I was in a car during rush hour, and I thought about all of the drivers in the cars around me. Each driver was focusing a major part of their attention on following the car in front of them without screwing up. Which is important, of course.<\/p>\n
But it’s only important in the context of a system whereby driving is the only practical way to get from one place to another on the roads. Let’s imagine for a moment that there was some reasonable alternative.<\/p>\n
Suppose, for sake of argument, that all cars were self-driving, and that the people in those cars could focus their attention on whatever they wanted to. That would free up several hours a day per person per car.<\/p>\n
If you add up all of that collective brain activity, it represents an enormous potential resource. Right now that resource is being pretty much squandered.<\/p>\n
Even if you discount the quality of life issues, there might be some reasonable way to measure the economic impact of recovering all of that potentially productive brain time. I suspect that you would end up with an extremely high financial value.<\/p>\n
When we measure the potential positive impact on the economy of any transition to self-driving cars, it might make sense to factor that in. If we did so, a world of self-driving cars might start to look like a very good deal indeed.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I was in a car during rush hour, and I thought about all of the drivers in the cars around me. Each driver was focusing a major part of their attention on following the car in front of them without screwing up. Which is important, of course. But it’s only important in the context of … Continue reading “Rush hour brain drain”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26545"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=26545"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26545\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":26546,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26545\/revisions\/26546"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=26545"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=26545"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=26545"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}