By Winton Bates, on December 31st, 2009
In my last post I gave several reasons why I think the ‘good society’ is a useful concept. There is another reason. The concept of a ‘good society’ may help us to think more clearly about progress.
What is the problem with progress? I am just about old enough to remember the 1950s when the most persuasive point used in favour of any change in Australia seemed to be: “You can’t stand in the way of progress”. A lot of good things were done in the name of progress but other things, particularly uneconomic public investment in dam building etc. gave progress a bad name. More recently the concept of progress has been confused by well-meaning people who have combined national accounting concepts with idiosyncratic values to produce meaningless indicators of “genuine progress”. Further confusion results from the tendency for people who still cling to long-discredited collectivist political views to be described as progressives.
The article in “The Economist” this week (19 Dec ’09 to 1 Jan ‘10) about progress and its perils discusses the popular view that while technology and GDP advance, morals and society are either treading water or sinking back into decadence and barbarism. The general message is that despite a general tendency to shy away from judgementalism many people yearn for a sense of moral purpose. The article ends by quoting Susan Neiman, a philosopher, who asks people to reject the false choice between Utopia and degeneracy: “Moral progress, she writes, is neither guaranteed nor is it hopeless. Instead it is up to us”.
I agree that people need a sense of moral purpose. A large part of the apparent decline in sense of moral purpose, however, can be attributed to a lack of moral clarity. In particular, there seems to be a great deal of confusion about the morality of modern consumer society. It is common to hear even avid users of new technology suggesting that the production of this stuff uses scarce resources but does little to add to their happiness in the long run. So why do they buy it and use it? Could it be because such stuff provides them with improvements in communications etc that are of enduring benefit, even though it has little effect on their emotional states in the longer term? The moral issue, whether it is good for us to have such stuff, does not depend on its transitory impact on our emotional states.
In terms of public policy, if progress means anything it must mean movement toward a good society, or movement from a good society to a better society. Changes can be counted as progress if they improve our capacity to live together in peace, provide us with greater opportunities to flourish or provide us with greater security.
However, the idea of progress also embodies optimism about the future of humanity – the idea that there has been a tendency for material, political, social, intellectual and moral conditions to improve throughout human history and that such improvement will continue in the foreseeable future. Roger Kerr has recently reminded us how inspiring the idea of progress was in the 18th Century. He argues that the idea that life tends to get better over the longer term still has potential to be inspiring today.
It seems to me that despite all the existing and potential problems faced by humanity there is a basis for optimism that advance of knowledge will continue to enable people to enjoy progressively better lives in coming decades.
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By Ajay Shah, on November 10th, 2009
The CMIE Consumer Pyramids data shows that in all their income categories, more than 50% of households have a mobile phone. It is only in their bottom category `Lower Middle Income – II’ that only 37.5% of households have mobile phones. From `Higher Middle Income – III’ upwards, the incidence is above 80%. If you had asked anyone in 1999 or 1989 whether this could be done by 2009, the answer would have been in the negative.
With broadband Internet, in contrast, India has not got such breakthroughs.
The September 2009 issue of Finance & Development has a story on the impact of mobile phones for development. In India, there is a lot of merit in using new technologies and players to break with the comfortable stagnation that’s enveloped finance.
The Economist has a beautiful section on mobile phones and development: on Chinese progress on network hardware, broadband, on the impact on development, a retrospective, looking forward, and an enthralling piece on the cost reductions by firms in developing countries. Now all we need is for Indian finance to go the way of Indian telecom (and airlines).
Anand Giridharadas, writing in New York Times, describes new developments in distance education. India is the place in the world which would be the biggest beneficiary from distance education, given the combination of lots of young people and a dismal education system. This does require broadband to go the way mobile phones have. I often joke that the task of an economics undergraduate education in India should be to get a person to the point where he or she can read my blog  (and cynics respond saying that most of the teachers of economics in India can’t parse my blog).
Anne Eisenberg has an article in New York Times about researchers at UCLA trying to use cell phones to do medical diagnosis. Given the ubiquity of cell phones in India, these could be useful lines of attack for us.
