But while robots whose movements authentically resemble those of humans aren’t quite here yet, another category of machine – drawing on the same gains in digitisation and the dividend of exponential progress – is on the verge of transforming whole industries. It is the leading edge of a transformation which will mean not only the loss of countless jobs, but entire professions. And just like the acrobatics of Atlas, nobody saw it coming – until it was right in front of them.
Autonomous Vehicles
In 2002 the American defence agency DARPA announced a ‘Grand Challenge ’ for driverless cars scheduled to take place in the Mojave Desert in spring 2004. The proposed route was two hundred and forty kilometres long and the prize, for whichever car finished first, was set at \$1 million.
While some of the most brilliant minds in America applied themselves to the task, not one of the fifteen teams present at the start line was able to complete the course. The ‘winner’, built by Carnegie Mellon University, was only able to successfully navigate 5 per cent of the route. While the challenge had been ambitious – after all, the point was to stretch the entrants’ abilities – few thought it would descend into such farce. One observer even labelled the episode ‘the debacle in the desert’. To any reasonable person the possibility of autonomous vehicles seemed decades away.
And yet, just six years later in 2010, Google announced their self-driving cars had ‘logged in over 140,000 miles’ with seven test vehicles completing over 1,000 miles each without any human intervention – including dificult terrain like San Francisco’s notoriously steep Lombard Street. Since then the likes of Apple, Tesla and Uber have entered the game, not to mention the older incumbents of the automobile industry. By 2016 Uber’s then-CEO Travis Kalanick was clear about the importance of self-driving vehicles for any transport company: ‘It starts with understanding that the world is going to go self-driving and autonomous … what would happen if we weren’t a part of that future? If we weren’t part of the autonomy thing? Then the future passes us by.’ In the span of just eleven years the technology underpinning autonomous vehicles had improved so dramatically that they went from a totem of public ridicule to influencing the business models of some of the world’s most valuable companies.
Full Automation
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