Should Driverless Vehicles Be Illegal?

Fast forward ten years. Driverless vehicles are common. Let me ask you this: what happened to all the people whose job it was to drive vehicles?

What happened to the truck drivers, taxi drivers, and delivery drivers? Are millions of people now unemployed?

Before you tell me that Uber and various trucking companies probably created retraining programs of one sort or another, let's go back to the present day and look for the existence of such programs. Where are the large scale retraining programs that got people solid jobs in the aftermath of the 2008 Great Recession?

Oh, yeah, there aren't any.

Societally speaking, it may not be such a good idea to take millions of people and put them out of work.

But doesn't innovation have to march on?

Some will argue that by my logic, we'd still be using horses to get around. 

I'd push back that in the short history of computer-driven automation, we aren't creating more jobs. We are killing jobs. Automated factories and warehouses employ fewer people. In our local hospital, a person no longer walks around distributing medicine from the pharmacy; a robot delivers medications.

Do I want to halt innovation?

No.

But I want us to make sure that "innovation" makes our world a better rather than a worse place. The way things are going, innovation seems to help investors, entrepreneurs, and some consumers... while it simultaneously harms numerous people who simply want a decent job.

Most of my clients are entrepreneurs. I've been an entrepreneur. But that doesn't mean that every new idea is a good idea.

For example, I can imagine many investors making huge sums from a transition to driverless vehicles, but I have a hard time imagining that this transition will create more jobs than it destroys.

One more problem...

Two harsh realities of our world are the existence of terror and cyber attacks. Recent headlines have even debated whether the NSA - the National Security Agency in the United States - was successfully hacked. Security experts say that nearly every major institution has its systems challenged by hackers on a regular basis.

Fortunately, you can't hack a car driven by a person, or at least no one has done this so far.

Now imagine that every vehicle around you is driven by a computer. Every vehicle that passes under a bridge - or that navigates through a city intersection whose sidewalks are jammed with pedestrians - is controlled by a computer.

In theory, driverless vehicles will be safer and more efficient than vehicles driven by emotional and unpredictable humans.

In reality, theories are often proven wrong, especially when they go from the lab to billions and billions of real life interactions.

I am usually the guy pushing others to be more creative, innovative, and daring. But driverless vehicles terrify me because the people who are pushing them forward have vested interests in profiting from the transition... and no one has a similarly powerful motivation to manage the unforeseen consequences.

For example, a retraining program isn't enough for former professional drivers, because retraining isn't the only issue. The issue is where is anyone going to find a better or comparable job? In the United States alone, there are something like three million truck drivers. Where are we going to find three million new jobs for these people?

Here's the bottom line: if we keep ignoring the human costs of "innovation", then one day we are going to wake up and the majority of people will have more to gain from the downfall of our society than from its successful continuation. 

We are in this together, and it's time to start acting that way.