[Blue House Sue]

Driverless cars, trucks, busses and delivery vehicles are the future and it will be a bright future. From transportation automation, we will accept and find it economically viable to automate almost all industries. Factories, fast food joints, mines, aviation, farming, energy exploration will all be automated.

[Windflier]

What if I don’t want to give up piloting my own vehicle? Will my future be “bright” too?

You sound like a Soviet central planner.

[neverevergiveup]

I have no doubt that the future will be much different than today, but I personally don't think anyone knows in reality what it will look like. Human beings have a need to differentiate themselves as individuals, and one way we do that is through the work that we do and the things that we create. The standard ‘futurist’ response would be that by automating all the ‘tedious’ work in society people will be free to pursue more creative pursuits. That's a very simplistic response that doesn't begin to answer the bigger questions.

Regarding ‘creativity’, I could see future computer programs making movies with next to real computer-generated characters and incredible graphics - and doing so from a basic plot inputed by someone sitting in their kitchen. Clearly we can robotize ‘painting’ - particularly realism - as a computer can digitize a real image easily, and recreating it with paint would just involve fine-movement robotics. Definitely doable. Novels? Music? All of this can be automated - but, will it be the same?

This leads to the bigger question, which is ‘what is our role in the universe’? To me, it always comes back to spirituality, and however we evolve as people will be driven by this.

Regarding the reality of where we are right now, anyone who has been frustrated by GPS knows that currently there are limitations to how accurate computer-based navigation is. The human brain is incredibly facile at dealing with the unexpected and operating on incomplete data sets. Computers, not so much at this point.

[freedumb2003]

In a driverless car world, we won’t have cars. We will have RVs where we go to bed at home and walk up in the office parking lot — go and shower then step into work.

Assuming the 100% telecommuting world doesn’t exist by then.

But vehicles as know them will disappear except as specialty items. We will be in transport boxes that are mobile living rooms, dens, offices, etc.