).

Goodbye cars. Heloooo profit opportunity.

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pwrfid
This is certainly plausible. Nevertheless, the resulting changes in economy
would drive more inequality and reward people with capital and/or technology

~~~
captk
I think that's kind of the point of the article - there's going to be a
massive shift in the structure of the economy when 10 million jobs disappear.

That being said, I think pretty much all of silicon valley is built on the
principle that the future will "reward people with access to capital and/or
technology."