By Ajay Shah, on November 2nd, 2009
- Sanjeev Sanyal in Business Standard : Building cities for 21st century India, Delhi (which leads you to delhinullahs.org), and Calcutta. Also see: The Sustainable Planet Institute.
- Why investment banks were fated to be roadkill, in Financial Express by Viral Acharya.
- On Mumbai’s Streets, Cabbies Fight To Keep Passengers Uncomfortable by Eric Bellman in the Wall Street Journal. A simple emphasis on law and order would go a long way.
- Green roots of recovery, by Ila Patnaik in Indian Express.
- In Foreign Policy magazine, Steve Coll has a great article on how the US should think about its AfPak strategy. India has a lot at stake in ensuring that this works out right.
- Brian Krebs is a columnist on computer security for The Washington Post. He has recommendations for customers — and implicitly for banks — on how to be safe when doing Internet banking.
- Editorials in Financial Express on the confusion that arises in India owing to the pervasive use of year-on-year growth rates: 13 October and 14 October.
- Andre Beteille, in the Telegraph, on The language of rights.
- Rob Walker in the New York Times, on the frontiers of quantification of Indian music.
- An editorial in the Telegraph on the disappointing perpetuation of censorship in various aspects of the Indian government.
- In response to The museum of innocence by Orhan Pamuk: a review in the New York Times by Maureen Howard, review by Pico Iyer in The New York Review of Books, and Negar Azimi in the New York Times on the museum that goes with the book.
- In the story of Microsoft vs. Unix, Windows 7 seems to have reached the point where, in David Pogue’s words: “Microsoft employees can show up in public without avoiding eye contact”. On another front, Microsoft seems to be losing the cell phone to the two Unixes playing in that space. See Daniel Lyons look back at Microsoft’s last decade, and a great Bill Gates story by Joel Spolsky.
- Baby you were born to run by Tara Parker-Pope, in the New York Times.
By David Barr, on September 29th, 2009
I recently came to a rather obvious, yet remarkable insight. The 20th century was a truly unique and remarkable moment in human history. There is not a single aspect of human civilization that changed less during the 20th than in any of the centuries that came before. Population, economic output, life expectancies, oil consumption, meat consumption and international travel are just a few of the countless factors that changed more between 1900 and 2000 than in any other prior hundred years.
Expectations for the future are with few exceptions rooted in this period of explosive change. Some scholars have traced a variety of trends back into the more distant past, but these works are largely viewed as curiosities on the fringe of economic and social thought. For better or worse most of us are happy to assume the order of things that emerged after the Second World War will hold steady throughout ours and our children’s lives.
Economic growth has been both the great cause and great consequence of the recent pasts explosive change. By rapidly expanding the total available wealth, this expansion has allowed the general population to enjoy unheard of prosperity, without threatening the comfort of the elites.
Growth can be broken into two pieces; basically more people consuming more stuff. Population growth has obviously been the major driver of the first component of growth. From 1900 to 2000 the number of people on the planet rose nearly 4- fold to approximately 6 billion. Just as dramatic was the increase in the number people actively engaged in the globalized economy.
For all the wonders of the Pax-Britannica, world trade really only impacted a small percentage of humanity, in Europe North America and a handful of aristocrats scattered around the rest of the world. Today, only a small number of subsistence farmers are cut off from globalization.
If population growth were the primary driver of economic expansion, we would be living in Malthus’s world. The miracle of the 20th century was the dramatic rise in living standards that accompanied population growth. I don’t have time to recount all the ways in which living standards have improved since 1900. Look around you, the growth is obvious.
Is the 20th century repeatable? In 2100 will our heirs see 2000 through the same eyes that we see 1900? Our entire understanding of the future depends on the answer to this question. It is clear, that attempts to preserve the rate of growth for the next hundred years will smash into the physical limitations of the planet.
Technology is frequently cited as the magical solution to square this circle. Yet, there has never been a major innovation that has shrunk humanities lust for resources.
Adapting to a world of limited growth will be the profound challenge of the next hundred years. The impacts will be both positive and negative, but will shake the very core beliefs of society. This post is the first in a series that I will publish laying out the implications of a limited growth world on our expectations.
