Driverless Hotel Rooms: The End of Uber, Airbnb and Human Landlords
hackernoon.com
hackernoon.com
We can already have a “driverless room”; it’s called a Winnebago. Most prominent politicians, musicians, and celebrities will have well-appointed RVs that carry them around. Even if you take the driver out of the equation, logistical issues abound: Where do you do laundry? What about plumbing? Where do you put out the garbage? I am reminded about that episode in “The Office” where Dwight crams everyone into an overcrowded bus and has them do work there.
Second, the article complains about overproduction and waste, but the proposed solution is to create skyscraper-sized parking lots? Even the picture that is supposed to idealize this shows the lego skyscraper half-empty. How will Bondi Beach look when this monstrosity looms over it?
Finally, moving things around isn’t free. Yes, solar energy and electric cars means that it’s renewable. But doesn’t mean it’s unlimited. We are going to dedicate a large amount of energy generated in moving “mobile rooms” around 24/7 for lots of people. That power still has to come from a power plant somewhere. Life isn’t like AWS; you can’t just spin up a solarpanel2.large.
I know this is essentially a piece of utopian fiction, but there are glaring flaws in this just aesthetically, let alone with other factors.
The vision is one were nearly _all_ services a traveller might interact with have seen the kind of automation we've seen in areas like agriculture. We've already replaced fields full of farm-hands with one guy and a combine. What happens to the travel business when every single service can be readily provided by a machine? What would the price to the user look like when there is no labor component (outside of occasional maintenance)?
To answer the two questions you posed directly: Your laundry is picked up by drone back to central laundry, plumbing is hooked up when docked at the "hotel". The "parking lots" would look similar to modern-day highrise hotels or apartment buildings: individual units looking out over the city, but these ones can be swapped in and out. In this model, "parking" is hard to distinguish from "real estate" when we've made your residence fully mobile.
well if this was possible a lot of things would be easier.
(but I would prefer solarpanel3.8xlarge and use a grid8s on top of it) edit2: i think a lot of energy problems would've been solved if we would see the world as a whole energy consumption. and if we could delivery energy more freely. i.e. at night some places do not need as much energy as others where it isn't night, etc. but well autonomy and money will prevent such global thinkings or make them worse than it is today
What we need are residentiala and office skyscrapers built along high density electric rail. This has always been the solution.
Sadly, people hate hi density public transit, and thus we pay for inefficiency.
I don't think it means unlimited, but perhaps essentially unlimited (do any of us realistically worry about the sun dying during even our most distant descendants?).
This is very hand wavy, but I feel like once we are able to store the energy we create (and so easily discard without even a thought), we'll realize just how energy abundant we really are. I mean, the US had an over abundance of energy, it's just stored on our guts rather than a battery. We are constantly moving, our pets are, our entire life is filled with energy we never store or harness.
Once we're able to store this, I have a feeling our worries about energy will take a back seat.
Again, hand wavey, but that's also kinda like this article :)
But I couldn’t buy the part about a drone delivering food in 6 minutes to a vehicle that’s travelling between cities.
At first I figured the food would be prepared in the closest town or city. Assuming that there could be distances of tens or even hundreads of miles between adjacent localities, drones would have to cover at least 10 miles every minute (or 600 mph).
But instead of traditional restaurants, you could have driverless food trucks everywhere. Presumably, given enough density and clever routing algorithms, you could significantly cut down on the drone travel distance.
Edit: If the mobile hotel room in the story was only travelling between the airport and a nearby city, that would make it more plausible, but also less useful.
My dream for the future is less density. I'd love to move inland to where land is cheaper and invest in staying in place. Setting up solar/water to be self sufficient while I work at home remotely in peace from the constant thunder of garbage trucks and screaming taxi horns.
I'd still race a Tesla during the day that I charge at night from stored solar while I watch Netflix on a massive screen hung between two trees outside my living room.
In a free market this should result in prices dropping until the excess supply lowers to meet demand.
But what typically happens is that manufacturers either artificially restrict supply or resort to simply destroying the unsold goods. "<<
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Seems like a correct observation, pointed out by the article. I had not given it a thought before.
