It’s easier than ever to be a futurist. Simply imagine what life will be like when driverless cars take over our streets and highways. Noah Smith, who’s a professor of finance at Stony Brook University, took a run at the question in an essay for Bloomberg reprinted Thursday as an op-ed in the Tribune.
If all this sounds like deja vu to the attentive reader, Smith admits that it is. “You’ll notice that all of these are basically continuations of problems we’ve already seen in the U.S.” Not that the automobile wasn’t worth all the grief it has caused, and not that the benefits of driverless cars won’t be “enormous,” but they’ll bring all sorts of “policy challenges” that Smith says we need to be thinking about now.
Maybe they won’t come down. I don’t know. I’m just saying driverless cars will bring us a future that’s not beyond the imaginative reach of anybody. Maybe you can imagine segregation by class and race becoming even worse than it is now.