By Ajay Shah, on September 21st, 2009
In 1993, before the World Wide Web and before the commercial Internet, AT&T ran a set of television advertisements. They are visible on Youtube. At first blush, a lot of it sounded wide eyed and futuristic. But to people who were in the field then, everything in the ad was reasonable and incremental; merely a matter of scaling up what had been figured out. It was a great time to be alive, those early days of the Net. To AT&T iPhone customers of today in the US, almost everything in the ad is now reality.
A more gloomy version of the ad was floating around:
Have you ever received an automated sales pitch,
while you were still in your pajamas?
Have you ever had thousands of calls all over
the world charged to your stolen account number?
Have you ever had your paycheck deleted
by faceless intruders from across the globe?
Have you ever had an employer know more about your
whereabouts and activities than your spouse?
Have you ever been snuffed to dust by a
satellite laser while lying on the beach?
YOU WILL
And the company that will bring this to you
is AT&T.
This was a post on rec.humor.funny on 20 April 1994. Everything in this dystopic vision came out true by 2009 too, other than the last one.
By Cheryl Grey, on June 17th, 2009
President Obama has made the advancement of renewable energy sources (RES-e in greenspeak) an integral part of both his environmental and economic policies, and Texas billionaire T. Boone Pickens has enough belief in its potential to invest heavily in wind power. But as thirty plus years of research spending and ineffective regulations have proven, that’s not going to be enough to move this horse into the mainstream of residential usage, which has been the driving force in European wind and solar power generation. At least three drivers must come together to accomplish that feat in the United States.
Adopt feed-in tariffs to create demand. It’s not enough for people to want alternative energy; it must be economically viable, as well. No matter an individual’s level of belief in clean energy, global warming, or carbon footprint reduction, as long as entry costs remain prohibitive, most small investors such as homeowners will stay out of the market. Only by offering financial incentives to surmount those entry costs will governments, local or federal, entice homeowners into investing in their own solar panels or rooftop wind turbines, which will create long-term demand, increase production over time, and lower the entry costs naturally.
Accomplishing this goal in Europe, particularly Germany and Spain, has been the feed-in tariff, which mandates payments for homeowners who generate sufficient electricity from their RES-e systems to sell it back to the power companies. Using this system, in Germany between 2000 and 2007, the installed capacity of RES-e more than doubled, including within residential areas, meeting the 2010 goal (12.5% of electricity derived from alternative sources) three years ahead of schedule. At the same time, the entry cost of such systems fell 20% and 10,000 manufacturing and maintenance jobs were created, giving the RES-e industry viability and sustainability.
Aesthetics must be recognized as a luxury item. With homeowners associations (HOAs) wielding the power to refuse urban and suburban residents the ability to utilize solar panels, solar water heaters, or light-colored roofing materials for aesthetic reasons, RES-e production won’t extend into the most heavily populated parts of the nation, which is where the energy is most needed. The same holds true for local governments, which often block adoption of RES-e by refusing to issue building permits for such projects or by charging such high fees to issue permits that again the entry cost is raised beyond the small investor’s reach.
If RES-e production is going to survive and thrive, this trend must be reversed, and state laws and subsequently state courts are increasingly becoming battlegrounds between aesthetics and science. Currently eight states have enacted laws giving homeowners teeth against HOAs and local governments, while four more are considering them. Perhaps most well known is California’s “solar rights” law, which bars restrictions against solar panels and water-heating systems by HOAs and other public entities on the basis of appearances.
Additionally, similar bills have been introduced in both houses of Congress to move homeowners’ RES-e rights to the federal level. Although these bills received little support to date, the new administration’s drive toward green power could change that rapidly.
Not a luxury is the electrical transmission grid. Already aging, subject to brownouts and blackouts in some regions, and in desperate need of upgrades, the grid that stretches across the U.S. and Canada will control the rate of advance for RES-e systems.
Many transmission nodes within the grid require additional depth to handle the increased workload from the exponentially rising numbers of electrical devices—computers, entertainment systems, kitchen appliances, heating and cooling systems, even plug-in cars—in high population areas. In addition, the electrical inputs into the grid must be balanced against the demand load, with additional power needed during peak hours. Under the current system of generating electricity via a few hydrocarbon-based generation plants, grid managers can balance their loads relatively easily; but when a cityful of solar panels or rooftop turbines kick in, this task becomes much more difficult.
