The Extra Dimension

The Extra Dimension #17: Transportation – The Future

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What exciting new forms of transportation does the future hold for us? How will self-driven cars change our travel habits? What even is a hyperloop? Ian, Brian, and Ryan have done the research on all of this and more!

Transportation Miniseries
  • Cycling
  • Public Transit
  • Individual Car Ownership
  • Long Distance
    • Overview:
    • Self-driven cars allow the concept of transportation as a service to really come to fruition.
      • The future of Google with Sundar Pichai – YouTube
        • 4:07-4:42
        • The seed that got Buck thinking about this whole topic, especially transportation as a service with self-driven cars.
        • Cars currently sit idle 90% of their lives. If we do not individually own cars, they can drop one person off and immediately go pick up another.
        • Tesla considers its own ride-sharing business – Autoblog
        • Anytime you need to go somewhere, summon a ride. A car comes to pick you up, drives you to where you are going, and drops you off.
        • Car distribution can be tailored based on expected demand.
        • If you have a regular schedule/put things on your calendar ahead of time, the system can dispatch a car to you before you even ask for it.
        • The system can send different types of cars based on the needs of the trip.
          • Going to work? Smart car.
          • Going out to eat with a bunch of friends? Van.
          • Hauling furniture? Flatbed.
          • Price can be tiered by how much you want to be alone.
          • Parking (and its frustrations) are a thing of the past.
            • Self-driven cars can park much closer together.
            • Electric vehicles could plug into the grid, serving as distributed energy storage.
            • Transportation will be much easier for the very young and the very old.
            • Can get stuff done during a commute.
            • Will encourage more urban sprawl.
              • Potential prevention: it will be comparatively expensive to drive out to the middle of nowhere.
              • The Driverless Economy – Federico Pistono – Medium
              • The transformative potential of self-driving electric cars – Vox
                • Electric cars can take almost any form you can imagine.
                • All they need are wheels, a platform for batteries and passenger(s), a user interface, and wires to connect everything.
                • Electric cars convert higher percentage of energy to movement (~60% vs ~20%).
                • Infrastructure is (by necessity) designed for peak use. This applies to not only streets, but also parking.
                • Accidents will be far less common.
                  • No need to armor up vehicles, so they can be much lighter.
                  • Use less energy to move.
                  • Use less material in construction.
                  • Light Traffic / MIT Senseable City Lab
                    • With only self-driven cars on the road, we won’t need traffic lights. As cars approach intersections, they will coordinate their timings and routes so they have to slow down at the most.
                    • Using a slot-based system, pedestrian and bicycle traffic can be accommodated.
                    • Way less pollution.
                    • Security
                      • A lot of data will be collected about individual citizens.
                      • Who can access the data? What can it be used for?
                      • Targeted advertising will be lucrative, no doubt.
                      • A lot of effort will have to be put in to protect against attacks.
                      • The future of America is driverless | Verge 2021
                        • Self-driving won’t just apply to cars; trucks, ships, trains, etc will be largely automated.
                        • Trucks will be able to drive much closer together, reducing drag and saving fuel.
                        • Data will have to be shared between manufacturers, so AIs can learn from each other.
                        • Real-time reporting of road conditions.
                        • Labor concerns as jobs that rely on driving become obsolete.
                        • Safety is a huge topic when it comes to self-driven cars
                            • The Extra Dimension #28: Infotainment Interface Design for Automobiles › The Nexus
                              • No matter what interface you use, the driver is still going to be distracted.
                                • How do we decide a self-driven car’s response to ethically tough scenarios?
                                  • The Messy Ethics of Self Driving Cars – YouTube

                                  • Self-driven cars will have more opportunity to respond to situations in an ethical manner, as events are often so fast a human would only have instinct.
                                  • Laws do not cover all ethical conundrums, and sometimes run contrary to what is ethical in a particular situation.
                                  • Who is at fault if a car does something harmful? The owner of the car? The manufacturer? The programmers?
                                  • Now that we have neural networks, it may be possible to teach a computer to figure out the answers to ethical conundrums based on examples.
                                  • Self-driving cars can be fooled pretty easily in ways humans cannot.
                                    • Google self-driving cars lack a human’s intuition for what other drivers will do.

                                    • If a driver does something the self-driven car does not expect, it has more trouble reacting than a human driver would.
                                    • The National Highway and Traffic Safety Administration ruled that AI software can count as a driver.
                                    • Drivers in different regions have different norms. Sometimes a driver has to be aggressive to merge, but if an AI is programmed to follow all laws, it may never make it into the lane.
                                    • Flying cars
                                      • Uber’s Flying Cars Plan | WIRED

                                      • Not really cars, but small electric VTOL aircraft.
                                      • Uber wants to offer an on-demand service that uses them within five years.
                                      • Infrastructure won’t be much of an issue, since they just need helipads instead of runways. There are already ~6,000 helipads in the US.
                                      • Hyperloop
                                        • A proposed solution for high-speed travel between cities with large traffic that are less than 900 miles apart. It would consist of a tube with a rail inside it, where air pressure is kept low. Pods would travel through this tube at subsonic speeds.
                                          • Hyperloop | SpaceX
                                        • It’s a cross between a Concorde, a railgun, and an air hockey table!
                                          • Full Video of Tesla and SpaceX Head Elon Musk at D11 – Liz Gannes – D11 – AllThingsD
                                        • SpaceX announced the concept in 2013 and started a competition for independent teams to design and build a hyperloop pod. The big event will take place on a test track near SpaceX headquarters in January 2017.
                                          • Hyperloop | SpaceX
                                        • Dubai may be the first place we see a hyperloop in the wild.
                                          • In the loop: Dubai is to test the feasibility of hyperloop trains | The Economist
                                        • Building hyperloop on Mars would be a lot easier, because the air pressure is already low enough so you wouldn’t need the tube.
                                          • Elon Musk talks Hyperloop on Mars – Business Insider
                                          Attributions
                                          • Free Music Archive: Remain – Acid
                                            • Copyright

                                            The Extra Dimension is released under a Creative Commons — Attribution 4.0 International license. Feel free to use any or all of it as long as you link back to https://thenexus.tv/ted17.

                                            This episode of The Extra Dimension has a Fringe episode. You should really listen to The Fringe #408: TED #17 — Nothin’ Like Some Saliva and Friction!!

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