What driverless cars will cost us

I was watching this mini documentary about Waymo driverless cars and how they are are impacting the livelihood of cab drivers and also Uber and Lyft drivers in the US. They're only in a few cities at the moment, but they are likely to spread and become far more commonplace. The thought came to me that mostly likely within the next 10 to 20 years we'll be seeing them in KL, too.

Personally, I don't like to chat with the Grab drivers when I get a ride, as I do occasionally. It might be an introvert thing; I also don't want to chat with my hairdresser 😂 But I know people who enjoy chatting with their drivers because some drivers have such interesting stories to tell. This is something we'll lose if driverless services start to take over. 

I started thinking about how taxi drivers are the ones who know the city best and are familiar with all sorts of secrets the city has to keep. We've already lost this with Grab drivers, some of whom are part-timers, but all of whom rely on the GPS system in their Grab app and so I daresay never have to memorise the network of routes in the city nor figure out its complexity. I say that cos I know that relying on Google Maps for navigation has caused me to pay less attention to routes because I haven't had to make myself take note of landmarks and such. The app says, "Turn left," and I turn... if you were to ask me later, I couldn't tell you precisely which junction I'd turned at. So probably only the old-timer taxi drivers know the city very well, the ones who were driving around before the advent of GPS.

If you're a visitor to the city, often the cab driver is the one who's easiest to chat with and to ask for advice about places to go or where to find the best food. You may not feel comfortable or safe approaching a stranger on the street, but it's the most natural thing in the world to strike up a conversation with a cabbie and ask them about their city. Anyway, you also have no reason to think that the stranger on the street would know the stuff you expect the cabbie to know, simply because the cabbie has ferried so many people around to so many places that he has more knowledge about the city than most others. 

All this is the cost of replacing a human's job with automation. I remember seeing another video (can't remember which one now) which talked about how replacing a doorman with doors that open automatically may seem more efficient, but an automated door doesn't notice that they haven't seen eighty-two-year-old Mrs Wong coming and going in five days and worry about her. It won't be able to catch the hand of a child who is about to dash out onto the street ahead of their parents. It won't be looking out for miscreants who are loitering in the street and making the young female residents feel unsafe when they are coming home. 

Those were my examples cos I don't remember what examples the video used, but you get the point. The doorman does more than just stand there and open doors. We put a dollar value on the service or the work done and we think that replacing him would be more cost-efficient, but we have not considered all the other things he does which can't really be quantified -- but which help to enrich the community. 

Similarly, with taxi drivers, we have put a dollar value on the work they do and considered replacing humans with driverless cars because it's a way to make money without having to pay some of that money to a human in the process. But we haven't considered the other ways in which they contribute -- the unseen value that we're going to lose because we didn't learn to appreciate it when we had it.