This is the future

Spencer over at his new digs at WIRED's Dangeroom reports on the Army's  self-driving trucks. As Yglesias notes it's a shame that the militiary so dominates awesome technical research like this and robotic cars actually would be extremely useful to building a better country.

I couldn't find great recent statistics, but this says 42,116 died in highway crashes in the United States in 2001. Additionally there were 3.4 million injuries from car accidents in 1999. By comparison roughly 15,000 are murdered in the US annually. Worldwide the WHO says 1.2 million die every year from car accidents with this figure projected to rise 65% over the next 20 years. 1.2 million. But death and injury are not the only social coasts of driving. We spend over 100 hours every year driving, that's more time then we spend on vacation. I couldn't find any statistics about this, but the parking that our car culture needs to sustain itself wastes huge amount of valuable real estate. And of course our cars are slowly killing the planet and building disconnected, inefficient and ugly communities. In short, human-driven cars are hugely destructive to human life and society.

It's an insane system, it's going to change in our lifetimes. I'm a big advocate from moving away from cars in general. I don't think they should be eliminated but having a smarter transportation system: bikes, walking, rail, buses, streetcars and the like, can save us huge amounts of money while building better, healthier communities and reducing pollution and congestion. That's going to require a lot of public investment and cultural change, but it's worth it and it needs to and I believe will happen. But that doesn't mean cars will be gone, people will always drive cars.

One big shift will be the transition from gasoline powered to battery powered cars, the climate crises and disaster of our oil habit will necessitate that. Cars powered by batteries that are powered by clean, renewable energy will have huge economic benefits ultimately but let's be real, it will be a massive R&D project that will take decades to complete even with a massive effort.

The other big change is going to be the shift from cars driven by humans to cars that automatically drive themselves. I'm obviously not a technical expert, but from what I've read the technology is not far away. In 2007 General Motors VP of research Lawrence Burns predicted that completely driverless cars would be on the market by 2018. He added that the primary obstacles were legal and bureaucratic, not technological. Now, I could be wrong, but an effort to develop the technology needed to make diverless cars a reality shouldn't be particularly hard or costly. The infrastructure and transition costs are not huge. All that's keeping us from a future where hundreds of millions of people will live, not suffer cruel and arbitrary deaths, where we have years more of human productivity and trillions more in wealth is our fear of change and political and cultural conservatism. 

But for now all we get is people who can look for bombs instead of driving tanks. Change is slow.