But, by the same token, isn't setting up this type of 'smart city' with human-less services, also a significant investment, and also can be overdone. What will happens when this type of infrastructure is overdone ?
I personally think, that 'de-urbanization' with increased mobility across cities, 80%+ telecommute work force, and a 4 day work week, is the answer to many of today's issues in developed and yet-to-be-developed economies (still corruption, political militarization of law enforcement -- are huge issues that must be addressed).
Note that the link regarding destruction of unsold goods has nothing to do with cars. It's about H&M clothing. In an article that's all about cars/housing, it's a bit off-topic to use this as support. Including a parenthetical noting that the citation is about clothes, not cars, would be less misleading. Most people won't read every linked piece, and those who don't shouldn't be misled. This was in a section called "Crisis of Car Manufacturing" and was preceded and followed by paragraphs solely focused on cars and auto manufacturing.
" A similar movement is going on before our own eyes. Modern bourgeois society, with its relations of production, of exchange and of property, a society that has conjured up such gigantic means of production and of exchange, is like the sorcerer who is no longer able to control the powers of the nether world whom he has called up by his spells. For many a decade past the history of industry and commerce is but the history of the revolt of modern productive forces against modern conditions of production, against the property relations that are the conditions for the existence of the bourgeois and of its rule. It is enough to mention the commercial crises that by their periodical return put the existence of the entire bourgeois society on its trial, each time more threateningly. In these crises, a great part not only of the existing products, but also of the previously created productive forces, are periodically destroyed. In these crises, there breaks out an epidemic that, in all earlier epochs, would have seemed an absurdity — the epidemic of over-production. Society suddenly finds itself put back into a state of momentary barbarism; it appears as if a famine, a universal war of devastation, had cut off the supply of every means of subsistence; industry and commerce seem to be destroyed; and why? Because there is too much civilisation, too much means of subsistence, too much industry, too much commerce. The productive forces at the disposal of society no longer tend to further the development of the conditions of bourgeois property; on the contrary, they have become too powerful for these conditions, by which they are fettered, and so soon as they overcome these fetters, they bring disorder into the whole of bourgeois society, endanger the existence of bourgeois property. The conditions of bourgeois society are too narrow to comprise the wealth created by them. And how does the bourgeoisie get over these crises? On the one hand by enforced destruction of a mass of productive forces; on the other, by the conquest of new markets, and by the more thorough exploitation of the old ones. That is to say, by paving the way for more extensive and more destructive crises, and by diminishing the means whereby crises are prevented."
(From the first chapter of the Communist Manifesto)
The idea that capitalism inevitably leads to such crises forcing it to increase levels of exploitation, eventually pushing things too far, is the most central underlying idea of Marxism.
So your commute takes on properties of already being at your destination, and being at your destination takes on properties of your commute or taxi ride — being in a space-constrained vehicle in motion, consuming power, creating and experiencing traffic, etc, not just en route but all day or all night!
Even if this vision were true, what about other problems like motion sickness when working (or reading books) in a moving vehicle? That's just one question of many.
People focus on the cost of the car without a driver, but forget that roads are not infinite and as demand for driverless cars increases, congestion will only get worse.
I don't think we're going to get to a future where everyone works remotely any time soon, but I do feel like self-driving cars will favor cities that look more like LA than NYC.
Not as many as with real public transport though.
Car sales are down because of demand side issues, nothing else: the potential car buyer demographic of this generation is comparatively poorer, average second hand car lasts longer, public transport in Western countries is slowly getting better, road congestions are hitting developing countries where there were no such issues before. That's it.
A lot of the costs of driving and parking commons is subsidized through government policy and taxes. If the commons gets abused even more easily because driverless electrics reduce the friction of doing so, cities and government will react through policy and user fees.
One thing that keeps me from being all about car-sharing is the idea of having to sit in someone else's funk. Humans are nasty and disgusting and constantly outgassing, consciously or unconsciously, and some of those emanations are downright hazardous.
So why is everyone completely ignoring how we clean all these driverless, shared things?
The same people who clean your cube now, because they're cheap and no one is responsible for them.
This entire scenario dreamed up in this article is wholly unworkable due to the physical constraints of cars and roads.
