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In 2020 You Won't Be Driving Yourself to Work and How That Will Change Your Life

At this point, there have been many articles about self driving cars or autonomous cars. Elon Musk, GM and Google have all pointed to the future being filled with these types of cars. The promise is that safety will increase and tens of thousands of accidents will be eliminated.

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Within 5 years, we are told, we are going to start to see the in roads of these self-driving vehicles and the ride sharing giant Uber is planning on using these. So, if you are an Uber Driver, consider training to do something else because in 5 years, you might be out of a job.

I can truly admit to actually loving the thought of these types of cars.

For example, you have teenagers that have jobs and you need to drive them to their jobs at strange hours which is normally your time off of your work. Can you imagine the freedom of just putting them in the car and programing the car via your smart phone to take them to their jobs and you can sit back in your easy chair after your hard day at work with a nice cold beer! There are many other good reasons to look forward to this pending technology improvement. Sleep on your four hour trip to a golf weekend with buddies and arrive rested rather than exhausted. Emergency at school can send the car to go and pick up the child and bring them back home safely should you be somewhere inaccessible.

There are so many possibilities.

However, with the good inevitably comes the bad. As disruptive technology appears its leaves misery in its wake. So what are the downsides to this technology when there is obviously some really good that can come with this.

Obviously anyone that drives for a living will start to become displaced. These workers will have to find additional work in other fields. More and more work is being subcontracted to robots and now even cars that unskilled labor will find it more and more difficult to find work. I also believe there will be much less mechanical wear and tear from driver abuse. Since the computer/car can be programmed to operate at peak efficiency there will be less and less need for auto mechanical jobs.

Since I envision many of these cars being electric, there will be very little need for service visits and auto dealers will potentially lose a valuable revenue stream. All in all, there is little stopping these technology. I’m sure at some point a mechanized mail truck will drive by my house and open my mailbox and insert the latest bill in my box.

Thus, future is here and we haven’t reached the fly Jetson’s car but we do have the Solar Impulse that is flying entirely around the world in a solar airplane. How quickly is innovation pushing us toward that now.

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