Someone recently mentioned horses as a good analogy. Cars replaced horses; now horses are mostly not allowed on roads, and most people do not own horses. However, horse enthusiasts are still able to own horses and ride them, albeit in certain areas. As someone who enjoys driving, I can definitely see this same sort of thing happening with cars. Fortunately, it gives me hope that manually-driven cars won't become completely extinct.
I've thought for a while now that driving a car (and probably gas powered cars) will go the way of horses. A leisure activity that some will enjoy, but will pass from the conciseness of society with time.
Not to mention people who use their vehicles as a hobby - be it in motorsport, vintage restoration, or whatever.
Electric cars and Automation will do the same to conventional cars as the automobile did to horses. Cars didn't bring on the horsepocalypse, it just created a new enthusiast industry around them as opposed to being a mainstream transport industry.
The response-by-analogy is that people still ride horses for pleasure, and we should expect to see the same thing with cars: a (comparatively) small base of enthusiasts practicing the activity in a way that doesn't endanger others.
Broadly speaking, it seems like there are an infinite number of potential "simple pleasures" out there that people could enjoy, and if we have a chance to transition lots of people from a simple pleasure that endangers others to other pleasures that don't, we should probably do it.
I think a better way to reason about the tradeoff (since reasoning by analogy is unreliable) is to suppose that we were in a world where cars had always been autonomous, and imagine how it would play out–specifically, would enthusiasts in such a world try and build human-driven cars (maybe?), would they drive human-driven cars on public roads (probably not?), and would the non-enthusiasts feel a sense of longing for the joys of the road (for the most part, no?).
The future we should try to reach is the future that we would aim for regardless of our starting position. To me, that seems like a future where no one has to drive cars, and some people who want to do drive cars, but no one has to be impacted by the manual-driving of cars if they don't want to. So I think the response-by-analogy is probably correct in this case.
Funny that you would take this example since personal cars (as we know them since the Model T) are likely to become restricted to rich people in a few decades...
(Though I doubt horses would come back to replace a significant fraction of them.)
But cars replacing horses didn't cause any of the problems in its intermediate state. They intermingled on the same roads quite well.
The transition from traditional cars to driverless cars will be smooth, insofar as the cars are intermingling. But the supposed additional benefits that idealists like to portray as inevitable are nearly impossible to intermingle. The only way that they can appear is through a forceful transition...eg banning non-driverless cars.
Horses were more dangerous than cars, but you're still allowed to ride horses on the road. A total ban on manual driving is just not feasible in a democratic country. I agree that it's possible some roads would be automatic-only, but you're not going to get a ban on cars being driven by people.
You would need just as many robotic cars as you would current taxis. The demand shape isn't going to change just because you remove the driver. Yes, parking and other things will improve but it's going to be a small improvement, not an order-of-magnitude jump.
This is an absolutely terrible argument, because the population and societal use of horses have been greatly reduced once the automobile came into play. If we were to transfer this with people, this means that once automation comes into the play, the vast majority of working humans will be culled and those remaining are only luxury/recreational items...
The biggest reason why it took a long time for cars to replace horses was high price (simply stated: most people couldn't afford a car even if they wanted one) and lack of infrastructure (it takes years to build roads).
We already have the infrastructure and the price will favor self-driving cars.
The laws heavily favor safety in cars (not everyone likes seat-belts and yet we have laws requiring people to use them; we have laws banning using a cell-phone while driving, driving while drunk; cars have to build in a way that withstand crashes etc.).
As long as it can be demonstrated that self-driving cars are safer (and they are), there will not only be pressure to allow them but to require them and eventually ban human drivers altogether.
Once the self-driving cars are allowed, the lower price and greater convenience will make it a blockbuster. I don't want to own a car, I don't want to operate it, I just want to get from Mission to SOMA fast and cheaply and self-driving cars will be able to offer that.
I'm paraphrasing Jay Leno who was being interviewed on a car show, so take this with the appropriate number of grains of salt, but ...
I'd like to see cars go the way of the horse. Horses used to be used for transportation, everybody had one, and they were abused to a huge degree. Then cars came along, and now horses are kept just by enthusiasts who care for them a great deal and go riding for fun every once in a while.
I think the best of both worlds would be for [insert your car alternative of choice here] to develop enough to replace the car for commuting and errands, with just a few thousand cars for people who like to drive them around tracks or through the countryside every once in a while.
In the same way you can go horseback riding today on dedicated tracks and in areas under the ownership of the farm you will still have courses to manually drive cars on for a very long time after the general introduction of self driving vehicles.
And while its not directly comparable, I still see horse and buggy carriages on public roads in PA so they haven't ever outright banned that particular obsoleted mode of transport. If the Amish lobby can keep shit getting dropped in my streets I'm sure the collective car enthusiasts of the world will keep their right to drive for a while at least.
Have you ever ridden a horse? They're mad fun to ride. That's why there's a whole industry for racing and riding them.
But they're inconvenient for getting from point A to point B. Which is why they've been replaced by cars.
I suspect the same will happen with cars. I love my fast cars, but apart from that once a month weekend drive, I really don't get to flex its muscles.
I'd much rather relax in my car on my way to work every day. Then I could buy a more powerful car which I could take out to the race track on weekends.
Another way of looking at it is, when the cars came, the carriages were obsolete. Sure, the drivers may have reskilled to some other vocation but what about the horse? In this situation, we are the horses, and the AI is the car.
While few people still use horses for transportation there are many people who still have horses as a hobby and they are readily available with many places to take them. I suspect internal combustion cars will remain in a similiar hobby niche. There will be mechanics, race tracks, drag strips, etc for a while.
People still ride horses and we've had cars for over 100 years. I don't see driving going away, it just might be constrained in when and where you are allowed to drive(maybe like Autobahn in Chicago and Motorsports Ranch in Houston).
Or it won't, since technology will replace the need for it long before that. We don't use horses to drive our cars not because we've run out of horses.
Cars are a long way from achieving Artificial General Horsiness (AGH). There are many things a horse can do vastly better than a car, such as jumping over fences, navigating by itself, swimming through water, fueling themselves from naturally occurring vegetation, and providing social companionship.
And yet cars have managed to replace horses for pretty much all tasks that people previously used horses for. This is because it turned out that, while cars can’t do everything horses can do, their speed and cost advantages were big enough that it was worth adapting the rest of the world (e.g. building roads and gas stations) to compensate for their limitations.
There may be lessons here for how we should expect AI to replace human labor.
Cars are not replacement for horses. You have to have factories, they break, you need to rely on fuel supply, they also pollute and go too fast - they can kill you. I like my horses, thank you very much!
>Sherman, 21, a mechanical-engineering student at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, trusts the technology and sees these vehicles eventually taking over the road. But he dreads the change because his passion is working on cars to make them faster. “It’s something I’ve loved to do my entire life and it’s kind of on its way out,” he says. “That’s the sad truth.”
I don't fully agree - horses didn't disappear, but instead are now mostly kept by people that just love horses, love interacting with them and love riding them.
The same is likely to happen with cars. Most likely people that race them will continue to do so, provided they have the means. If at some point driving a non-autonomous car becomes illegal to drive on certain roadways, they will be trailered to where they are legal to drive. Horses are legal on regular road, but you cannot have them on a Freeway because it's no longer safe.
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