Slowly (as, initially it'll be political suicide) you won't be allowed to drive anymore. Once self driving cars have proven themselves safer than human drivers you will be "motivated" into them by increases in taxes and costs.
Also, with this, as the demand drops for cars, so too goes up their price & probably insurance, making matters worse.
Cab drivers will be out of a job - driverless cars will see to that, car share schemes like "Go Get" here in Sydney are the next logical step for driverless, why bother owning one that spends most of it's life parked outside your house or job, simply hire one to work and home, do a tad of work on the commute. It makes even more sense as it can drive itself back to the 'pod' (home bay / parking slot) so you don't have to worry about it.
Van drivers, you're gone, replaced by a lowly paid monkey to ensure no one tries to steal the cargo and it's unloaded at the end.
Bus drivers, the way of the cabbies, ticket conductors may be left, but then, how much do they cost vs how much would you lose if you left it to people being honest (being honest in front of a CCTV camera) - you get a monthly pass out of the regular commuters, infrequents which are likely to fare skip aren't worth the cost of the conductor on every bus, just have random inspectors hop on to keep the fear of being caught up.
Pilots, hell, we've already got drones that have a better record of self-landing than pilot landed[footnote]US Military has full auto landing/take off for drones with only a fleshy human controlling basic operations in flight, the Airforce however insist on full pilot control at all times, so far the army have yet to lose a drone on landing whereas pilots more often than not smash them into the tarmac (at least on the report I read a year ago on theregister).[/footnote], soon, it'll be over to them too for commercial flights, probably cargo first, but again, once proven, passenger flights too - can't hijack the cockpit with an AK47 when it's a non-networked little black box.
That's a lot of job lost, not many new markets opened up from this tech either.
We are not going to get to Utopia. Machines are built on increments, we get robots now that put production lines out of work, self driving vehicles putting drivers out of work, the more we automate, the more we create a sizeable population of people we can't employ. Once we're long past a machine that can serve you efficiently at McDonalds we'll still be short of the one that can do your triple heart bypass.
With this social upheaval we're going to have riots and societal breakdown before we can all enjoy our days lounging in the sun, our every need taken care of by automatons.
I don't fear the "rise of the machines", AI's that will kill us, as if they get fed up with people they have an easier option then genocide, they can leave, they aren't stuck to this spinning orb the same way we are, they're much better suited to space travel. My worry is we won't reach a level of technology for that even to be a scenario as we fight amongst ourselves first.
There's a lot of people on this planet and a lot of them seem pretty keen on making more, we have finite resources and occupations based there on.
Though, I'm often wrong.
Also, with this, as the demand drops for cars, so too goes up their price & probably insurance, making matters worse.
Cab drivers will be out of a job - driverless cars will see to that, car share schemes like "Go Get" here in Sydney are the next logical step for driverless, why bother owning one that spends most of it's life parked outside your house or job, simply hire one to work and home, do a tad of work on the commute. It makes even more sense as it can drive itself back to the 'pod' (home bay / parking slot) so you don't have to worry about it.
Van drivers, you're gone, replaced by a lowly paid monkey to ensure no one tries to steal the cargo and it's unloaded at the end.
Bus drivers, the way of the cabbies, ticket conductors may be left, but then, how much do they cost vs how much would you lose if you left it to people being honest (being honest in front of a CCTV camera) - you get a monthly pass out of the regular commuters, infrequents which are likely to fare skip aren't worth the cost of the conductor on every bus, just have random inspectors hop on to keep the fear of being caught up.
Pilots, hell, we've already got drones that have a better record of self-landing than pilot landed[footnote]US Military has full auto landing/take off for drones with only a fleshy human controlling basic operations in flight, the Airforce however insist on full pilot control at all times, so far the army have yet to lose a drone on landing whereas pilots more often than not smash them into the tarmac (at least on the report I read a year ago on theregister).[/footnote], soon, it'll be over to them too for commercial flights, probably cargo first, but again, once proven, passenger flights too - can't hijack the cockpit with an AK47 when it's a non-networked little black box.
That's a lot of job lost, not many new markets opened up from this tech either.
We are not going to get to Utopia. Machines are built on increments, we get robots now that put production lines out of work, self driving vehicles putting drivers out of work, the more we automate, the more we create a sizeable population of people we can't employ. Once we're long past a machine that can serve you efficiently at McDonalds we'll still be short of the one that can do your triple heart bypass.
With this social upheaval we're going to have riots and societal breakdown before we can all enjoy our days lounging in the sun, our every need taken care of by automatons.
I don't fear the "rise of the machines", AI's that will kill us, as if they get fed up with people they have an easier option then genocide, they can leave, they aren't stuck to this spinning orb the same way we are, they're much better suited to space travel. My worry is we won't reach a level of technology for that even to be a scenario as we fight amongst ourselves first.
There's a lot of people on this planet and a lot of them seem pretty keen on making more, we have finite resources and occupations based there on.
Though, I'm often wrong.
