I Digress...

A little AI distraction to cheer your day (and relieve us of yet another discussion about workplace). Ever wandered through the streets and felt like you've stepped into the future? With their undeniable presence here in San Francisco, the driverless car is quickly becoming the most prominent representation of AI in our daily lives. If you spend any time in San Francisco neighborhoods, you can’t miss them. The other day, as I chatted with a neighbor, I counted 6 autonomous vehicles casually cruise by our front door within a span of 10 minutes. Intriguing, right? And today, in a twist of irony, I was held up by one. Blocked by a double-parked UPS truck, the driverless car hesitated, unsure about navigating into the lane of oncoming traffic. Of course, all the drivers in the opposing lane weren’t too keen to make space for the driverless car, as one normally would (or at least the more decent among us would) for a human-driven vehicle. Hence, we waited.
 
While sitting there contemplating my driverless future, I began thinking about other applications for these information gathering machines. Picture this: police using them to spot minor traffic offenses and dispatching e-tickets seamlessly, in the same way we now go through toll booths and simply get a bill. More severe violations, like excessive speeding, could prompt these vehicles to alert human officers nearby. Could they also serve as eyes on the streets, spotting potential crimes in progress?
 
What about redefining delivery? Imagine compact, driverless vehicles that ping you upon arrival, so that you can go to them and retrieve your goods via an app, eliminating the all-too-familiar sight of double-parked delivery trucks. Of course, this poses potential challenge for delivery jobs (a big hit to the gig economy). One summer when I was in college, I worked for a bakery loading trucks at night so the drivers could show up to a fully loaded truck and make their deliveries the next day. It was hard work, made harder by the fact I worked with one other man the entire night (effectively my boss) who was not super chatty (nor happy), and who had the odd habit of playing the same John Denver cassette (yes, that’s how long ago this was) every night, multiple times. To this day, if I hear “Thank God I’m a Country Boy” or any of Mr. Denver’s other hits, the song will get stuck in my head for hours. How long before (maybe already?) that job I endured way back when is gone? It was certainly a robotic set of tasks. The big truck would arrive with all the goods, and we would unload, then load them into the smaller trucks. This could be done by robots, loading into driverless trucks that contact the recipient on arrival – which may, in turn, be another robot who could unload at the site.
 
Of course, the idea of driverless cars ferrying us to and fro is a very real near-term application, and that's probably what springs to mind first. Yet this seems like just the beginning. We're on the cusp of so much more. Today, San Francisco's streets are more bustling than I’ve seen in my 30+ years here. We have more people driving in and out of the city. We have more delivery trucks due to e-commerce. We have many Uber and Lyft drivers. And amidst this urban ballet, we now have all these empty cars. But I digress…