Without strengthening this necessary infrastructure, and without finding a means of balancing these inputs against demand loads, RES-e could cause more problems than it solves. The cost of grid upgrades, meanwhile, could eat a significant share of the new administration’s recently proposed economic stimulus plan.
There’s no easy solution to driving such a fundamental change within the world’s largest economy, particularly through established political fiefdoms and vested interests. Nobody should expect the process to be smooth or error-free; but then, neither is economics.
By Erica Tesla, on February 12th, 2009
There have been more words written about the iPhone “phenomenon” than perhaps any other single piece of technology. So it might seem like another blog would be just one more for the pile.
But the iPhone presents a perfect example of technology making its mark on consumer behavior. A recent article in the LA Times discusses the overwhelming accessibility of information for iPhone users. The article primarily explores the possibility that this accessibility could become a social liability – the phone can “in seconds change a lighthearted conversation into the Pursuit of Truth”.
It is true that easy access to information via the iPhone may make it all too easy to beat a dead horse, but access to information has important – and interesting – economic consequences. A well-known problem in economics is that of asymmetric information. In a typical exchange of goods or services, one party will usually have more information than the other. In theory, this information would either cause the seller to demand a higher price for the item or the buyer to offer less.
Have you ever suspected you were being had by a used car salesman? Hand your iPhone over to your buddy to pull up Kelly Blue Book while you test drive. Not sure that first edition at the Rare Books Emporium is actually all that rare? Hop on Amazon and see if copies are going for three cents plus shipping. Can’t understand why on earth your friend would pay $80 for those shoes? Hop on Facebook and read her review, detailing her five years in the same pair.
Indeed, some say that social networking – the ability to see what people you trust think about something before you shell out cash – is the most powerful aspect of the iPhone. Jared Kelley-Hudgins, a design student from the Atlanta area, says the phone has opened up a “huge opportunity for people to check on a certain product, be it a pair of jeans, a computer, or car, with their peers.” Jared is holding out for the new iPhone, in particular for the expected 3G feature, which if introduced would make accessing the internet outside of Wi-Fi networks up to 10 times faster than speeds on EDGE networks.
For some people, it seems, almost instantaneous is not quite fast enough.
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By R. C. Anderson, on October 16th, 2008
One concept most scientists agree on is that water is necessary for life. Because of this, finding water on Mars has become a mission for NASA. In the October 3 issue of Science, it was reported that the Phoenix mission to Mars has found minerals that “are indicators of liquid water in the past,” according to principal Phoenix investigator Peter Smith at a press conference on September 29. These minerals were sampled mere centimeters above the suspected position of frozen water.
To discover if indeed water had interacted with the minerals, the Phoenix took samples and ran several tests. Through these tests, soil samples were heated to high temperatures while Phoenix measured the amount of water and carbon dioxide released. Scientists believe that anywhere from tens of thousands to several million years ago the frozen ice on Mars may have warmed. This could have caused the ice to melt, allowing for the possibility of microbial life to develop in the soil. Even if this holds true, it is possible that the water and microbes formed elsewhere on the planet and were relocated via wind and time.
Unfortunately, this gives scientists little insight into when the liquid water existed or where. To make matters worse, the Phoenix machine only has a matter of months before the Martian winter disables it. Since the Phoenix is powered by solar panels and the sun is increasingly absent, it will soon fail to function. Phoenix has, however, already finished its original 90-day mission and an extended 30-day mission. While Smith would like to look for organic matter resulting from past life, William Boynton, another lead scientist, is not very hopeful of success. He notes that if any does exist, it exists in very small quantities. Scientists anticipate that Phoenix will continue to operate into November; however, toward the end of the month, it is likely the extreme cold and snow will completely disable the system.
