Henry Ford famously said that if you asked people what they wanted, they wouldn’t have said “ a car.” They would have said – “a faster horse.”
I believe driverless cars are today’s equivalent of faster horses. A continuation of what exists – not a true category break. Predictable but not revolutionary enough.
That takes me to Elon Musk, who is probably our most passionate and visible autonomous hero.
As a fellow car enthusiast, I admire him. As a tech entrepreneur, I respect him. And there’s no doubt that Elon has been right most of the time. (As for Solar City , I will wait for the sunlight of the future to pass judgment, but I’m a believer).
So I hate to diverge from his vision of driverless cars. Yes, in the future we will not drive ourselves. Machines will do it for us – but let me tell you — those machines will be looking down, from above, on the Interstate Highway System.
I believe we will skip driverless cars and go straight into driverless drones.
Don’t get me wrong – I realize the many benefits that driverless cars could deliver – fewer accidents, lower costs getting from A to B, and perhaps most important, freeing up time.
In the U. S. alone, the average commute time by car is 24 minutes each way. That means the average commuter will spend ~200,000 minutes focused on the road just to get to and from work. Add in all the other trips we make in our cars – shopping, appointments and travel destinations, and the amount of time we spend with our brains engaged in driving rather than other creative activities we would choose to focus on, is astonishing.
