It’s great to explore this topic. You can have a lot of fun in picking a random industry and imagining the effect that self driving will have.
Health - beyond the obvious effects on the emergency room, what else? Ambulances willl quite clearly be affected. Why would someone wait minutes for one to arrive when they can just hop in an autocar to go the hospital? Or would the entire emergency room itself be on wheels? (Less likely.)
Will seniors stay at home for longer? Absolutely. How will this affect the need for aged care nurses? Will their doctors come to them?
But we can go even deeper. How will autocars affect people’s desire to exercise? Will more people ride bikes as a result of the increased safety of the roads?
Education - at first glance, it’s hard to see. But this is the one I’m currently most excited about. Primary and high school education are both built on cars - we just don’t realise it, but a crucial underpinning factor for parents using a local school is its convenience for them in dropping their kids off and picking them up. When that goes away, what happens next?
The demand for better public high schools will explode as the friction in going to a high school 25 minutes away in an awkward direction evaporates...
This makes for much more fertile territory for new schooling concepts - if I want to start a new kind of high school, one where the kids spend a bit of time each day tending to farm animals or perhaps studying entrepreneurship, it now becomes 10x easier to build critical mass. And given how much people care about their kids educations, I expect the movements in this space to be highly disruptive.
Those are two. On health, I’ve barely scratched the surface.
Then there is
- tourism
- logistics
- distribution (imagine Amazon’s FBA on steroids)
- housing (what happens to all those garages? Do we build shipping-container sizes homes that fold it wherever they park?)
The best way to understand the depth of the upcoming changes
is to pick a seemingly unrelated industry and explore how current car-related assumptions underpin it. It becomes clear, to me, that the internet of vehicles will be even more disruptive then the internet itself.
Health - beyond the obvious effects on the emergency room, what else? Ambulances willl quite clearly be affected. Why would someone wait minutes for one to arrive when they can just hop in an autocar to go the hospital? Or would the entire emergency room itself be on wheels? (Less likely.)
Will seniors stay at home for longer? Absolutely. How will this affect the need for aged care nurses? Will their doctors come to them?
But we can go even deeper. How will autocars affect people’s desire to exercise? Will more people ride bikes as a result of the increased safety of the roads?
Education - at first glance, it’s hard to see. But this is the one I’m currently most excited about. Primary and high school education are both built on cars - we just don’t realise it, but a crucial underpinning factor for parents using a local school is its convenience for them in dropping their kids off and picking them up. When that goes away, what happens next?
The demand for better public high schools will explode as the friction in going to a high school 25 minutes away in an awkward direction evaporates...
This makes for much more fertile territory for new schooling concepts - if I want to start a new kind of high school, one where the kids spend a bit of time each day tending to farm animals or perhaps studying entrepreneurship, it now becomes 10x easier to build critical mass. And given how much people care about their kids educations, I expect the movements in this space to be highly disruptive.
Those are two. On health, I’ve barely scratched the surface.
Then there is - tourism - logistics - distribution (imagine Amazon’s FBA on steroids) - housing (what happens to all those garages? Do we build shipping-container sizes homes that fold it wherever they park?)
The best way to understand the depth of the upcoming changes is to pick a seemingly unrelated industry and explore how current car-related assumptions underpin it. It becomes clear, to me, that the internet of vehicles will be even more disruptive then the internet itself.