Future Missions
Another mission, however, is already being planned for 2010. Recently, 100 scientists met to vote on where to send the Mars Science Laboratory (MSL) to have the most success of finding water. This is important since it will cost $1.9 billion. As always, there were two opposing groups. The spectroscopists hope to send the machine to areas which give off spectral colors distinctive of rocks which have interacted with water. The second group, geologists, believe any site showing rock formations clearly formed by interaction with water would be the most likely place for success. It will still take until November for the managers and landing-site steering committee to decide which three spots should be in contention as the most viable. It will be until spring 2009 before a winning site is declared.
Although the MSL was originally planned for launch in the fall of 2009, it was feared that this would be delayed for two years. Scientists grew anxious that this could delay other missions or cancel them all together if the MSL was not launched as planned. The reason for this was increased cost and complexity of the MSL machine. The MSL is four times heavier than the typical machines and is loaded with scientific instruments to examine the soil and atmosphere of Mars. This has been costly. In 2004, the rover was to cost $1.2 billion. As of this year, it is now projected to cost $1.9 billion.
Budget Concerns
The flow of money has not been staunched, however. NASA expects another $300 million to be added to the project, increasing the total cost to $2.2 billion. If this happens, it could threaten the 2013 Scout mission which is estimated to cost $485 million. The 2016 mission could also be cancelled. If it is, the $1.4 billion that would be freed would be put toward the MSL mission and two other rovers currently on Mars. Unfortunately, delaying the MSL launch could cost even more than continuing with it, according to Jack Mustard who leads NASA’s Mars science advisory panel. He noted that, “A two year delay could increase the cost of the mission…that would come out of the Mars budget.”
Regardless of the decision made regarding MSL and future rover missions, it is certain that the search for water and life on Mars will cost significant amounts of money in the near future. Although the findings from this type of study could be interesting, spending this much money on such a project tends to seem a bit irresponsible given the $700 billion bailout the government is also slated to spend in an attempt to save the economy. Perhaps the billions of dollars currently marked for rover missions could be reallocated to a fund for tax payer relief instead.
References:
Kerr, Richard. Minerals Suggest Water Once Flowed On Mars—But Where? (3 Oct 2008). Science 322(5898) p. 32.
Kerr, Richard. Culture Wars Over How to Find an Ancient Niche for Life on Mars. (3 Oct 2008). Science 322(5898) p. 39.
Lawler, Andrew. Rising Costs Could Delay NASA’s Next Mission to Mars and Future Launches. (26 Sept 2008). Science 321(5897) p. 1754.
By James Ratcliff, on August 28th, 2008
“Eat your vegetables,” my mother told me when I was growing up in America in the 1950s. “Children are starving in Europe.”
My mother’s postwar economic geography sounds comically antiquated today; she could never have foreseen a world in which the euro is stronger than the U.S. dollar. But in another sense she was half a century ahead of her time; her quaint tactics were designed not only to encourage me to finish a meal but—at least in part, I think—to teach me that the destinies of all people on earth are somehow connected.
Although economic geography has undergone changes my mother never would have imagined, one thing remains unchanged: the key to reducing poverty around the world is to build a sense of community at the global level.
When I was a child, of course, I could find no connection between my uneaten vegetables and hungry people in a faraway land. I knew that cleaning my plate had nothing to do with anyone else’s stomach—not directly, at least. But what I didn’t know then—and what my mother must have known all along—is that, when coupled with the necessary resources, a desire to make a difference is a powerful tool for change.
The most ambitious twentieth-century attempt at changing the world—the United Nations—is generally perceived as having failed to improve political, economic and social conditions around the world. Time after time, the UN has failed to prevent genocide, famine and widespread repression of political freedom. If global collaboration is the key to solving the world’s most pressing problems, then in view of the UN’s dismal performance, do we still have a reason to hope?
The World Development Report has been published annually for the last 30 years by the World Bank. The 2008 Report focused on the key role of agriculture as an instrument for development and poverty reduction. All 191 UN member nations have committed to the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). Goal 1 is to eradicate extreme hunger and poverty.
The nations of the world and the World Bank have thus reached an unusual and perhaps unprecedented consensus; everyone agrees that the key to reducing poverty in the poorest areas of the world is to target more aid money for agricultural development. But as Time recently reported, “This year the U.S. will give more than $800 million to Ethiopia: $460 million for food, $350 million for HIV/AIDS treatment—and just $7 million for agricultural development.”
