Driverless cars are bound to introduce a host of new challenges that society will have to grapple with. They’ll have an impact on jobs and the American worker.
They’ll be tracking your driving habits and location, just like Google monitors your search history today. And what if the software fails? Is it truly safe? Who should be held accountable when things go wrong?
All of these are interesting and serious questions that we’ll be addressing in future posts. But for now, let’s talk about all the good reasons why you might want a self-driving car someday.
The chart sums it up for you, describing how certain advantages of driverless cars help individual consumers more than society as a whole, and vice versa.
The further right you go on the X-axis, the more a particular stated benefit of driverless cars (“mobility”) helps you personally. The higher up you go on the Y-axis, the more the benefit aids society (“energy consumption”).
Framing the technology this way is important, because it speaks to a basic calculation that every consumer makes when buying a car: How is this purchase going to benefit me? If the perception is that driverless cars hold few tangible benefits for the individual, then they may have trouble getting adopted as consumers opt for cheaper conventional cars.
But if consumers believe the benefits are worth it — even if they’re rather abstract — then driverless cars may completely change the face of our economy.
The chart was produced by James Anderson, a behavioral scientist at the RAND Corporation. Anderson argues that energy-efficient driverless cars will disproportionately benefit society over the traditional gas guzzlers we pilot by hand today. And those benefits begin with the individual consumer.
Mobility
Mobility is really just a fancy word for transportation, referring to the way humans get around. We’ve already seen tremendous changes in mobility with the rise of ride-sharing companies like Uber. And as ride-sharing goes driverless, too, it’s possible to imagine an entire intelligent transportation infrastructure whose services you can summon on the fly and pay to use only while you’re in the vehicle.
We’ll have to balance the convenience factor of this technology with many of its social costs — lost jobs, a bias toward urban Americans — but technologists say it also stands to make us more productive with the time we currently spend behind the wheel.
Read more of the original article in The Washington Post