Don't you have this backwards? Cars driven by fallible humans need lots of separation to avoid collision but cars driven by computers should get by with thinner lanes closer together and less room between cars. Cars driven by fallible humans have to stop at stoplights creating backups that restrict flow whereas cars driven by computers probably don't need to do as much of that - they can coordinate and interleave instead. Cars driven by computers don't have to circle the block looking for a nearby parking place (this factor alone accounts for a substantial fraction of peak city driving), which also means we could convert some downtown street parking into extra traffic lanes. Cars driven by computers don't create freeway traffic jams due to clumsy lane merging or due to the drivers rubbernecking at accident scenes.
In short, switching from mostly human drivers to mostly autonomous drivers should substantially increase road capacity. We should be able to get at least several times as many cars - possibly 10x or more - in the same amount of road area. (Over time I'd expect road area to shrink.)
Simply put adding another car on the road immediately kills whatever savings may be had by reducing the space between cars and clumsy lane merging.
Right now reasons people don't drive include:
- Parking too expensive
- No license/ability to drive
- Car too expensive to purchase.
Autonomous cars sharing removes all those deterrents, and so this would cause an increase in drivers and cars on the road.
> As such it’s predicted that by 2025 all new vehicles produced will be 100% electric[.]
This seems grossly unrealistic.
This sounds like it has very serious pitfalls for mere mortals who don't know exactly what they want every minute of the day and for real world scenarios where language is not static nor universal. In fact, the same word or expression can mean many different things.
With the internet, you run into situations where an old person with cognitive issues is spending money online in a problematic fashion and similar. For people who don't really understand how such systems work, the lack of friction between every random desire that passes through their head and the ability to make it happen actually causes problems.
So I read this story of frictionless everything and I wonder where it goes wrong. Actual reality for many modern systems is some form of crazy making frustration. You call and get an automated system and spend forever going through a menu, unable to get through to a live person or find the option you need.
The scenario posited that you casually state a two item food order and you have it 6 minutes later. Reality would probably include 10 minutes of aggravating back and forth while the room lists all options for beer brand, size of the beer, did you want condiments with that, etc.
You can argue they are just trying to give a nutshell version of the concept, but either it is inaccurate or there is a great deal of room for you to speak and something to promptly happen because of it and that something not being what you really had in mind. This can be as minor as getting a brand of beer you don't like, but it also has potential to result in much more serious problems.
The author did not include any provisos that, of course, the room knows which brand and size of beer you meant because it automatically logged you in through your Apple account and it has a list of default definitions for what exactly you mean when you say, for example, that you want a beer.
I can't believe my comment is being dismissed and downvoted. Yes, it is pedantic. But automated systems don't function if someone doesn't ask all these pedantic questions and find answers for properly handling real world scenarios.
Of course we don't know how much better they will get, and at what rate they may improve, but there's good reasons to think they will get better.
We can currently order food online. Domino's saves a default order for you so you don't have to fill it out every single time. If you change any details at all, that takes extra time.
There is no verification at all in the story. There is no mention of how and why there is no verification, yet the order of food is what was wanted and he isn't cussing about the brand of beer he got.
The only way you get exactly what you want with such a short sentence specifying what you want is if you are a creature of habit, go to your usual eatery and someone with a long history of serving you asks "Your usual?" Otherwise, no, saying you want a beer is simply not enough information.
Is it in a can? Is it in a bottle? Is it from a tap and served in a tall glass? What brand is it? Was that a regular bottle or a 40 ounce?
Etc etc.
Even with humans involved, "I want X food and X drink" isn't enough information. The story in no way explains how that somehow is enough info.
If your response to this is "but the article didn't mention anything like that", that article was obviously just outlining a high-level vision. Just because details weren't mentioned in the article doesn't mean they therefore could not possibly be handled in some fashion.
This post is clearly just a micro-fiction in the scifi genre, so we can handwave this objection away with "your phone notifies the car that you're having a conversation". Or the carpartment or whatever only responds to certain keywords.
> What happens if you speak American English and you touch down in Australia and your room understands some American expression completely differently?
What happens if your taxi cab driver does?
> This sounds like it has very serious pitfalls for mere mortals who don't know exactly what they want every minute of the day
I'm not sure what an example of a pitfall here is.