How Will Autonomous Vehicles Transform Our Cities? | Nico Larco | TEDxCollegePark

[sourcedrop]

Looking forward to getting my Dominos delivered and not having to tip.

[LughSummerson]

3:33 Graph does not bear out what he says. People adopt new technology based on cost vs. utility, not what he was trying to say, that we're quicker to adopt things now than people were in the past. Cars rose just as steeply as computers, but topped out at 60% for a while because of the cost vs. utility for the poor. Radios quickly rose to near ubiquity because they're cheap and fridges because of high utility.

Telephones spread slowly because of the infrastructure cost. Once the cellphone network was in place, it didn't cost much to add new customers compared to physically wiring up every house in the world.

The statistics do not show different consumer behaviour; they show that people always buy things when the technology gives good enough value for the proportion of their budget they'd have to spend.

[unleashingpotential-psycho]

Self driving cars will Save many lives from drunk driving.

[sojournern]

this is one change among many that will catch people by surprise

[knowledgehindi]

really good speech . i really love him

[marycklinn]

Safety can be argued both ways. As far as progress is concerned human beings need to progress as well.

[salameri]

This man is very intelligent. I’m very excited for autonomous cars!

[viratveer]

TEDx TALKS are good now this one of the part of watching vidoes on you

Excellent video. Not only AV, I think the principle is to have more common goods in this case we have to aim for shared cars

[JustMeProf]

Can autonomous cars be connected to some software on smartphones for safety to detect people who walks? For privacy could be something like flight mode, but for autonomous cars human detection on and off.

[xaira]

Consider the ramifications of this on the insurance industry's.

[viratveer]

Tq you for making those video those are really inspires and gain a knowledge to us ...

[TheIntJuggler]

Garage remodeling is going to be big business.

[geovanefagundes]

Gosto muito do TEDx, gostaria que tivessem legenda em português nos vídeos, aprecio e aprendo muito a cada palestra e testemunho. Parabéns pelo Canal é muito bom 👍.

[PeteS_]

Maybe it will take time because users would need to build their confidence in autonomous cars. I think we would have to go through a long phase of semi autonomous cars for this. Especially as cars are believed to last longer nowadays.

[DougGrinbergs]

Interesting talk. Flaky audio levels. (:-(

[micahdelport]

A real catch 22, if we fully adopt this into society as it will save do many lives but drivers will lose their jobs

[johndemeritt]

There are a lot of unchallenged assumptions in this video, but I'm glad to say the presenter recognizes the need for foresight and the need to anticipate unintended and undesirable effects of this new technology. No new technology enters the wilds of human society without unintended or undesirable consequences. And, as Larco notes, there will be cascading effects. Take the insurance industry, for example: if an autonomous vehicle gets in an accident, whose fault is it and whose insurance covers the accident?

Larco addresses autonomous vehicles as inevitable, and there are good reasons to want them . . . but are they really inevitable? As one who studies technological innovation, I see that it's easy to be taken in by the shiny new technology and the idea of technological inevitability; however, as Rogers made clear in his classic Diffusion of Innovation, there have been a lot of technologies that initially looked like they'd take over the world, only to fail because they never reached the critical mass necessary to make their progress through society self-sustaining. Many of these technologies never appealed to people outside innovators and some early adopters (weren't we all supposed to be riding Segways to work by now?). Other technologies failed to take off because they contradicted existing social constructions of how things work in our world: even a technology as simple to adopt -- and already well-known -- as boiling water can be rejected because the new reason for adopting it doesn't account for the existing social construction for why you should boil water.

The point is that until we deal with the social construction of "cars" and "personal freedom" and a number of other social construction issues, autonomous vehicles will remain a shiny possibility waiting realization. Because until we recognize that there are hosts of laws that have to change; economic models of production and consumption that must be factored in; deeply vested interests that have power to resist new technologies; and varied, differing social constructions of human living environments, autonomous vehicles may remain nothing more than technological curiosities that leave people wondering, "Why don't we have self-driving cars? They promised us self-driving cars!" Just like the IBM ads from the mid 1990s . . . .

I'm still waiting for my flying car . . . .

[brendarua]

My mind put on the breaks when he pretty much made his case statement that adaptation is happening faster and faster.. With societal isolation, resistance from people was heavier, so decisions take longer. 100 Years to reach 95% adoption of the telephone; 10 years for the cell phone.

Well they are exactly two items to be compared. The introduction of the phone had to start from step 1 in many different subjects and legal entanglements. Cell photes and wireless started a step from the top and they are a lateral shift for the consumer, not a new one for land line users. But this doesn't negate his general point.

[hanspanzer]

For those who want, it will reduce the immense cost of mobility by at least 50%. Now bring down the immense cost of housing by 50% and we have the golden era!