Spending the bulk of our available resources to treat chronic ills and recurring crises is like treating a cancer patient with band-aids: the deep causes of the patient’s condition go untreated as long as we must respond to one crisis after another, even though we think we know what the root of the problem is and where our money really needs to go.
According to the 2008 World Development Report, 2.1 billion people live on less than $2 a day; 880 million live on less than $1 a day. Agricultural development isn’t a magic bullet; disease, lack of education, social inequality and political corruption are huge obstacles. But since three of every four poor people in the developing world live in rural areas, targeted investment in agriculture promises to pay the most immediate social and economic dividends.
World Development Goal 1 is to cut worldwide poverty and hunger in half by 2015. Even though the G8 leaders have pledged to increase African aid to $50 billion a year by 2010, “Sub-Saharan Africa is at the greatest risk of not achieving the Goals and is struggling to progress on almost every dimension of poverty, including hunger, lack of education, and prevalent disease,” says the UN.
Our Heavy Responsibility
It’s hard to picture a scenario in which the affluent nations of the world will be willing to spend even more money to achieve the MDGs. “You will always have the poor with you,” Jesus told his followers two millennia ago. Although 21st-century economic geography suggests that Jesus was an astute economist, he also exhorted his followers to aid the poor to the best of their ability.
Microsoft chairman Bill Gates believes that creative capitalism is the best way to reduce grinding poverty in developing nations. In theory, Gates’ proposed “system innovation” would produce a kind of planetary trickle-down effect by stimulating consumption in affluent economies.
But as long as we live on a planet with limited resources, unrestrained consumerism in wealthy nations can only produce the opposite effect. On a global scale—and in a closed system—an increase in consumption in affluent nations is more likely to bring about a decrease in consumption in the poorest areas of the world.
Wouldn’t it make more economic sense to consume less in rich economies in order to provide more to the world’s poor? As Vic George pointed out two decades ago in Wealth, Poverty and Starvation, “From a rational perspective this would be a desirable trend because most people in affluent countries consume far too much for their own physical and mental health.”
In Development as Freedom, Amartya Sen, winner of the 1998 Nobel Prize in Economic Science, wrote, “With adequate social opportunities, individuals can effectively shape their own destiny and help each other.”
Sen has argued that human capability influences rapid change far more than human capital. In view of Sen’s findings, Nicholas Negroponte’s One Laptop per Child Foundation is one of the most exciting ideas in the global marketplace. There are two reasons why it can work:
1. It stimulates direct targeted investment in the world’s poor.
2. It aims to unleash human capability.
The Mande people of West Africa have a sophisticated belief system. Although primarily an Islamic people, Mande cosmogony hardly sounds foreign to anyone who is familiar with the Old Testament book of Genesis. “When the Everlasting addressed man, He taught him the law by which all the elements of the cosmos were formed and continue to exist. He made man the Guardian and Governor of His universe and charged him with supervision of the maintenance of universal Harmony. That is why being man is a heavy responsibility.”
Our food consumption, to cite one of the most blatant examples of universal disharmony, is out of control. At the beginning of the new millennium, the percentage of obese Americans had skyrocketed to 65%.
“We’ll be cutting down on fast food, sweets and other unnecessary calories,” my mother would have said if she were raising children in 2008 instead of 1958. “We’ll eat better and save more. Let’s see how many laptops we can buy for kids in Africa.” Then she might have added, “We’ll all be healthier and happier for it.”
Teaching children about man’s heavy responsibility is the best education we can give them. Can smarter consumption in affluent countries be channeled into exponentially greater levels of targeted investment in the world’s poorest economies?
It couldn’t hurt to give it a try—we’ve tried everything else. Who knows? We might all be healthier and happier for it.
By R. C. Anderson, on July 14th, 2008
In about 10 years we could all feel a little closer, technologically speaking, to George Jetson. Although our cars probably won’t be flying, they could be driving themselves. In June 2008, Carnegie Mellon University issued a press release stating that their robotics institute had just received a $5 million grant from General Motors. This money will be used to continue one of the institute’s main projects: autonomous cars. According to Dr. Raj Rajkumar, who is the co-director of the project, the technology for driverless cars could be available to the public in as little as 10 years with the cars themselves available by 2030.
