Part 14 - The cusp of change

Something a little different this time, mainly because the thought occurred to me that autonomous vehicles are just part of a whole raft of technology that is affecting the way we live.
So then I started to think about the long term affects that technological change will have on society.

I am no psychiatrist, sociologist or anyone else remotely qualified to comment on the actual effects but I over the years I have observed a trend.

People appear to becoming more socially isolated as technology gains ground in our everyday life.

Back in my younger days when dinosaurs ruled the earth the family would sit around the radio, and later the TV and watch or listen as a family.

For a real treat, occasionally you got to go to the movies and sit with a crowd to watch it together.

With the advent of affordable home computing, every kid has a mission control in their bedroom with a computer, tablet, mobile phone all working together over the internet.

Instead of sitting as a family, each member watches what they want on TV or streaming services or play games online, or frequently, both at the same time.

Even in the early days of computer games, my kids used to have LAN sessions where all their mates would come around, set up a local network and hook all their machines together, order pizza and away they go. Today it's all in the cloud so there is no direct personal interaction.

Many people go to work on public transport. With autonomous vehicles happening, the advent of a vehicle as a service is being mooted and may even become the new public transport of the future with trains and buses becoming obsolete. There you have people sitting, working or playing within the vehicle with no direct personal interaction. Is personal isolation the way of the future and social interaction done through virtual reality?

Another observation. You used to sit at your office desk and talk about things. Now it's all email or chat software. You can work all day and say nothing aloud to another person but have many virtual conversations.

 Ok, so what has technology ever done for me?

Today its everywhere. Tonight I watched Britain's got talent the day after it's shown in the UK. One of the acts used computers to drive drones as part of the act and I watched it on the other side of the world several hours after it aired live.

People are printing prosthetic limbs on home computers for a fraction of the cost of commercial units.

One of my colleagues told me in the stairwell as I was leaving work today about a 3d printed electric bike. called light rider. Apologies to KIT (Knight Rider for those of you too young to know) for the pun. Even though it looks like something out of farscape, it is impressive as possibly the worlds first 3D printed motor cycle.

Computer controlled routers abound, I have one in my shed complete with computer keyboard, mouse and LCD screen and CAD CAM software.

What home doesn't have an LCD screen with a set top box and streaming services?

Foxconn, which is a major supplier of devices for Apple and other major suppliers has replaced 60,000 jobs with robots.  A good choice for a manufacturer to reduce costs and increase productivity, but what is the long term cost to society?

Workers are also consumers. If workers are replaced by machines on a large scale then who is left to buy the products produced?

Some argue that they don't lose their jobs but just increase productivity, the world economic forum has an interesting paper here on the possible effects of automation

So when you are sitting in your autonomous car what will you be doing?

Going too or from work could be used to catch up on work, reading, studying etc but on weekends it could be another story.

With cars currently being only semi-autonomous, engaging in sex in a moving car brings more than the normal amount of risk to the act.

Latest news on the autonomous front: insurance companies are predicting a drop in the cost of insurance once this tech hits the road in serious numbers, with Bloomberg predicting insurance costs could drop 60% in 15 years, giving fears to the survival of the industry.

To compound their woes, vehicle manufacturers, confident in their products ability to avoid collision may choose to wear their own insurance costs, putting yet more pressure on the insurance industry.

Add to that the probability of less cars on the road due to a car as a service scenario and things start to look very bleak.

On that note, a new start up called Zoot, out of Silicon Valley, is attempting to raise $US252 Million to start an autonomous Uber type service.  It also has a license to operate autonomous vehicles on the road in California. Uber, Lyft and others are heading down the same path and have inked deals with major vehicle manufacturers to provide these services.

Tesla, a name fast becoming synonymous with driver less technology, may be far closer to a fully automated vehicle than many people think, possibly next year if this article from MIT Technology Review has the facts right.

Tesla is fast becoming a leader as it is logging truly massive amounts of data as all their vehicles constantly send data back to Tesla. What that means in the real world, is that Tesla is getting the real world data equivalent of Googles total testing data, and this is hard to believe, every 10 hours.....

They have a massive, world wide test bed, on the road everyday,sending reams of data back to improve their systems based on real world data.

So the question is can we become socially isolated when we are connected like never before?

Time will tell.

  

Part 13 - To Infinity and Beyond

The new space race has begun, or more accurately the race to be the lead in driverless cars has begun.

The US and Russia began the space race when the US realised that Russia was so far ahead it would take a decade or more to catch up. In 1962 President Kennedy pushed through a program to land a man on the moon by the end of the decade.

 By 1969 that goal was achieved

Today we have a new space race.

Countries all around the world are waking up to the fact that autonomous vehicles are no longer in the realms of science fiction but are a reality and ready to move out into the real world now.

Even the queen is talking about it 

As a consequence many countries and manufacturers are waking up to the fact that they could be left behind and are suddenly making decisions about where they want to be in this emerging race.

As I have mentioned before, China is actively setting up vehicle to vehicle communication systems in existing vehicles to talk to autonomous cars. Baidu, Google of the orient, is heavily involved in this race as well and has signed an agreement with the City of Wuhu to build a dedicated zone for autonomous vehicles, the first in China.

Baidu is also partnering with BMW to build an autonomous car for the hugely lucrative Chinese market and is spending serious coin to get ahead of the game. As can be seen from the video below they are focusing on the technology and not worrying about the aesthetics yet but that will change...

Meanwhile, in Europe, VW Group’s head of digitisation Johann Jungwirth is talking up driverless cars happening quicker than most people believe “In a few years we’ll see vehicles without a steering wheel or pedals. This is not 2030. I’m talking about five years from now.
By 2025 it will be commonplace.” He then went on to say "We will be making a massive effort to promote piloted driving. We will be investing with the aim of bringing these technologies to market faster than the competition"

So yet another joins the race.

