07-07-2018, 12:32 PM
Self-driving cars will make travel, especially long-distance travel. less expensive. With fewer collisions they will have lower insurance rates. They will allow people with such conditions as narcolepsy, sleep apnea, and epilepsy to drive. -- well, more technically, take a car. They will allow people to command a car after those people are no longer fit to drive. They will lead to fewer traffic tickets for speeding, red-light violations, and stop-sign violations.
But here is one effect: they will allow people to travel overnight without concern for falling asleep at the wheel. So if you are out of work in Chicago, you can drive to Atlanta for a job interview without missing the afternoon in Chicago -- or stopping at a motel on the way. You might sleep all the way from about Lafayette, Indiana to Chattanooga, Tennessee. This could hurt the motel industry badly, at least in rural areas that are not destinations in their own right.
I doubt that we will give up the car for some time. It has been around for a century, and it has a huge commitment in infrastructure dedicated to it.
But here is one effect: they will allow people to travel overnight without concern for falling asleep at the wheel. So if you are out of work in Chicago, you can drive to Atlanta for a job interview without missing the afternoon in Chicago -- or stopping at a motel on the way. You might sleep all the way from about Lafayette, Indiana to Chattanooga, Tennessee. This could hurt the motel industry badly, at least in rural areas that are not destinations in their own right.
I doubt that we will give up the car for some time. It has been around for a century, and it has a huge commitment in infrastructure dedicated to it.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.