On November 3, 2007, DARPA sponsored a race between autonomous cars developed by 11 different groups. DARPA’s Grand Challenge website has stated that 89 teams applied to race, 35 passed DARPA’s initial tests and 11 were allowed to compete in the final event. “Boss”, an SUV entered by Rajkumar’s associates, Tartan Racing, finished first and won $2 million. The mission was for each car to not only cross the finish line but to also stop at pre-set checkpoints. Since half of the race was off-road, each car was given a GPS map of the 55-mile course 24 hours in advance. This gave scientists 24 hours to upload the map to the car. However, the positions of the checkpoints were only provided five minutes before the race began. Using 19 sensors, 2-D and 3-D lasers, cameras and short and long range radar, Boss was able to stop at each checkpoint and ultimately win the race.
Fortunately, Rajkumar believes a “hybrid or fully electric vehicle would be [an] ideal” platform to build autonomous cars upon since they have a built-in power source. This could be used to run the accoutrements used to drive the car. While Boss required an extra generator to power the various sensors, lasers and cameras, the new model is based on a Chevrolet Tahoe hybrid which extinguishes this need. Boss was also outfitted with bulky sensors and attachments around the top of the frame; future models are intended to have scaled down versions which can be hidden in the front and rear bumpers as well as the head and tail lights. Rajkumar expects some of the technology to be integrated into current cars in as little as five years. Cameras and lasers could be incorporated to sense when a driver is drifting off-road, if a car is hiding in a blind spot or to quickly slow down if a car ahead brakes suddenly.
Many social and financial benefits could come from the general acceptance of autonomous cars. For example, the elderly could be driven anywhere they wish without having to depend on others or their eyesight after dark. Children could automatically be driven to school with the push of a button, leaving parents free to go to work. Since cars would be controlled by a computer and not manually, accidents would decrease. According to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), there were almost 43,000 deaths from roughly 6 million car accidents in 2006. The National Center for Statistics and Analysis has reported that in 2005, car accidents were the leading cause of death for Americans ages 4 to 34. Rajkumar anticipates that the number of deaths could be lowered by 1 to 2 orders of magnitude to 430-4,300 deaths per year. This dramatic decrease would be due to the fact that computers do not get drunk, angry, fall asleep or commit human errors. The vehicle would always be fully aware. This would be positive for the overall economy since the NHTSA estimated in 2000 that $230.6 billion was spent every year due to car crashes. Of this, $977,000 was spent for each fatality and $1.1 million was spent on injured victims. If the number of accidents decrease, then it would follow that insurance rates would as well. Since insurance rates are based on how many accidents a type of car has, insurance for automated cars would have to be significantly less than for a manually operated one.
This is not to say that there may not be problems with such a car. Problems could arise if the car’s computer were “hacked” into or if the computer shorted out. If either of these were to happen, the consequences could be serious. Rajkumar believes the safety systems involved in autonomous cars would prevent either of these from being a problem. “Serious and secure safety mechanisms” would be built into the car to prevent others from accessing the computer. He doesn’t foresee problems being any worse than they are today. As for internal computer problems, there would be “multiple stages of operation.” If the computer were to go down, a backup would take over so fluidly, the driver would probably never know there was a problem. This is considered stage one. At stage two, the car would go into a more degraded operation or “limp home” mode. Stage three would allow the car to slow down, pull over to the side and call for help. The car itself would know if something was wrong and initiate the appropriate backup system.
Rajkumar believes GM will be one of the first manufacturers to begin production of these cars. “GM is our biggest partner and funding [organization],” he says. GM is even funding a second lab to continue such research to perfect the technology. However, anyone who watches the BBC’s top rated car show Top Gear will have already seen an autonomous car in action. Made by BMW, this experimental car flew around the racetrack while a nervous Jeremy Clarkson sat passively in the driver’s seat. Regardless of who produces the car first for the general populace, it is certain that this type of technology could shift how we think of driving and how much we pay individually and as a society for it.
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