Hearing reports of the big trends at the Frankfurt International motor show (the IAA, die Internationale Automobil-Ausstellung) were finally broaching the potential of driverless-carriages and that markets may be losing interest in gilding lilies (though coverage was somewhat tarnished by other events in the industry).
Thinking along similar lines as this interesting analysis and projection from
Vox magazine, while I would not necessarily embrace having the one remaining risky and frenetic activity that’s allowed to us anymore despite the potentially deadly consequences of letting a human pilot a massively over-engineered craft taken away from us—shedding yet another experience for something overly-safe and sanitised, I would nonetheless being treated to a special valet service, where I did to fret about my particular parking handicap and be dropped off curb-side and trust that my vehicle will find itself an orderly place to keep itself until summoned. Transporters could negotiate among themselves the logistics of double- and triple-parking. Civil engineering would need to reserve far less space for idle vehicles. There are always trade-offs, I suppose, and it does seem particularly worrying for
teamsters, lorry-drivers, whose role in supply and shipping would be as quickly made redundant and the demographic shift for the labour market would be as monumental as change that results any more intelligent (but not reduced, I think, but rather the opposite) traffic. What do you think? Is it time to take off the training-wheels?
