Robots in the prey. Cars and we [02]
Why is it so important to pay attention to such popular concepts as big data, robotics, artificial intelligence and all these attempts to train machines to do more interesting things? It would seem that these are all toys for geeks. Why is this just as important, and maybe even more so than nanotechnology?
Scientists studying the history of innovation come to the conclusion that there are certain patterns in the process of innovative development of society. Each individual period can be described.S-curve, on which there are periods of slow initial propagation, rapid wide distribution and attenuation. The economic growth cycles, which Kondratyev discovered, also converge with these phases. Questions were studied, theories were refined, and now, according to one of the many opinions, five waves of innovations (technological structures) can be described. Now we are on the verge of the sixth way, the picture below shows approximate time frames and related technologies:
The sixth wave of innovation is designated as the development of nanotechnology and nuclear energy. Apparently, it was this forecast that was chosen as fundamental for the technological development of Russia, the legs of RosNano and the Breakthrough project grow precisely from it. Unfortunately, most likely guessing about the timing and dynamics of the new structure, thisthe forecast , in our humble opinion, has oversized a large selection of technologies. According to the scheme, the information revolution begins with the end of the twentieth century, which cannot be disagreed, while for the sixth way, for some reason, information technologies were chosen at all.
If we look at the current landscape of technologies and think about what can change our life just like a steam engine and a microchip, we come to the conclusion that these are the same information technologies of geeks. Let's look at an example of one of the most sensational technologies of the present: a robot car that can move around without human intervention, created largely due to the symbiosis of machine learning and the analysis of a huge amount of data. For example, below it is a well-known, reminiscent of a Google car smiley, behind which already 1.1 million kilometers in the form of a technical prototype.
According to the estimates of its creators, it will reducethe number of accidents and the time lost in commuter trips by 90%. We add that the annual mortality from road accidents in the world is more than 1 million people, and in children this is the main cause of death. If cars cease to be private vehicles and become public, a multiple reduction in the fleet can be expected, because the utilization of private cars is very low. The example below shows that even at rush hour, no more than 17% of cars are simultaneously on the road:
Horizontal - time of day, vertical - share of private vehicles on the roads
The transition from a personal car to a robotic taxi will reduce the required number of cars, increasing their overall utilization, while reducing the cost of transportation. On the one hand, the “social robomobile” is opposed by the inertia of human thinking, but on the other, studies show that it will be trite 1.5-10 times cheaper and more convenient. Plus, it is the West that is the starting point of many social breakthroughs, such as open source software or human rights. Government regulation is also a good tool - for example, in Norway, a quarter of cars sold are electric cars, while in Manhattan only every fourth person has a car and the main transport is a taxi.
All this leads to a change in the optimal characteristics of the car: instead of the usual five-seat gasoline sedans, and for the United States and instead of pickups, two-seater mini-cars are relevant as in the image above. They will be cheaper to manufacture and require less energy for transportation to and from work, which makes electricity for such machines a much more interesting option than now.
Structural consequences in the economy are also inevitable, entire industries will become less relevant: fewer gas stations, repair shops, car washes, insurance agents and insurance companies themselves will be required, one of the automakers will go bankrupt or switch to the production of exclusive models for connoisseurs. Hospitals will become freer as they lose hundreds of thousands of patients; territories occupied by parking lots will be freed up - this will free up space in cities for alternative use; the logistics industry will change - the demand for the profession of drivers of all kinds, including couriers and forklifts, will decrease.
The most popular profession by state (blue truck drivers)
As a result, all this frees up millions of workers and trillions of dollars of potential savings - you can conquer Mars and build underwater cities. Well, if you are a pessimist, then millions of poor and unemployed are waiting for us, straying into gangs and hunting for privileged class robomobiles. In any case, this is truly a revolutionary technology that will have an impact on society comparable to replacing a horse with a “Model T” from Ford. That is why this funny little car attracts the attention of economists and futurologists of all stripes.
Morgan Stanley analysts are of the opinion that we will be in this utopia by 2025, and the first fully autonomous models will appear on sale in 3 years, in 2018. They add to Audithat in 2017 they will release a fully automatic A8, and the main problem is no longer technical, but legislative.
The development of technologies of autonomous vehicles
People hardly imagine a nonexistent and even more benefit from it and steadily underestimate the possibilities of progress. For those who, on the other side of the monitor, casually wave their hand at our fantasies, we give real commercial examples.
