innovation
William Sachiti founded the Academy of Robotics. He was the founder of Clever Bins – bins with solarpowered digital advertising – which featured on Dragon’s Den. He formed Kar-Go in 2016 and is preparing to launch an autonomous delivery vehicle as well as driverless cars.
The UK government recently set a target for all new cars to be electric by 2040. While it may be a few decades away, when fleet managers are faced with the decision to replace their entire fleet in a world of driverless cars, new ways to collect waste will have to be considered. It may be cheaper to switch to a vacuum system than to buy an entire new fleet over time. And by the time a vacuum system is widely established, the vehicles that will remove the recyclable material from the other end and transport the waste to a landfill will be driverless and carbon-neutral. Where vacuum systems are not used, the most likely outcome is a change in design, placement and format of street bins to allow them to be more easily picked up by autonomous vehicles. The exact method and execution are up to governments and local authorities across the world, but it is unlikely that such processes will not move towards automation. After all, humans are growing increasingly accustomed to machines taking over our daily responsibilities. Since the days of early automation, we have seen more and more tasks replicated entirely by machines. Despite the challenges of redundancies and retraining requirements for those whose jobs are replaced by robots, when it comes to eliminating the need for tasks that humans do not wish to do, automation could be a good thing, if implemented responsibly. So far though, many of us might not have noticed the increasing adoption of machines in order to undertake major tasks. After all,
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such revolutions occur on the factory floor rather than in the everyday lives of consumers. However, when self-driving cars hit the roads, it’ll be hard to deny that we’re living in a technological future. Driverless passenger cars already exist in some forms, but they will hit the market in the early 2020s and emerge with increasingly advanced capabilities over the coming decades. Very soon, we’ll be able to prepare for a business meeting during a London commute or read a novel while travelling to a family gathering. Motorists will never have to take the wheel again – unless they choose to – with future driving tests, insurance and the like reflecting the extent of automation of the vehicle rather than the type of vehicle itself. AI-operated vehicles can ‘travel safely closer together, and with less braking and accelerating than human drivers’, leading to reduced congestion, a greater capacity for roads, and greater overall efficiency, according to a Guardian interview with Stan Boland, CEO of FiveAI, which develops driverless car software. Human error is the critical reason for 93% of crashes, according to the findings of a 2008 US National Highway Traffic Safety Administration survey. If you consider speeding, drink-driving, negligence, and phone use at the wheel, it becomes clear how much safer AI-controlled cars could be. However, as the availability of driverless cars goes up, car ownership is projected to go down. While an increasing proportion of car owners want driverless and electric cars, half of today’s owners do not want to own a vehicle in the future, according to a KPMG survey. If you imagine how driverless cars might fit into our lives, the reason becomes clear. You may, for instance, need a car only for your commute to work, totalling a few hours each day, plus the occasional weekend trip with the family. Owning a car and storing it 24/7, with all the related responsibilities such as MOT, insurance, road tax, upkeep etc, makes little sense for the part-time driver when other options are available. So if you only need a car for a few hours each working day, it makes sense from an environmental, economic and practical point of view to borrow rather than own a car. Renting could become the natural solution. Just imagine it. A car may have driven another commuter to work for an earlier shift, and then drives itself straight from the commuter’s office to your home. Having dropped you off, it would then move along to the next person in need of a vehicle, and so on. Likewise, you could easily organise a car for ad-hoc weekend trips. All the logistics and the driving itself would be AI-operated and fully autonomous. So you can see why any industry that relies on transport can expect to be well and truly shaken-up by automated technology.