The self-driving revolution is at our doorsteps. Driverless and autonomous vehicles are becoming a reality faster than anyone would have expected just a few years ago. And, for better or for worse, the consequences for the socioeconomic fabric will be radical. Cities will be redesigned, roads will become safer, cars will turn into mobile offices, millions of jobs in the transportation industry will be displaced and free time will surge.
At the beginning of the previous century, the internal combustion engine unleashed the mobility revolution that we have experienced so far. Now, the Internet of Things is laying down the foundations for the self-driving transformation.
Automobiles are shifting from purely mechanical systems to computers on wheels. The average car is already equipped with an array of sensors that collect internal and external data to help it run safely and efficiently. Once this huge amount of information is fed into an onboard artificial intelligence system, a fully autonomous vehicle will emerge – one that is capable of navigating on busy traffic grids without any human input.
By transforming cars from a product into a mobility service, the concept of private ownership will change, facilitating coordination between strangers living in the same area and willing to share car rides. Cars sits idle 96% of the time and are thus ideal candidates for the sharing economy. If the use of an individual vehicle is optimized, fewer cars will populate our streets, traffic will become more fluid and air pollution will decline. And the number of casualties due to deadly car accidents (the figure now stands at about 1.8 million every year) would drop almost to zero.
But driverless cars will have a drastic impact on urban planning as well. Parking lots, traffic lights and highways are the durable marks of the previous mobility revolution. The vehicles of the future, rather than demanding new infrastructures, will force a radical rethinking of the existing ones. With fewer cars around, vast areas of valuable urban land currently occupied by parking lots could be redeveloped to support a whole new spectrum of social functions, from playgrounds and cafés to fitness trails and bike lanes.
The flipside of the coin is that we are now entering unchartered waters. Driverless cars will pose unprecedented ethical questions when it comes to attributing liability for a crash caused by algorithms and artificial intelligence. Malicious hacking could cause mass accidents or traffic congestions. Finally, driverless cars might crowd out public transportation, reduce tax revenues for local municipalities through a drop in fines and parking fees, and disrupt traditional industries faster than our societies can cope with.
The world is now entering a challenging transition, where traditional vehicles will have to coexist with driverless and autonomous ones. To smooth out this process, policy-makers and business leaders should think about ways to implement inclusive systems, capable of leveraging the potential while neutralizing the risks of these new technologies.