In Your Ear — The Communal Bot-Car（英文）

此内容暂无简体中文译文，以下为英文原文。

Historical Summer 2017 article. Dates, prices, services and contacts describe the source period; current availability has not been established.

There’s a lot of talk about self-driving cars. I’m old enough that I used to use a rotary phone and drove a stick-shift car, so the prospect of being driven around by a robot is still pretty mind-boggling. Apparently the technology needed for a bot ain’t that big of a deal, though. Already when I’m driving to a distant land – say someplace west of Hanley – and am using my phone’s GPS so I am not lost, it tells me when I am a quarter mile from an intersection. Sometimes it tells me to move to the left lane. So big brother is already in the cloud and he has my car tracked and monitored like something in a John Le Carre novel. Given that, how hard will it be to just relax and let the bot do the driving? Yep, this will happen sooner than we suspect.

My hunch is that self-driving technology will be a feature in new cars by 2022, and bot-cars will become common by 2030. Once this is common – not that far away, certainly by the time today’s kindergarten student graduates from high school – it will change how we commute.

First, at a simple level, the design, the shape and interior of cars will change radically.

There will be no need to have a rectangle in which everyone faces forward. Bot-cars will become more rounded because the seating will be circular, facing in. Yeah, you will be able to play cards with friends while being driven by your bot. Since all of these botcars are going to be managed by super computers (envision John Travolta as God managing the strings of a million marionettes), they will go faster and be closer together, thus eliminating traffic jams or even back-ups. Sell your auto insurance stock! Since you’re not driving – you’re being conveyed – the seats will be larger, more like reclining chairs.

If you wish, you can sit back and nap, watch bot TV, or read Fifty Shades of Chartreuse. You’ll be able to text without endangering everyone else on the road!

This ability to be totally inattentive will make it possible to go on long, long journeys without stopping the car – oops, I mean without stopping the bot-car – and that will have a powerful impact on the airline industry. Why spend time taking off shoes, going through the metal detector, and arriving 90 minutes early for a flight when you can sit in your comfortable bot-car and be conveyed? Short flights, those of an hour or less, will become a thing of the past, and even longer ones will be a rarity. Sell your TWA airline stock!

The hotel and motel industry will take a hit too. No longer will people need to stop and get a room because they’re tired of driving or need to rest. They’ll simply program the bot-car and crash in their recliner chair (which converts to a bed) so they can be conveyed through the night.

There will be far fewer desk clerks and custodial staff so most of the people in the hospitality industry are going to be looking for jobs. Sell your Holiday Inn stock! For that matter, once the car transforms into a bot, the notion of auto ownership will change. Why should you own a car that sits dormant for 95% of the time? It’s really a big ornament with wheels! You see, it doesn’t need to be your car, after all. Since it’s really a bot, it can be summoned by someone else by the password and simply report to them for their journey.

In this way a bot-car can be in use, actually moving, most of the hours of the day. Sure, that full day use will increase the wear and tear but it won’t matter much to you because you’ll only own 5% of the botcar. Neighbors and friends will come together to invest in their joint auto-bot, and program it so that it goes from person to person, task to task. And while some of the time it will be delivering passengers, a lot of the time the bot-car will simply be a land-drone going from station to station – getting the cleaning or groceries. Sell your GM stock!

We may see this kind of botcar used first with restaurants and supermarkets. Already, some local companies are offering delivery of meals or groceries within an hour – just go to their website, make your selections, give them your credit card number, and bingo!

While that’s good and convenient, think of how much they could reduce their costs if they simply needed to load your order into the bot-car and forget about paying a driver. That will probably begin to happen in President Trump’s second term. Sell your U.S. Savings Bonds!

The evolution of autos is just the first step.

As computers become smaller and smaller (a new IBM transistor chip is 7 nanometers wide, 1/10,000 the width of a human hair), their capacity will increase while the cost diminishes.

Most of our jobs are vulnerable to being done by a bot, and that isn’t limited to low-level repetitive work. Years ago Ray Kurzweil (the inventor of voicerecognition technology) said that someday you won’t know whether the teacher in front of the classroom is a real person or a hologram. Computers that can read facial expressions and understand voice tones are already being used in emergency room reception areas; they infer from what the patient says as well as how the patient looks and sounds to determine what should happen next. Buy IBM stock!

The future is filled with promise and yet it worries me.

I don’t know where we are going, but I’m sure that I’ll be driven there in the communal bot-car.

Originally published in The Times of Skinker-DeBaliviere, Summer 2017.

Read this article in the original newspaper issue.

Original source: SD_Times2017_06.pdf, printed page(s) 8; PDF page(s) 8.