Gadgetory

I think by 2021 we will see a lot of autonomous vehicles in operation across the country and ways that we imagine today like individual cars owned by individual families but in other ways with some of the ride-sharing services making conversions to autonomous vehicles families that will be able to walk out of their homes and call a vehicle to them and that vehicle will take them to work or to school or to a doctor's appointment or something like that this is something that's going to transform just about every way we move so I think you're going to see trucks for example that are driverless and you're going to see because of the technology those trucks and went and running much more closely together which actually will have fuel savings and climate impacts on the positive end in the future you're going to see ships that have more self-driving features trains that have more self-driving features and just about everything other than walking is going to have some self-driving aspect to it there's another opportunity for us in this era and that has to do with data and analytics you know today I Drive over our pothole and if you happen to be driving behind me and see what happens to my car you glean that understanding and you think to avoid that pothole well if an autonomous car runs over a pothole will it be able to communicate and share that data not only with cars of the same type but can that information now be shared to all autonomous vehicles regardless of who made it the industry working with us again we're going to have to answer that question together because I want us to have as broad an imagination of how data and analytics can help improve what we do in transportation and frankly lift the safety advantages autonomous cars I do think the age of technology and transportation that we ran is going to revolutionize the way we think about transportation but we don't take leaps that much I mean it's been 50 years since we've taken the last big leap and transportation and that's why this moment is so important back in 1956 we were a vastly different country we were a country that had laws of segregation we're a country that did not have Voting Rights Act passed and so there were projects that were designed in the 1950s that ultimately got built along racial lines or long economic lines so you look at our freeways you go to New Orleans or Syracuse or Los Angeles and you can see those distinct lines that have been drawn and highways that have been built and overpasses that are still there that are actually walls between people here's a challenge with self-driving technology is that I think left to its own devices any technology is going to end up going to those who can afford it the most first the difference here with transportation is that so much of the infrastructure that driverless technologies need is coming from the public sector so here in this instance the public sector actually has a lot more control than would be the case with something like VCRs for example and we can create the incentive structure for the demand to wrap around the wide swath of socioeconomics that we have in this country so that perhaps the existence of a staging area for rideshares attracts new housing new neighborhood services like pharmacies and grocery stores into those areas and then begins to provide an underpinning of mc-- activity in an area that previously didn't have as much we have an opportunity to press a reset reset button in a certain sense we also have an opportunity to just completely drive forward an entire global transformation of the relationship between human beings and machines that's just an amazing opportunity for a society but we've got to seize it and we've got to be intentional about you