Several German auto makers held their shareholder meetings recently and all are discussing Teslas' lead in both electric and autonomous technology and their reaction to it.

BMW announced " In 2018, we will lunch a BMW i8 Roadster. This will be followed in 2021 by the BMW i Next, our new innovation driver, with autonomous driving, digital connectivity, intelligent lightweight design, a totally new interior and ultimately bringing the next generation of electro-mobility to the road."

Challenge accepted, race on.

Raj Nair, Ford Motor Co's head of design,engineering, research and product development believes that "it is credible that and autonomous vehicle at SA Level 4 [one step below full automation] will hit the market by 2020".

Toyota announced its financial results this month an also signaled a paradigm shift in thinking. After a mostly lukewarm approach to autonomous vehicles in the past it has now well and truly joined the race by announcing the Toyota research lab and that "Automated driving and robotics are challenges that affect us closely" Toyota last year put up a billion $US to expand its research into autonomous driving and has announced a collaboration with the University of Michigan, the third alliance with universities in the US to advance its autonomous driving efforts.

On your marks.

Volvo is to run self driving versions of family 4x4s on London roads next year as the motor industry trial of autonomous vehicles accelerates.
Volvos test is called Drive Me London and will see families driving autonomous vehicle on public roads as they have been doing in Gothenberg since 2014.

Get set.

Automated vehicles is not just about cars. Look how many trucks are on the road at any time around the world delivering everything we use on a daily basis from basic food to building materials and everything in between.

A new US startup called Otto Trucks is converting, for around $30K, any standard truck built since 2013 into an automated workhorse.These are now on the road in limited testing in states that allow it and will be a growth industry once trucking companies start to look at the costs involved with manually driven trucks involved in collisions through damage, loss of earnings and legal ability.

However, given unionisation and US laws this may well be something that develops faster in Asia due to social differences.

GO......

The development and implementation of this technology is most definitely accelerating, pardon the pun.

A lot of it is due to visibility.
Let me expand on that.

Remember when you wanted to buy a car? If you aren't fixated on a particular brand then you do research and eventually come up with a make and model that you are interested in.You start looking at them, test drive and so on.

At this point something strange happens, because everywhere you look now you see that model on the road, they are prolific and seem to be breeding at an exponential rate. You never realised how many there are out there.

What has happened here is focus.
You have become aware.

The same thing applies to autonomous vehicles.

I have been in a new job now for just over six months at the time of writing, and as you would expect,I am fairly passionate on the subject of autonomous vehicles and can't resist the impulse to start discussions on it at work......frequently.

The same situation has happened with my colleagues, everywhere they look now they see news on autonomous vehicles.  They hate me for it but hey, it happens.

So as more and more governments and companies become aware they start to think about the dollars and social benefits and talk about it and more news stories appear. The more the people see the more they think about it and the more focused they become.

The manufacturers and governments see the progress of other manufacturers and governments and want a piece of the action but to do that they need to get there first so they need more partnerships and alliances which generate more news stories and more awareness.

Rinse repeat.

So yes, the new space race is most definitely on - but this time it's not about outer space, its about evolution.

Part 12 - Oh sweet Irony, where is thy sting?

If you have been here before you will be well aware that I am a great believer in Autonomous vehicles, no suprises there.

But today I was suprised at the level of automation  that already exists in our society.
Honestly, I really need to get out more.

Today I took my daughter and her family to the airport and then I really started to think about how far down the track automation has already taken us and how we accept it without a second thought.

Automated traffic lights linked by computer to maximise traffic flow all the way. When we arrived at the airport there are automated signs with flashing messages and electronic advertising panels trying (unsuccessfully I might add) to sell me stuff.

We drive in to the fully automated car park where we take a ticket and the gate opens, we drive in and park and after getting the cases and all the other stuff needed to support a four year old on a trip, we entered the terminal. 

Do we wait in a long line for a bored person behind the desk to print out boarding passes and give seat allocations?
Not these techno bunnies.

They've already done most of that online and have seat allocations, boarding pass and all other info on their smartphones.

At the airport the cases get weighed on an automated scale, the phone boarding pass is scanned and the baggage labels shoot out of the machine. You attach those to the bag and trundle across the floor to the baggage check in machine.

This machine scans the phone again, you place the bag on the rack and lasers scan the area and read the tags. The machine says thank you and the bag automatically disappears into the bowels of the earth, hopefully to reappear again in one piece at the final destination.

Now that process is out of the way without any airport staff intervention everyone sits down and uses their phones for what they're designed for, letting all their friends know they're at the airport through their favourite social media platform.

At that moment my wife gets a selfie from the four year old who has just discovered how snap chat works.

We are sitting there gazing out the window at the plane when a food handling platform rolls up. It has a shrink wrapped container of food trays about a metre square. It slides from the truck to the conveyor by rollers, no human interaction. The conveyor then rises on a scissor lift to the galley level of the aircraft. The roller start to move it toward the aircraft and the rollers change direction and the container rotates to face the aircraft and then moves in automatically, no people to be seen. The truck backs away and the door closes.

The boarding announcement comes and everyone gets to stand in line, where they stay for the next 15 minutes as the staff try furiously to get the boarding pass scanning system to work. After numerous reboots the computer God gives a final sad laugh and deigns to let people aboard the highly computerised and automated aircraft.

We say our goodbyes and walk back to the car to pay the parking robot $13 for the pleasure of leaving our car in the open wet car park for less than two hours.

I then have to manually drive my non automated car home.

Irony anyone?