Here’s a post about robot cars that developed into the realization that I was not taking global warming into account. Now that I have looked at this I am speechless. I hope my real-time discovery makes sense as written, but if not please let me know.

          I don’t think the prospects for robot cars are that favorable just because I think this level of robotics will be out of reach for a long time, say more than 15 years. BTW, this also means that once it is in reach global warming will have become a problem that even Federal politicians and government agencies can no longer ignore. I believe that the problems of coping with global warming will necessitate drastic policies that try to cope with more social chaos and greater survival issues like more damaging storms everywhere and less gasoline and oil for cars. Robot cars will not be on people’s minds.

Aside: When I started this post I was just thinking about the report I linked to below. But as soon as I reviewed what I’d written I noticed a vague statement claiming that robot cars will be out of reach “for a long time.” What was I thinking?: 100 years, 10 years, what? As soon as I filled this in I realized that in 15 or 20 years global warming will be much more of a problem, and that government and industry would be impacted: I think long supply chains of goods and raw materials from marginally developed countries (or even China which fits into no single category of development), will be intermittently disrupted or even hugely disrupted. This means that the supply of batteries and computer chips, just for starters, will begin to decline, and eventually this will cause the failure of some of the systems that rely on current supply conditions.

Now I’m way out of my depth. Life on planet Earth can’t be as bad as what I’m imagining right now—I have no perspective on how humans and systems will adapt, and not enough facts. So, back to the fantasy that life as we know it is going to be with us indefinitely.

Reasonable minds can differ on these issues, and those who think that robot cars are coming in the next five years or so have all sorts of reasons to claim that such cars will reduce traffic, reduce fatalities and basically save the world from the evils of gridlock and the gasoline engine. What to make of these claims?

Here is a well-researched report that assumes robot cars are coming in some form and then looks at the pros and cons: http://www.ptua.org.au/myths/robotcar/.

Based on this report I think that the common scenario for robot cars, that people will have them instead of current cars, will not happen because it will make urban congestion worse. The report examines many scenarios I had not thought of, and I offer it as a kind of primer on the proposal.

–Michael Kelly