Autonomous cars are vehicles that are able to sense the environment around them and navigate without any kind of human input. They are able to detect their surroundings by using things like GPS, radar, sensors, computer vision, etc. Self-driving cars have a long and complex history. In fact, the first recorded idea of an autonomous vehicle actually dates back to the middle ages when Leonardo De Vinci sketched a rough blueprint of a self propelled cart. But it wasn't until the start of the 20th century when a true effort to create an autonomous vehicles started to take shape. It started with the Houdina Radio Control Company’s first public demonstration of a driverless car in 1925. The car was a radio-controlled 1926 Chandler which was guided through traffic by signals sent from another car that was following close behind it. After that, many research institutions embarked on their own exploration into autonomous car technologies. In society today, many companies are working towards perfecting self-driving car technologies and although self-driving cars are not yet widespread, they are certainly on the way.
I believe that the self-driving car revolution will have an overall positive impact on society. Self-driving cars will provide a cheaper and environmental friendly way to travel and will save many lives by decreasing the amount of car accidents that happen. They will decrease fuel consumption significantly and allow for higher speed limits that will allow people to get to their destinations faster. There is no doubt that the self-driving car revolution is also going to destroy a lot of jobs and have a large impact on the economy. However, I believe that the impact it will have on jobs will lead to a boost in economic productivity and the long-term benefits that we will see as a society will far outweigh the short-term inconveniences that it will cause.
In this project I will take a closer look at analyzing the effect autonomous vehicles have on jobs and the economy both now, and in the future, when self driving cars become more widespread. In Jordan Chittley’s article, The Future of Mobility, she states that “Ford CEO Mark Fields says this technology will have as big of an impact on the auto industry as the assembly line once did. One estimate suggests autonomous vehicles will be a $42-billion (U.S.) market by 2025.” It may be some time before all of society is being conveyed by totally automated vehicles, but self-driving cars are already on the way and are going to have a large impact on the world and change many aspects of society. I am hoping that by the end of this project, the audience will have a better understanding of the effect that self driving cars are going to have on job availabilities and the economy and will better understand how it will affect them in the future.
Present Time-Analysis Paper
Self-driving cars are already present in several states and are slowly being implemented into society. Business Insider released an article titled 10 Million Self Driving Cars will be on the Road by 2020, in which it stated that “the barriers to self-driving cars remain significant. Costs need to come down and regulations need to be clarified around certain self-driving car features before the vehicles fully take off among mainstream consumers.... Companies like Mercedes, BMW, and Tesla have already released, or are soon to release, self-driving features that give the car some ability to drive itself. Tech companies are also trying to pioneer the self-driving car. Recently, Google announced that it would be testing its prototype of a driverless car on roads this summer in California.” Self driving cars are not widespread yet but they are not no longer a futuristic idea. There are already fully autonomous vehicles on the road, however semi autonomous vehicles are currently more common and widespread. Business Insider supports this when it described that “self-driving cars are not some futuristic auto technology; in fact there are already cars with self-driving features on the road. We define the self-driving car as any car with features that allow it to accelerate, brake, and steer a car's course with limited or no driver interaction.”
Although there are more semi-autonomous vehicles on the road than autonomous vehicles, fully self-driving vehicles are already starting to have an impact on jobs and the economy. In Chris Giarratana's article, Top 5 Impacts Self Driving Cars will have on the U.S. Economy, he helps illustrate this when he stated that “in its most recent iteration of automated technology, we see the effects of self-driving cars in our job market. The primary concern is raised by the commercial trucking industry with the first self-driving commercial truck.” He goes on to detail how truck operators are being affected, especially in relation to jobs, and the worries they have about how self driving technology will continue to affect their lives. In order to illustrate the significance of this issue, Giarratana states “with about 800,000 drivers in 2014, the total amount of jobs potentially at risk comes to 2.4 million that could be lost or seriously impacted in the next decade. The article continues on by stating “Uber and other commercial-sharing services are referenced as examples of how disruptive technology can quickly topple a vast and well-established industry. Service drivers are concerned that automated vehicles will render their jobs worthless, much like how ride-sharing services like Uber undermined the taxi industry across the world.” This is significant because although self-driving cars are already affecting truck driver and companies such as Uber, they are far from widespread and therefore over the next few years, we will see much more significant changes.
In Jeff Plungis’s article Self Driving Cars: Driving into the Future, he illustrates how self-driving cars are currently being tested in today’s society when he stated that “it has become increasingly clear in recent years that self-driving cars and trucks—animated by computer code—will be sharing the roads with ordinary drivers in the near future. And in places like Mountain View, Calif., Pittsburgh, and Phoenix, this is already happening in the form of on-the-road testing. Pittsburgh was also the place Uber chose to launch its prototype test fleet of self-driving taxis last year.” Plungis goes on to introduce Philip Koopman, who is a computer and electrical engineering professor at Carnegie Mellon. He explains that Koopman often spots Uber’s self-driving taxis while riding a buses downtown which illustrates how self-driving cars are already affecting jobs/companies such as Uber. Plungis then explained how “today’s self-driving cars are sometimes described like teenagers: relatively safe in limited situations, not nearly as safe as an experienced human driver.” This helps illustrate why self-driving cars are not widespread yet. There is still a significant amount of testing that needs to be done in order to make autonomous vehicles safe enough to be "completely" let loose on busy roads.” Once these vehicles become more common and widespread, the impact they have on job availabilities and the economy with increase drastically.
