The central idea is pretty simple: Self-driving electric vehicles organised into an Uber-style network will be able to offer such cheap transport that you’ll very quickly – we’re talking perhaps a decade – decide you don’t need a car any more.
By Justin Rowlatt – Re-Blogged From BBC News
[If the images don’t show up, please see the original article. -Bob]
I’m guessing you are scoffing in disbelief at the very suggestion of this article, but bear with me.
A growing number of tech analysts are predicting that in less than 20 years we’ll all have stopped owning cars, and, what’s more, the internal combustion engine will have been consigned to the dustbin of history.
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The Most Revolutionary Act 
Not so fast!
From the article:
“There will be downsides: millions of car industry workers and taxi drivers will be looking for new jobs, for a start.
But think of the hundreds of billions of dollars consumers will save, and which can now be spent elsewhere in the economy.”
Excuse me, but this doesn’t even make any sense. Who is going to need to ‘order’ a driverless car when we shall all be sitting on Skid Row, or somewhere like it dripping hookworm and sweating from typhus fever since there’ll be millions out-of-work because robots are also coming for our jobs and now robots are going to take more jobs and so who is going to be left with a job that will enable them to order one of these vehicles? Because even the facilities to make the batteries for these vehicles will eventually be run by robots and so what need has the future for ‘humans’? Sears is on life support and the plug is almost ready to be pulled. Kmart is in its death throes. JC Penney is holding on for dear life. Toys R Us just closed. Radio Shack is gone. Macy’s is closing stores left and right as is Nordstrom’s and the list is endless and yet we are to see yet another technological ‘advancement’ as being a ‘win/win’ for the people? Me thinks not. Amazon has already almost totally destroyed malls and other brick and mortar stores everywhere and Walmart had already closed hundreds of thousands of mom n pop businesses and so why in hell should we herald this news as a great thing? It is not!
Unfortunately, Pandora’s Box has been opened and there is no closing it and so all I can say to that is, “They know not what they do!”
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I’m inclined to agree with you, Shelby – mainly because young people have already quit buying cars. The primary reason being that they can’t afford to maintain them on the low salaries they are paid. I know many occasionally use Uber – because it’s cheaper that a taxi – but for the most part they walk and cycle.
As best as I can reckon, the economy of the industrial north lost billions in wealth with the 2008 global financial crash. This caused a massive contraction in the economy, which has far as I can see continues to contract, causing all these retail bankruptcies. It’s my impression that on-line retail (eg Amazon) has hastened the collapse of the retail sector, but that on-line retail is still a mainly “middle class” phenomenon. A sizeable proportion of minimum wage workers either don’t have regular access to the Internet or to credit cards.
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