History can begin with the confrontation between two resource-oriented states - Brazil and Australia. Both supply iron ore to the growing Chinese market (China accounts for 60% of global iron ore imports). Brazil has cheap labor and a more saturated breed, but it is far from China. Australia is closer, but has an expensive workforce. Competition led to optimization - Brazil reduced the cost of transportation through the construction of a fleet of dry cargo to an unprecedented scale of 400,000 tons deadweight. Bulk carriers are so large that no port was ready to accept them and had to load ore off the coast of China into smaller ships.
The Australian company Rio Tinto (third in the world among mining companies) went a more advanced path and launched the program “mine of the future . ” While Google and others are working on their prototypes, Komatsu robotic autonomous 300-ton mining trucks in the harsh conditions of the Australian desert have already driven 4 million kilometers and transported 200 million tons of rock:
Moreover, the “mine of the future" is not limited to them: automatic explosive mortgages, monitoring and control systems for ore sorting processes, and now a 1,500 km railway with autonomous trains without train drivers has joined the automation program. On the whole, these innovations allowed to increase ore production, while saving the company 900 employees and significantly improve working conditions for hundreds of others. It is worth noting that for each dump truck 4-5 drivers with a salary of more than 100'000 dollars a year were required, and the driver received 240'000 dollars. The program does not stop there - the number of dumping robots, etc., is expanding, which ultimately will lead to a decrease in the cost of technology and its spread to other mines around the world. Thus,
Despite the above, no one has yet learned to predict the future, and the scientific community, as always, is divided into pessimists and optimists. The former believe that innovation in the near future is small relative to the two industrial and computer revolutions, and the current slow growth of labor productivity in the West will drag on. The latter rely on the fact that humanity always underestimates the potential of innovation. Nevertheless, the mentioned innovations will not become the banner of the current decade, since they simply do not have time to implement either on a global scale or separately to the West.
It is worth touching on the topic of unemployment. There is a logical, at first glance, causal relationship that robotization and other innovations will lead to massive unemployment, as the required number of employees will decrease. Fortunately, you can not confine yourself to theoretical considerations, but look immediately at empiricism - 160 years of unemployment in Britain as a state that gave the world an industrial revolution:
It is clear that during these 160 years progress has not stood still and labor productivity has grown 10 times. However, this did not affect the growth of unemployment. There are two long and many short periods of unemployment, but these periods were short-lived and were associated not with technological changes, but with economic ones. The fact is that automation and the growth of labor productivity not only destroy part of the jobs, but also create new and the whole question in the balance of these opposite processes, which was generally supported. So now some professions will disappear, others will appear - the world does not stand still, it has always been and always will be. In extreme cases, you can always go to communism.
Scientists studying the history of innovation come to the conclusion that there are certain patterns in the process of innovative development of society. Each individual period can be described.S-curve, on which there are periods of slow initial propagation, rapid wide distribution and attenuation. The economic growth cycles, which Kondratyev discovered, also converge with these phases. Questions were studied, theories were refined, and now, according to one of the many opinions, five waves of innovations (technological structures) can be described. Now we are on the verge of the sixth way, the picture below shows approximate time frames and related technologies:
The sixth wave of innovation is designated as the development of nanotechnology and nuclear energy. Apparently, it was this forecast that was chosen as fundamental for the technological development of Russia, the legs of RosNano and the Breakthrough project grow precisely from it. Unfortunately, most likely guessing about the timing and dynamics of the new structure, thisthe forecast , in our humble opinion, has oversized a large selection of technologies. According to the scheme, the information revolution begins with the end of the twentieth century, which cannot be disagreed, while for the sixth way, for some reason, information technologies were chosen at all.
If we look at the current landscape of technologies and think about what can change our life just like a steam engine and a microchip, we come to the conclusion that these are the same information technologies of geeks. Let's look at an example of one of the most sensational technologies of the present: a robot car that can move around without human intervention, created largely due to the symbiosis of machine learning and the analysis of a huge amount of data. For example, below it is a well-known, reminiscent of a Google car smiley, behind which already 1.1 million kilometers in the form of a technical prototype.
According to the estimates of its creators, it will reducethe number of accidents and the time lost in commuter trips by 90%. We add that the annual mortality from road accidents in the world is more than 1 million people, and in children this is the main cause of death. If cars cease to be private vehicles and become public, a multiple reduction in the fleet can be expected, because the utilization of private cars is very low. The example below shows that even at rush hour, no more than 17% of cars are simultaneously on the road:
Horizontal - time of day, vertical - share of private vehicles on the roads
The transition from a personal car to a robotic taxi will reduce the required number of cars, increasing their overall utilization, while reducing the cost of transportation. On the one hand, the “social robomobile” is opposed by the inertia of human thinking, but on the other, studies show that it will be trite 1.5-10 times cheaper and more convenient. Plus, it is the West that is the starting point of many social breakthroughs, such as open source software or human rights. Government regulation is also a good tool - for example, in Norway, a quarter of cars sold are electric cars, while in Manhattan only every fourth person has a car and the main transport is a taxi.
