The rise of affordable automobiles in the early 20th century led to an increase in personal mobility that was unprecedented in human history. Most of us suddenly had the ability to travel vastly longer distances anytime we wanted to, no longer encumbered by the limits of human endurance.
Among the many pluses and minuses of the automobile was the ability to get further away from civilization and get off the grid.
The world is now on the verge of another mobility transformation with vehicles that communicate and drive themselves and getting disconnected from the world may become increasingly difficult.
Autonomous, connected vehicles have the potential for enormous societal benefits. Personal mobility can be expanded to far more people that currently cannot drive including the elderly, the young and the physically challenged. Traffic accidents that currently take more than 30,000 lives annually in the United States may be virtually eliminated. Congestion and energy used can be cut back, saving us time, money and environmental problems.
As with any change however, there will be a cost, in this case the ability to move about in relative anonymity.
The age of autonomous vehicles will likely start with fleets of shared vehicles in urban centers that can be automatically summoned and paid for using smartphone apps. The difficulty in predicting human behavior means that these vehicles will probably operate in zones where human-driven vehicles are excluded. Over time, as the technology improves and populations continue to coalesce in urban areas, these autonomous-only zones are likely to expand. As older, individually-owned, human-driven vehicles are retired and replaced by shared autonomous vehicles, the transportation fleet will reach a new normal.
Not so long ago, staying off-the-grid even in a place like Manhattan, was not an entirely ridiculous idea. A person could pay for everything with cash and move about largely untracked, just a single individual among the haystack that was a huge city. The ubiquity of cell phones over the past 20 years means that we now all carry beacons that broadcast our locations. As we move toward a cashless society, every transaction is now recorded on a hard drive somewhere.
Those self-driving pods that will enable personal, point-to-point mass transportation will know exactly who is riding, probably recorded on camera, where the passengers were picked up and dropped off and what route was taken.
