What will be obsolete in 10 years?

Sadly, true. The robots are doing it way better than humans already.

You mean 'human radiologists'. The field will still be there and humans will still play a decently sized role in it but minor things like spotting a broken bone on an x-ray won't require a $60,000pa radiologist to spot.

The scans may be objective but interpreting them is subjective. Doubt AI will advance enough in 10 years to put radiologists out of business.

kayz08:

mumble rap hopefully

Let's hope it takes far less than 10 years!

If we're lucky, face tats as well.

We need handwritten letters back. I hate seeing "lol" and emojis

I'm hoping for a cashless society. Mobile payments is widely the norm in China

To take it a step further, what I always hear is that self driving cars will impact real-estate planning. Once they become commonplace, and private car ownership is significantly down, houses will no longer need to be built with garages, businesses won't need to have such a large footprint parking structure, etc.

What was the article you pulled the hotels and diners bit from? I remember reading that a year or so back. I'd like to go back and read it again.

lapike:

Here's a spooky one: truck drivers.

As soon as self-driving big rigs hit the road, we're going to see a huge upset in a major employment sector in our economy. How can our 50,000 truck drivers compete with a robot who can drive 24/7 and never get tired, never complain, never let some product "fall off the back"?

And then what happens to the small towns that relied on truck drivers to fill their hotels and eat at their diners? Look at what happened to all the now-dead towns along the old Route 66 when that highway died. Imagine that on a nationwide scale.

Here's a more "what if" one - but car dealerships. It's possible that self-driving cars plus car services like uber and lyft could further depress the demand for new cars, much the same way that longer lasting cars have resulted in slower car sales (remember, 40 years ago, it was considered a miracle if your car made it to 100k miles. Now it's standard to drive them to 250k unless you're driving a Yugo or a Daewoo). But when I can call a car to me whenever I want, have it autonomously drive itself to me, and then drive me to my location (creating a "mobile office" like environment for me to work while it drives), then why would I ever want to buy a new car? With the end of private car ownership, you lose dealerships, you lose service centers, you lose all those after-market places that sell 40'' rims and 180 dB speaker systems. This will upset everything.

Long haul truck drivers may be eliminated, but even that is a stretch as the 'last mile' will still be human. My dad owns a regional logistics firm that also has cross country capability and he has been drooling for this technology for years, but also understands the limitations such as navigating in incredibly tight spaces/locations. He envisions the creation of an additional stop when performing cross country trips to offload product/goods to a human driver to then be taken to the destination. Don't expect to see robotic 18 wheelers in NYC

I think a large part of the auto industry may suffer but you'll still have collectors/car fans/sports car drivers. Sure they'll be a small thing but cars have an appeal besides their function similar to watches - people thought digital watches (and now smart watches) would make the mechanical watch industry obsolete but it's doing pretty well because people have evolved to want watches as more than just things to tell the time.

This may be a contrarian POV but I think the appeal of personal automobiles goes beyond utility and into economy, luxury, customization, etc. The urban middle class market for automobiles may hollow out in time, but Uber hasn't exactly made it cheaper to get around. I think long term on the road will have a lot of poorer people driving their own cars (economical) and upper class enthusiasts (i.e. market for Bugattis won't dramatically change).

Since the lower class represents the vast majority of people on the road, I am shorting the idea of a near to medium-term driverless future. It might just be my LA perspective but that's the way I see it. I'm hoping driver assist technology makes the road safer, but I won't hold my breath for the next 10 years.

lapike:

you lose all those after-market places that sell 40'' rims and 180 dB speaker systems. This will upset everything.

When Pimp my ride stopped airing, it really upset me.

I think under this scenario Mercedes does better than the others. I think the upper market would see a lot of customization and the rich will buy their own self driving cars. But the middle class will find it’s cheaper to use Uber/Lyft.

I also wouldn’t be shocked if Uber goes bankrupt. Not a big believer they have an real edge in the autonomous car environment. Autonomous cars should make it easier for competitors to enter the market as the hard part of building a driver force is eliminated. You basically just need to have enough cars that you can get one to someone in 3 minutes. Which means the margins on the guy who built the software will not be that great.

It’s like google. They have a lock on the market but we don’t pay google anything. If google charged a quarter a search and yahoo charged 20 cents then everyone would go to yahoo. Should be brutal price wars in that business. I think it will be fairly easy for 30 competitors to spring up with a 5000 cars each roaming thru a city like Chicago.

I fear that autonomous driving is an industry that is just waiting to get over regulated by the government to the point of implausibility or extinction. Can it work? Absolutely.

However, will it survive after the first autonomous 18-wheeler slams into a school bus full of kids prior to the technology being perfected? That's an entirely different political and non-technological question.

100 years, maybe. 10 years, no way.

Whenever I read about self driving cars, it reminded me of Total Recall and that annoying talking robot in front. Hope the developers remember to include a trigger to shut the thing up.

whoever throw a SB at this is an incel

People think this is funny, but sexbot brothels are already operating (and thriving) in Europe...

Also, virtual reality 'sex' is going to change the relations between men and women in a big way, teenage men may never see the need to talk to women and thus never develop the social skills to do so (the end of the human race?). I can see a really good plot to a sci-fi movie here.

There are some arguments to be made in favor of paralegals and bookkeepers being automated. I don't see these positions going away - just that there will be fewer, and those jobs in the future will require the operation of more sophisticated tools of automation.

m_1:

Paralegals/book keepers/anyone that does white collar work that's easy to automate like the above. Hell, we even use AI to automate our CS for our portfolio companies which meant 1 human now does the work of 3 or 4 people...

LOL. Paralegals aren't going anywhere. Any honest lawyer (ok, lol) will tell you that their paralegals do most of the real, actual work. Paralegals are like nurses--they do almost all of the real work but get paid a fraction of what their boss gets paid--in other words, they are the perfect employee.

Long Jo Mills