Driverless Cars And Their Impact On The Economy

The impact of technology on the job market is causing a lot of concern at the moment. We’ve already started to see the seeds of this change with things like automated self service tills at grocery stores but this is just the beginning. One of the more recent innovations that is set to change the world in a big way is driverless car technology. Most of us have considered the impact it will have on our daily lives, but just how much will it change the job market?

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Safe Jobs

The biggest fear is that anybody in a driving job is going to be unemployed and the number of available jobs will plummet immediately. Luckily, it’s not that simple. There are some driving jobs that will still need to be done by people for a while at least. Heavy towing companies should be relatively safe because if a car has broken down, trusting another automated vehicle to recover it might not be the best choice. It takes a lot of judgment on the part of the driver when towing a car in the middle of a busy road. An artificial intelligence program isn’t going to be advanced enough to do that for quite a few years yet. There will also be a huge amount of jobs created by the driverless car industry because they’ll need to be maintained and the software that runs them will need to be updated and improved on a regular basis.

Unsafe Jobs

Unfortunately, there are a lot of jobs that will become obsolete. There are plenty of obvious ones like taxi drivers, delivery drivers etc. They just won’t be necessary anymore because automated vehicles will do all of that work for you. What people might not have considered is the other jobs that only exist while we have human drivers. Traffic attendants, for example, will be a thing of the past. It’s unclear what the situation will be if a driverless car does break traffic rules but it is going to be very rare so the number of parking attendants will drop quickly. The number of traffic police will also massively decrease because, again, autonomous cars aren’t going to break driving laws. This doesn’t mean that people will lose their jobs, and in fact will be a good thing because it frees up the time of officers and lets them direct it toward more important work.

Housing

When autonomous cars are widespread it’s likely that the idea of owning your own car will go completely out of the window. There’s no need when a car can pick you up, drop you off and then go to the next person that needs a lift. We’ve already seen the way that technology has changed driving in this way with things like Uber. The major effect of that is that there won’t be any need for parking anymore. Parking lots take up a huge amount of space so getting rid of them leaves us with loads more room, especially in cities. With a huge housing crisis going on, space is a commodity that we don’t have enough of. Getting rid of all of those parking lots and building houses on that space could be the solution we need to kickstart a reduction in house prices.

The impact of driverless cars will go way further than your personal commute. These are just a few predictions but nobody truly knows what the future holds.