Driverless cars will force labor changes
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The Slate reported that with billions in investment funding, the driverless future being unleashed by companies like Waymo, Lyft, and Uber still raises more questions than answers for the city planners who will be responsible for incorporating the technology into existing urban-transit infrastructures.
How driverless cars will reshape our cities drove debate at an event hosted by Future Tense at the Arizona State University Barrett and O’Connor Center in Washington, D.C.
Eric Anderson, transportation director for Maricopa Association of Governments, pointed to a “risk-adverse” public sector as one of the reasons that smart cities and roads seem to be developing at a much slower rate than the autonomous driving technology itself, which has made enormous strides in the past decade.
One key to these considerations is the debate over whether driverless cars will increase urban densification or, with the newfound ability to multitask during commutes, encourage Americans to live even farther out from city centers.
“The answer I think is both. It will do both, and we won’t know until people begin to start to make these changes with how they want to live,” said Grady Gammage, a senior fellow at Morrison Institute for Public Policy at Arizona State University. Cities will also have to re-evaluate the use of parking spaces and urban infrastructure that driverless cars might turn into relics of the past.
One unavoidable effect, of course, has been the tension between ride-sharing services and labor, something that automation is set only to deepen. As automation poses a threat to human labor, speakers pointed to the necessity of considering the human impact of adapting such technologies. Arizona State University President Michael Crow called the need to find new work for people like those in the trucking industry whose jobs are being replaced by automation “a huge social question.”