All this leads to a change in the optimal characteristics of the car: instead of the usual five-seat gasoline sedans, and for the United States and instead of pickups, two-seater mini-cars are relevant as in the image above. They will be cheaper to manufacture and require less energy for transportation to and from work, which makes electricity for such machines a much more interesting option than now.
Structural consequences in the economy are also inevitable, entire industries will become less relevant: fewer gas stations, repair shops, car washes, insurance agents and insurance companies themselves will be required, one of the automakers will go bankrupt or switch to the production of exclusive models for connoisseurs. Hospitals will become freer as they lose hundreds of thousands of patients; territories occupied by parking lots will be freed up - this will free up space in cities for alternative use; the logistics industry will change - the demand for the profession of drivers of all kinds, including couriers and forklifts, will decrease.
The most popular profession by state (blue truck drivers)
As a result, all this frees up millions of workers and trillions of dollars of potential savings - you can conquer Mars and build underwater cities. Well, if you are a pessimist, then millions of poor and unemployed are waiting for us, straying into gangs and hunting for privileged class robomobiles. In any case, this is truly a revolutionary technology that will have an impact on society comparable to replacing a horse with a “Model T” from Ford. That is why this funny little car attracts the attention of economists and futurologists of all stripes.
Morgan Stanley analysts are of the opinion that we will be in this utopia by 2025, and the first fully autonomous models will appear on sale in 3 years, in 2018. They add to Audithat in 2017 they will release a fully automatic A8, and the main problem is no longer technical, but legislative.
The development of technologies of autonomous vehicles
People hardly imagine a nonexistent and even more benefit from it and steadily underestimate the possibilities of progress. For those who, on the other side of the monitor, casually wave their hand at our fantasies, we give real commercial examples.
History can begin with the confrontation between two resource-oriented states - Brazil and Australia. Both supply iron ore to the growing Chinese market (China accounts for 60% of global iron ore imports). Brazil has cheap labor and a more saturated breed, but it is far from China. Australia is closer, but has an expensive workforce. Competition led to optimization - Brazil reduced the cost of transportation through the construction of a fleet of dry cargo to an unprecedented scale of 400,000 tons deadweight. Bulk carriers are so large that no port was ready to accept them and had to load ore off the coast of China into smaller ships.
The Australian company Rio Tinto (third in the world among mining companies) went a more advanced path and launched the program “mine of the future . ” While Google and others are working on their prototypes, Komatsu robotic autonomous 300-ton mining trucks in the harsh conditions of the Australian desert have already driven 4 million kilometers and transported 200 million tons of rock:
Moreover, the “mine of the future" is not limited to them: automatic explosive mortgages, monitoring and control systems for ore sorting processes, and now a 1,500 km railway with autonomous trains without train drivers has joined the automation program. On the whole, these innovations allowed to increase ore production, while saving the company 900 employees and significantly improve working conditions for hundreds of others. It is worth noting that for each dump truck 4-5 drivers with a salary of more than 100'000 dollars a year were required, and the driver received 240'000 dollars. The program does not stop there - the number of dumping robots, etc., is expanding, which ultimately will lead to a decrease in the cost of technology and its spread to other mines around the world. Thus,
Despite the above, no one has yet learned to predict the future, and the scientific community, as always, is divided into pessimists and optimists. The former believe that innovation in the near future is small relative to the two industrial and computer revolutions, and the current slow growth of labor productivity in the West will drag on. The latter rely on the fact that humanity always underestimates the potential of innovation. Nevertheless, the mentioned innovations will not become the banner of the current decade, since they simply do not have time to implement either on a global scale or separately to the West.
It is worth touching on the topic of unemployment. There is a logical, at first glance, causal relationship that robotization and other innovations will lead to massive unemployment, as the required number of employees will decrease. Fortunately, you can not confine yourself to theoretical considerations, but look immediately at empiricism - 160 years of unemployment in Britain as a state that gave the world an industrial revolution:
It is clear that during these 160 years progress has not stood still and labor productivity has grown 10 times. However, this did not affect the growth of unemployment. There are two long and many short periods of unemployment, but these periods were short-lived and were associated not with technological changes, but with economic ones. The fact is that automation and the growth of labor productivity not only destroy part of the jobs, but also create new and the whole question in the balance of these opposite processes, which was generally supported. So now some professions will disappear, others will appear - the world does not stand still, it has always been and always will be. In extreme cases, you can always go to communism.