There'll be a lot of money for whoever does a good job of figuring out what new things people will want when they've got the equivalent of a personal chauffeur.
(Probably just a high-power transceiver and antenna on the roof to ensure uninterrupted cellphone coverage.)
In-car bathroom? Mini-bar? Mobile toaster?
I have a horrible feeling we'll be pressured into working while we're driven.
:hmm:
I don't know.....if I get clocked in as soon as I get in the car and it counts toward the 8hr workday, it might help.
Though I wouldn't care for the resulting headache and nausea that will result, and using a PC in a moving car could present some problems.
LOLOLOL...you think you'll get less time in the office because of this? Salary people will get it stuck in them....DRY..(again).
But if you are conscious, why are you not spending that time working? You must not be devoted to the company.
Look around more than I can while driving, plan more routes to see more stuff.
You zombies with your eyes welded to your devices have no idea WTF is going on in the world.
Some of those devices have allowed me to see parts of the world (and solar system) that I'd never have seen otherwise.
But, I'd probably also be looking out the window most of the time. Or sleeping.
Second, I think I know why Google's building a car: Every second you're on the road driving (and paying some goddamn attention to the goddamn road like you should be while
driving) is a second you're not using the Internet, which is time that you're not spending looking at Google ads.
And maybe it could even be like airlines with in-flight entertainment options: Occasional interruptions of advertising that you can't turn off.
Google Nest knows when you're away, your Google car knows where you're going, your Google phone knows
everything else about you...then a
Google cheetahbot runs up to greet you at your destination to show you another ad.
Is there an open-source autocar project anywhere?
At some point we're going to ban manual (i.e. human controlled) driving, except in emergency situations. If all the cars on the road are AI driven, then theoretically a lot of the traffic problems will be gone too. What goes together with this is car ownership. At some point people will stop owning cars. It will instead become a service people pay monthly for. You'll have a fleet of electric AI controlled cars going around picking people up on demand and taking them where they need to go. When they run out of juice they return to their warehouse, recharge, and then head back out. This is the future of Uber. Another effect is people will stop getting driver's licenses, relying more and more on technology and less on actually learning the skill to operate stuff.
Humans do have a lot of systemic flaws problems that make them poor at handling high-speed driving and very quick decisions with simple physics-determined outcomes.
Tell a human, "Watch this dial. It's going to spend 99.9% of its time at 0. If it moves beyond 0.10 for even a fraction of a second, you need to push this red button."
The person will likely suck at that job after only a few minutes.
Driving a car has a bit more going on, but there's still a lot of "keep car between lines and don't hit obstacles." An autocar can also resolve another big human limitation: Tunnel vision and attention. You can't see in all directions at the same time. One of these cars can. It also won't get distracted by anything.
In other words, one step closer to the dumb, fat, lazy people in Wall-E.
As for what I would do... either read books, watch movies, or sleep.
Of course, maybe those people in Wall-E had a few recurring thoughts, such as "So.....
happy!"