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Comment by tedajax | Hacker News Reader

Fully autonomous fleets of cars will push societal changes we can't yet predict. Right now everyone shows up to work at about the same time. Is that a fixed position society will always uphold? I don't know, there's a lot of things I don't know. The only thing I can predict is that in the same way the personal automobile upended the social structures of the day, autonomous vehicles will likely do something similar.

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There's plenty of reasons to think that. For instance, it's well studied that people value leisure time at the same time as everyone else does. Having your time off disconnected from that of your social circle causes a lot of isolation. Since social circles interconnect with each other, we end up with a single major leisure window, and a set of people in relatively low paying jobs that are stuck working at different times. Those jobs often have out of band vacation days precisely so that they can still participate in regular social life some of the time.

We can make many technological changes in the world. Some will be huge. However changes that rely on humanity not being social are just very unlikely.

Always? No. Will autonomous cars change it? Doubtful. In fact, it could make it worse, because who cares if your commute is 3 hours instead of 2 as long as you can watch American Idol while you're doing it.

I'd love to see what the average household pays for vehicles. If you don't think that money is high on the motivational list for people, you need only look at what happened the last time gas prices were $1/gallon higher than today. In any case, I doubt car ownership will "fall off a cliff". It will be a gradual change. Many people won't trust the software, there will be a few incidents that get tons of media coverage to scare people off (no doubt funded by entrenched interests). Some people won't trust that the amount of time it takes to get a ride will be low enough, especially in more rural areas. Many people like the culture of car ownership. But at the end of the day, if it saves hundreds of dollars per month and is roughly as safe and convenient as owning a car, the value proposition will be too strong to ignore. But that's a change that will take (IMO) 15-25 years to see widespread adoption.

The thing is that even in rural areas the logistics of autonomous cars allow you to get away with just one for an entire family. The fact that the car can come back home and pick someone else up later means that even if there are still people who own cars (and I suspect lots of people still will) sharing amongst small groups will likely decrease overall count of owned vehicles.

Well I certainly care if my commute gets longer regardless of how I'm commuting because there's a lot of things I can't do with my time while I'm commuting.

People with families or physical social obligations care.

While people still drive themselves, there's a huge incentive to come to work early or late, to avoid traffic. I don't see that incentive increasing with autonomous cars. If anything, I predict that more people will join rush hour traffic if they don't need to do any actual driving. However, this might be mitigated by the better driving of autonomous cars.

We can predict some of the changes. I'm looking forward to the day where those with poor sight and poor reflexes (eg many old people) can get around cheaply and easily, without much risk to themselves or others. Drunk driving injuries and deaths should plummet as well. Self driving cars will be enormous for blind people that don't live somewhere with robust taxi facilities.

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