This isn’t the column I was going to write. The one I was going to write concerned a powerful technology that’s evolved over a span of decades and is, in many ways, uniquely American. It’s a near-ubiquitous technology that fascinates and frightens me along with lots of other people, nerdy and not. It’s a technology that people are strongly passionate about.
That was the column I was going to write. Until I woke up, just a little while ago, at 3:20 a.m. My most creative moments are in the space between sleep and wakefulness, and when I find myself in that space, I use the time to think about things I’m working on. Sometimes it’s a software problem from work, sometimes it’s this column. Sometimes I just fall back to sleep.
But this time, I started thinking about what I wanted to say in the column I’m not writing. And I realized that, just maybe, some crazy or criminal person reading my column at Starbucks or the all-night laundry might actually make the effort to figure out where I live—not hard thanks to Google—and target me personally. And for the first time, having written this column for more than a decade, I was frightened for my personal safety
Strange and paranoid, you say. And you’re probably right. But as much as I strive to use this column to make people think, this time the topic was something that people (sane and less-so) feel strongly—even irrationally—about. Even though the chance of something bad happening is vanishingly small, it’s just safer to leave the whole subject alone. And that’s the reason this column isn’t the column I was going to write: Because I was scared to write about guns.
So, let’s move on to something less scary: self-driving vehicles, which I’ve written about before (“Those Daring Young Men and Their Driverless Cars,” Tech Talk, July 2012). I recently ran across a 2010 YouTube video of a non-Google employee actually using a driverless Toyota Prius. You see the driver (?), Steve Mahan, get into the car, drive to Taco Bell, go through the drive-through and return home. Exterior shots show how well the car maneuvers: neatly turning left into the leftmost lane; avoiding the divider. There’s a little surprise in the video, so you might want to watch it yourself: http://youtu.be/cdgQpa1pUUE.
Awareness of the impending reality of self-driving cars is on the rise. I found the video above via a six-part series running in Forbes (http://blogs.forbes.com/chunkamui) that discusses the potential multi-trillion-dollar impact of a self-driving passenger car. And Volvo, the carmaker whose name is synonymous with “safety,” has announced all of its vehicles will be autonomous by 2020. Details are a bit sketchy, of course, but it makes complete sense in terms of brand image. One big question is whether Google will enter the car business (it produces the Nexus-brand Android phones and tablets using LG and Samsung for manufacturing) or license its technology to existing manufacturers.
Most of the discussion has centered on driverless cars, but some have realized the huge potential for trucks. Rio Tinto, a large mining company, is using driverless trucks at an iron ore mining operation in the hostile climate of remote Western Australia. Human truck drivers there are paid more than $100,000 per year, working two weeks on and two weeks off, which gives you some idea of the economics involved. You can see the mining dumptrucks, which are built by Komatsu and use GPS and radar to do their magic at http://youtu.be/d96N3dVqg4s. A recent Wired article by futurist Kevin Kelly states that the “highway legs of long-haul trucking routes will be driven by robots embedded in truck cabs.” Having watched the Google car, and seen Lexus vehicles that parallel park, I can hardly wait to see a driverless truck backing into the loading dock at the local Safeway.
Kelly goes on to talk about how robots will affect everything. His article, cheerfully titled “Better Than Human: Why Robots Will—And Must—Take Our Jobs,” opens with:
“It may be hard to believe, but before the end of this century, 70 percent of today’s occupations will likewise be replaced by automation…. This upheaval is being led by a second wave of automation, one that’s centered on artificial cognition, cheap sensors, machine learning and distributed smarts. This deep automation will touch all jobs, from manual labor to knowledge work.”
In Kelly’s world, robots aren’t the anthropomorphic creations from the movies, like Robby the Robot in “Forbidden Planet.” His robots are combinations of software and sensors that sense the world around them and react appropriately (like a driverless car), especially if they adjust their reactions as they gain experience (learning). They talk with each other and share their experience over the network.
Kelly believes the job of humans will be to think up new and useful things, which at first can only be done by humans, but ultimately become the job of more robots, in an ever-rising spiral of progress. I encourage you to read his entire essay at www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2012/12/ff-robots-will-take-our-jobs.
I remember the General Electric Carousel of Progress at Disneyland, which was all about how technological progress improved people’s lives over time. It had a catchy song that played at each transition: “It’s a great big beautiful tomorrow, shining at the end of every day…” and you couldn’t help but feel better at the end of the ride. I can’t wait for my driverless hybrid or electric car to show up in my driveway. And I’m lucky, because my job is already about thinking up new and useful software, a key component of our new robot overlords. Fortunately, no one’s had much success in automating the task of programming.
But I worry about those people who, for whatever reason, can’t adjust to the world of robots. What happens to a 45-year-old taxi driver in the Bronx when the Yellow Cab Company switches to driverless cars? It’s pretty clear that the occupation of taxi driver will disappear in less than 20 years, and it’s not likely that obsolete taxi driver will be writing software either. That 45-year-old is the walking unemployed. He just doesn’t know it yet.
What scares you about technology? Share your thoughts with me at mduffy@northbaybiz.com.
