One of the most exciting forms of new technology is the rapid growth we are seeing in the self driving/automated car field. Self driving cars is an idea that has existed in our science-fiction visions of the future for decades, and there have been enormous leaps and bounds made in developing and rolling out this technology. While the technology is not yet perfect, the testing being done on these automated automobiles has proven that the days of driver driven cars is limited.
By introducing driver-less automated cars into our society we are going to see a radical change in the way that businesses are run. One of the largest employment providers in the United States are those employing long distance truck drivers. These people literally keep our economy running. There are hundreds of thousands of delivers made to businesses for every kind of conceivable reason - food, clothing, furniture, cars, all of these things require long distance trucking in order to keep the (metaphorical) wheels of these businesses moving. With the introduction of automated cars this will rapidly wipe out hundreds of thousands of jobs currently filled with humans; why pay someone who has to rest and eat and sleep when you can just set a course for the destination and run your trucks 24 hours a day?
Another field which will be heavily impacted by the introduction of self-driving cars will be the private transportation industry. We have already seen how companies like Uber are aggressively moving to replace their human drivers with self-driving cars, working every day to improve their technology to eventually phase out the human element. This will start to bleed into taxi cab companies as well. It would be unsurprising if in the next decade we look around and see that most of the cars on our roads will be driving unassisted, piloted by computers.
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