Works Cited
Giarratana, Chris. “Top 5 Impacts Self-Driving Cars Will Have On The U.S. Economy.” Traffic Safety Resource Center, 11 Aug. 2017, www.trafficsafetystore.com/blog/self-driving-cars-economic-impact/.
Intelligence, BI. “10 Million Self-Driving Cars Will Be on the Road by 2020.” Business Insider, Business Insider, 15 June 2016, www.businessinsider.com/report-10-million-self-driving-cars-will-be-on-the-road-by-2020-2015-5-6.
Plungis, Jeff. “Self-Driving Cars: Driving Into the Future.” Consumer Reports, www.consumerreports.org/autonomous-driving/self-driving-cars-driving-into-the-future/.
Future-Prediction Paper
I believe that in the future, the self-driving car revolution will have a significantly positive impact on society. The impact it will have on jobs will lead to a boost in economic productivity and will benefit many aspects on society, from safety to traffic efficiency. However, there is a lot of debate about how exactly self-driving cars will affect jobs in the future and how significant of an impact it will have. In Joel Lee's article Self Driving Cars Endanger Millions of American Jobs (And that’s Okay), he states that “as autonomous vehicle technology improves, it’s easy to imagine a world where these vehicles have no need for a human operator. This would leave the following people jobless: 180,000 taxi drivers, 160,000 Uber drivers, 500,000 school bus drivers, and 160,000 transit bus drivers, for a grand total of 1 million jobs.” Lee continues by analyzing the potential impact on peripheral jobs that do not directly involve driving “but do provide services to modern day consumer drivers.” An example of a job like this would be auto body repair shops. Taking into account peripherally impacted jobs as well as jobs like taxi and Uber drivers, Lee is able to estimate that “a little over 4 million American jobs put at risk due to the coming revolution in self-driving cars – more than 1% of the country.” There is no doubt that autonomous vehicles will cause a lot of people to lose their jobs, as Lee illustrates, but there are disagreements on how significant of an impact it will have on the economy and jobs. This significant change should tend to result in employment rather than unemployment. Lee continues on by stating “the truth is that the advent of a driverless car industry will surely displace more jobs than it will create, but the long-term gains that we’ll see as a society far outweigh the short-term growing pains and inconveniences. The economic, environmental, and human benefits are astounding. I truly believe that this is one of the situations where the loss of jobs is a valid sacrifice for the greater good of society.” I agree with Lee that the long term gains the self driving revolution will bring outway the short term “inconveniences.” Obviously there is controversy regarding this issue but in time we will see the effect it really has on both jobs and the economy.
In his article 5 Ways Self-Driving Cars Will Upend the Economy, Matt Jancer states that “the inevitable takeover of self-driving cars will change the economy in profound ways. The economics of driving reach into facets of life beyond who's in control when we travel down the highway, from funding legal assistance for the poor to the design of whole cities.” In his article, he focuses on five major trends related to the economy we will see in the future relating to the self driving car revolution. These themes are parking, advertising, car design, ticket money, and insurance. He uses these themes to illustrate how autonomy will affect different aspects of the economy. Jancer continues on by describing how there won’t be an immediate shift “from the cars of today to a whole fleet of nothing but autonomous vehicles. It won't happen overnight. There'll be people who need to drive but can't afford an autonomous car initially, and people who choose to drive classic cars. So the roads of tomorrow are weird mix of humans and robot drivers, and thus, a weird mix of insurance coverage. And as long as self-driving cars let drivers take over the controls on demand, that policy will have to ride along with a continuation of liability insurance. For many years to come, older non-self-driving cars will share the road with newer self-driving cars with the option to drive manually.” This is significant because it works to illustrate that it is difficult to pinpoint a specific time in the future when self driving cars will be widespread in our society and how fast this will affect the economy. Like Lee, Jancer believes that self-driving cars will overall have a positive impact on the economy. He concludes his article by stating “it also might make people more productive as they use their commuting time to work rather than steer. Self-driving cars might burn less gas because they're not lead-footed rageaholics like we are, and that might lead to another realignment in how driving is taxed, since gas tax revenues would decrease.”
Works Cited
Lee, Joel. “Self Driving Cars Endanger Millions of American Jobs (And That's Okay).” MakeUseOf, 19 June 2015, www.makeuseof.com/tag/self-driving-cars-endanger-millions-american-jobs-thats-okay/.
Jancer, Matt. “5 Ways Self-Driving Cars Will Upend the Economy.” Popular Mechanics, Popular Mechanics, 14 Nov. 2017, www.popularmechanics.com/cars/g2215/self-driving-cars-auto-economy/.
I hope this project allowed the audience to better understand the effect that the self-driving car revolution currently has on jobs/job availabilities and the economy and also has a better understanding about how it may affect jobs/job availabilities and the economy in the future. There are currently more semi-autonomous vehicles on the road than autonomous vehicles, however fully self-driving vehicles are already starting to have an impact on jobs and the economy. There are many different opinions on when all of society will be conveyed by fully automated vehicles, but it is no longer a futuristic idea. Self-driving cars are already present in many states and are slowly being implemented to all of society. Over the next few years, we will see much more significant changes in regards to autonomous vehicles and the effect they have on jobs/job availabilities and the economy. Although the self-driving car revolution is going to destroy a lot of jobs and greatly affect the economy, I personally believe that the impact it will have on jobs will overall lead to a boost in economic productivity and will be extremely beneficial in the future. The long-term benefits that we will see as a society from the revolution will far outweigh the short-term problems and inconveniences that it will cause. Obviously there is controversy surrounding this topic and many people disagree. However, in time we will get to see the effect it really has on both jobs/job availabilities and the economy.
