Here's a surprising fact: One of the world's hottest names in driverless cars right now is Canadian. Chris Urmson, born in Richmond, British Columbia, and an alumnus of the University of Manitoba, made headlines all over Silicon Valley a year and a half ago when he left his job heading up Google's self-driving cars program to start a mysterious new company called Aurora.
In the February issue of Report on Business magazine, Alec Scott profiles the expat wunderkind and explores his venture's outrageous ambition: to design and build a driverless car system that provides complete autonomy. Urmson's timeline is tight. In a famous TED Talk recorded in 2015, he boasts that his eldest son, who is now 14, will never need a driver's licence.
To be fair, driverless cars are already here. Google's Waymo project has been testing them on the roads for years—that program alone has already logged more than 4.8 million autonomous kilometres on public streets. Urmson says the sooner they take over the better, as when they do, we'll see a dramatic drop in traffic fatalities.
Still, every groundbreaking technology brings with it a few unintended side effects. Here are some to watch out for as self-driving cars take over our roads.
Intersections will suddenly become mind-boggling. Tesla CEO Elon Musk confidently predicts that humans will be eventually banned from driving because we're too dangerous. Once that happens, traffic lights will vanish. Researchers Carlo Ratti and Assaf Biderman say city planners will replace them with "slot intersections" that regulate the speed of incoming cars using WiFi. Such intersections will allow twice as many cars through per minute—but what about pedestrians?
Pedestrians will get hyper-aggressive. There's no need to worry about those on foot, as it turns out. Driverless cars will be programmed to avoid hitting people at almost any cost. Once pedestrians realize it's almost impossible to be struck, they will cross the street whenever they damn well feel like it.
Police departments will go bankrupt. Luckily, the resulting pedestrian anarchy will be stemmed by swarms of cops issuing jaywalking tickets. They'll have lots of time (and incentive) to do so because they will no longer be ticketing cars. Autonomous vehicles will never speed, and they won't let you park where you shouldn't. Toronto alone currently rakes in about $80 million a year in parking ticket fines. Once driverless cars hit the road, we can kiss that revenue goodbye.
Your car could take you hostage. If it contains a computer, it can be hacked. Cybersecurity researchers famously took control of a wirelessly connected Jeep Cherokee in 2015 and have since demonstrated that hackers can remotely hit the brakes, cut the engine and turn the steering wheel. How long before a message pops up on your car's touch screen display ordering you to pay $100,000 in bitcoin, or your car will drive you into a wall?
Dead people will show up at parties. Even without malicious hackers, heart attacks happen, and sooner or later, one will happen to a passenger in a driverless car.
We'll pine for taxis with drivers. Today's big-city cabs reek of vomit, the armrests are sticky and there's trash on the floor. Ubers are better, but that's because drivers own and maintain the cars. I shudder to think what an autonomous taxi, which will have super-low fares, no driver and spend all day picking up nameless folks from city streets, will look like by the end of a shift. Last call at the bar? I think I'd rather walk.