Overview
Automated transportation was considered to be many decades away as recently as 2005. In their highly influential 2004 book, The New Division of Labor, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane (MIT and Harvard) analyzed which human jobs were safe from automation, and used driving as an explicit example of an occupation that was safe from automation:[1]
One year after this book was published, five vehicles completed the DARPA automated driving 132-mile Grand Challenge, a feat that had not been accomplished by any contestants in previous years. The advent of LiDAR, 3-D mapping, and incipient pattern recognition all contributed to the success of the winning (and finishing) participants in the 2005 race.[2]
As artificial intelligence began to take shape in the 2010s and automated driving advanced rapidly, conventional wisdom shifted to the viewpoint that automated vehicles would soon dominate. Urban parking garage owners contemplated how to convert their structures to other uses, as AVs would likely drop off their passengers and park outside of the urban zone in specified AV parking facilities.
Automated vehicles offer yet another example of the human tendency to overestimate technological reach in the short run and underestimate it in the longer term. As we enter the second half of the 2020s, automated vehicles have become commonplace across the USA and China and are just beginning to exert their effect on our society and economy. This section provides an update on where we are in this progression and a guide for the road ahead.
[1] Levy, Frank, and Richard J. Murnane. The New Division of Labor: How Computers Are Creating the Next Job Market. Princeton University Press and Russell Sage Foundation (2004). The driving example appears in the authors’ discussion of tasks requiring real-time sensory processing and judgment. ↩
[2] DARPA Grand Challenge (2005), held in the Mojave Desert over a 132-mile course; five of 23 finalists completed the route after none finished the 2004 event. DARPA. ↩