I RATHER enjoyed a piece written late last year by techno-pessimist Robert Gordon, who was seeking to defend his thesis that innovation-driven economic growth in real per capita income is more or less over, in the face of striking new technological advances. He wrote, for instance:

Can economic growth be saved by Google's driverless car? This is bizarre ground for optimism, but it is prometed not just by Google's Eric Schmidt but by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Erik Brynjolfsson. People are in cars to go somewhere, whether from home to work or from home to shop. Once they are inside the car, there is relatively little difference between driving the car on their own or having it drive itself. Greater safety? Auto fatalities per million miles traveled have already declined by a factor of 10 since 1950. In setting out the case for pessimism, I have been accused by some of a failure of imagination.

No kidding! Mr Gordon's remark is equivalent to someone in the late 19th century arguing that automobiles wouldn't amount to much since one would still need to hook the vehicles up to horses. It misses the fundamental innovation being deployed, and the potential consequences of it. A new piece in Popular Science on Google's driverless-car project provides a sense of what Mr Gordon was unable to imagine:

Self-driving-car boosters talk about a virtuous circle that starts when human hands leave the wheel. It’s not just safety that improves. Computer control enables cars to drive behind one another, so they travel as a virtual unit. Volvo has perfected a simple auto-drive system called platooning, in which its cars autonomously follow a professional driver. It uses technology that’s already built into every high-end Volvo sold today, plus a communications system. The vehicle-to-vehicle communications standard soon to be announced by NHSTA would, at least in theory, enable all makes and models to platoon. And lidar could eliminate even the need for a lead driver. A 2012 IEEE study estimates that widespread adoption of autonomous-driving technology could increase highway capacity fivefold, simply by packing traffic closer together. Peter Stone, an artificial-intelligence expert at the University of Texas at Austin, thinks that intersecting streams of automated traffic will essentially flow through one another, controlled by a new piece of road infrastructure—the computerized intersection manager. Average trip times across a typical city would be dramatically reduced. “And once you have these capabilities,” says Stone, “all kinds of things become possible: dynamic lane reversals, micro-tolling to reduce congestion, autonomous-software agents negotiating the travel route with other agents on a moment-to-moment basis in order to optimize the entire network.” In our self-driving future, not only would traffic jams become a thing of the past, every stoplight would also be green. In Volvo’s real-world platooning tests, drafting resulted in average fuel savings of 10 to 15 percent—but that, too, is seen as the tip of the iceberg. Wayne Gerdes, the father of “hypermiling,” can nearly double the rated efficiency of cars using fuel-sipping techniques that could be incorporated into auto-driving software. Efficiency could double again as human error is squeezed out of the equation. Volvo’s goal is to eliminate fatalities in models manufactured after 2020, and its newest cars already start driving themselves if they sense imminent danger, either by steering back onto the roadway or braking in anticipation of a crash. Over time, virtual bumpers could gradually replace the rubber-and-steel variety, and automakers could eliminate roll cages, returning the consequent weight savings as even better mileage. The EPA has a new mileage mandate for car manufacturers: They must achieve a fleet-wide average of 54.5 mpg by 2025; autonomous technology could help them get there faster.

In fact, these possibilities are only the tip of the iceberg. Autonomous vehicles' most transformative contribution might be what they get up to when people aren't in the vehicles. One suddenly has access to cheap, fast, ultra-reliable, on-demand courier service. Imagine never having to run out for milk or a missing ingredient again. Imagine dropping a malfunctioning computer into a freight AV to be ferried off to a repair shop and returned, all without you having to do anything. Imagine inventories at offices, shops and so on refilling constantly and as needed: assuming "shops" is still a meaningful concept in a world where things all come to you.



The really remarkable thing about such possibilities is that the technology is basically available today. It isn't cheap today, but that may change very quickly. If the public lets it, of course. When it comes to AVs stagnation, if it occurs, will be the fault of regulatory rather than technological obstacles.