Here are my thoughts on how self-driving cars related to healthcare. In no particular order.
- First, it is very likely that self driving technology is already well past the reliability and safety of any human driver. This makes for a classic engineering ethics debate. How long will our society tolerate a technical solution to a problem (driving) that we know is much less safe than another solution (AI drivers), just because we are used to a particular paradigm (human drivers).
- Second, there will be a very strange middle stage when self-driving becomes available in new cars. AI drivers are likely to be vastly more cautious than normal drivers. Some are very concerned that this will cause a problem with humans “bullying” AI drivers. But there is also going to be a health disparity created here. People who can afford new cars could be nearly immune from car accidents, creating a new kind of haves/have nots.
- We can expect that the geo structure of modern life will change substantially. The introduction of highways to the US caused a migration to suburbs by making a longer drive shorter. Soon it may become both affordable and popular to live in very rural areas, because long commutes will be easier to handle. If you can read, type and make phone calls safely as your car handles a two hour commute to work, long drives will become much more tolerable. This could increase populations in very rural areas, making emergency services drive longer for more people. This could dramatically increase the need for automated drone-based life-flights that are capable of air-lifting people much more cheaply.
- Similarly, very urban areas could entirely loose parking facilities. Instead of parking cars, they would either drive themselves away from urban areas to use cheaper parking, or perhaps stay active in “uber-mode” delivering other passengers to different destinations. Car ownership could become something that is done only by the very rich (who choose to afford their own self-driving car rather than subject themselves to the availability of a pool of unowned cars) or the very poor (who choose to drive themselves in older cars, and face the problem of vanishing parking)
- As self-drive cars age, they will become subject to more mechanical problems and more unreliable, increasing the delta between the safety of self-driving cars (which will be smart enough to seek their own maintenance).
- It is entirely possible that humans will choose to unionize drivers. So even though a truck is capable to driving itself, a human “monitor” will be required to be present for “accountability” purposes (but really just so they stay employed). We are already seeing that “sitting is the new smoking” and these “driver monitors” could lead to a hyper-sedentary lifestyle that could have very negative impacts. Drivers are already subject to lots of unhealthy behaviors, which could be made much worse by disengaging them from any energy expending processes at all.
- The impact on policing cannot be over emphasized. Many small police departments rely entirely on traffic tickets for revenue. In fact, many small towns are entirely run on ticket revenue. Large police departments also rely on traffic violations for funding policing. In some ways, one might consider the police presence as something that is enabled by the fact that roaming police are constantly able to gain revenue by ticketing traffic violations. Depending on how this issue is resolved we could see police targeting “pedestrian violations” much more heavily, or we could see an uptick in violence as a result of lowered policing. When you consider the possibility of “drone police cars” that are themselves lowering the cost of police presence… it becomes very difficult to predict how policing, and as a result, violent crime, will change in response to self-driving technology.
- Almost all organ donations are made as the result of traffic accidents. This could lead to a critical shortage of donations. This shortage will likely cause the funding for organ printing to sky-rocket. This is similar to the “parity costs” for solar energy. There is a kind of “parity cost” for organ printing in healthcare and dramatically reduced accident rates as the result of self driving cars could change that calculus very quickly. However, we may face a decade(ish) worth of organ shortage (and corresponding shortages) before organ printing works fully, and after accident based organ donation trails off.
- Accidents of any kind are generally estimated to be the sixth, fifth or fourth leading cause of death in the United States. Auto accidents are the most common cause of accident. If you eliminate this as a “way to die” it will put greater pressure on heart disease, stroke and age related disorders like Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s disease. This is a good problem to have, of course, be it needs to be accounted for.
Thats all I can think of off the top of my head.
-FT