IEEE Spectrum June, 2014 - 90

continued from Page 63 | accidents will be rare enough to be as
shocking as they should be.

A si mov w rot e not of roboc A r s bu t of t h ei r
consequences. He thus followed the sci-fi rule of his colleague,
Frederik Pohl, "to predict not the automobile but the traffic jam."
In that spirit, let's assume that fully autonomous vehicles mature
without worrying too much about the technology needed. What
would happen? Briefly, our roads, our towns, and the frames of
our lives will change, as they did when cars were first introduced.
"Approximately every two generations, we rebuild the transportation infrastructure in our cities in ways that shape the vitality of
neighborhoods; the settlement patterns in our cities and countryside; and our economy, society, and culture," writes Marlon G.
Boarnet, a specialist in transportation and urban growth at the
University of Southern California.
Robocars would be shared, and that would make them both
convenient and cheap to use. Vehicles would be fewer in number but far more heavily used, picking up new passengers near
where they left the last ones off. Such vehicle-sharing schemes
are spreading, even though today's dumb vehicles tend not to
be there for you when you need them. One reason is that they
accumulate at popular destinations. It'd be different for a car that
could come when you called and leave when you were done with it.
"Certainly, car sharing is an option," says Ralf Herrtwich, a leader in Mercedes's autonomous car project, in Stuttgart. "Get the
vehicle at your command, drop it at your convenience, no parking."

Brave talk, but Mercedes owners must quail at the thought of
a commodified sharemobile. Who would pay a higher fare for a
robotaxi lined in burled walnut, with leather seats and a perfume
dispenser-features actually offered in the 2014 Mercedes S-Class?
There's one bunch who won't be able to pay for such fripperies: professional drivers. Say good-bye to all of them-5 million
people in the United States alone. In a world of autonomous
cargo carriage, machines could hitch trucks to standardized
containers of stuff. Then, at distribution points, other machines
could transfer their contents to smaller trucks-or perhaps to
robots so small they could safely roll along sidewalks. Picture a
little triwheeler that would fail only by stopping, not by falling
on your head, as one of Amazon.com's proposed quadcopter
delivery drones might do.
"Could we enter into a world where things are brought to us
in a Segway-size pod?" wonders Burns of Columbia. "And if so,
what does that do to retail big-box stores?"
Say bye-bye as well to the soccer mom. Parents will call a
robocab, set its parental controls, lock the car doors, and send
their teenage daughters to practice or maybe to the library, making it impossible for them to cruise "through the hamburger stand
now," as the Beach Boys sang in 1964.
The self-driving car will free us of much drudgery, true, but future generations may never know the freedom of the open road.
And though the work such a car will do will be of great value, it
probably won't inspire many songs. n
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Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of IEEE Spectrum June, 2014