🚗 HELLO FUTURE: The Great Thanksgiving Drive… Without the Driving

Speaker 1 (00:07):
The other day, I was walking my dog, Theo, and
I see this car with a helicopter thing on top
of it, and I didn't see anyone in the front seat.
My jaw dropped and I thought, this is one of
those driverless car things. Hello Future, it's me Kevin. This
is a dispatch from the Digital Frontier. The planet is Earth,
the year is twenty twenty five, and my name is
Kevin Cyrillian. Today I'm talking all about driverless cars. Is
this something that we need? Is this traffic jam on steroids?
When are we all going to get one? Why should
we want one? And what does the future look like
if none of us are drivers and when you turn
sixteen you get in a robot and not to the DMV,
Maybe that's a good thing. My guest today is the
leading authoritative voice when it comes to driverless cars. His
name is Professor Philip Coopman. He is the emeritus Professor
of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Carnegie Mellon University, and
for the purposes of this he's my go to driverless
car guy. He is really the leading voice and has
been featured everywhere as it relates to the Autonomous Vehicle
Technology Summit everywhere talking about driverless cars. So, professor, when
are we all going to have driverless cars?

Speaker 2 (01:24):
Well, you can tick a ride in one today if
you want to go to one of the cities where
they're operating. There's this great saying that the future is here.
It's just not evenly distributed. It really applies to driverless cars.

Speaker 1 (01:37):
Why should we want them? I mean, obviously we've seen
I was just looking at the local headlines. A beloved
cat got ahead. I think it was San Francisco. Actually,
some cat got run over by a driverless car. Everybody's
up in arms, the animal rights people, blah blah blah.
If a driverless car hit my dog, I would be livid.
But we're also seeing food delivery driverless cars. We're seeing
cities in Texas and California begin to expect with them.
I've been in them. We've all probably been in them once.
But I don't know. I mean, why should we want them?

Speaker 2 (02:06):
Well, let's sort of tease out a subtlety that matters here.
We're talking about cars that don't actually have a driver,
as opposed to a car where the driver's there to
absorb the blame if something bad happens. Right, So, we're
because there's that's mostly what's on the road right now,
and people say they're self driving, but they're not. Really,
this is the future. So we're talking about cars and
trucks that don't have a driver. They may not even
have a place for a person to sit inside the vehicle.
Because that that's the future we're being promised, right, So what.

Speaker 1 (02:37):
If that's the future that's being promise. I find this
fascinating and phil because this would dramatically change the car
insurance market.

Speaker 2 (02:45):
Maybe that's an interesting one car, you know, car has
a crash, most of the car insurance money goes towards
fixing the cars, not for damage to people. So they
could still have crashes. But why you asked, why would
we want them? I would love nothing better than when
I'm driving from Pittsburgh, where I live, to Washington, d C.
Because flying super expensive and it takes longer than driving
many times. Right, I'd love to just go into my car,
pop on a movie, take a nap, whatever, and not
have to worry about driving. I would just love that,
and I think that's pretty common and it would be
nice to not have people having to spend their lives
sitting in trucks. Now, the trucker, the truckers want to
make a living. I get that. But in the future,
if we can work that out so everyone still has
a great job, to not have people sitting there at
steering wheels that that's their job, you know. And if
you can get it to be even safer than it
is today, that would be even better. So there's lots
of reasons to really like this technology, and the question
is going to be when is it going to be
here at scale?

Speaker 1 (03:49):
So I believe that technology and innovation in particular always
have an upside, some more job creation. And I think
that the mainstream media has just done a lot of
doom and gloom with innovation kills jobs. Innovation kills jobs.
I'm not naive. Obviously certain jobs are going to be displaced,
but I think the upside is always more job creation,
and in markets that we haven't even thought of yet.
But specifically for when does it get here? You asked
the question, It's my same question to you, when do
we live in this area? I've got to go to Philly?
For example, When can I get to my driverless car
and go to Philly to visit my parents? As opposed
to having to suffer through traffic, And what impact would
if everybody has a driverless car, what impact would this
have on traffic?

Speaker 2 (04:33):
Well, lots of questions there. Let me do the traffic
one first, then let me go back to the timeline.
There's a paradox here that if you make a commodity cheaper,
probably people want more of it. And so if you
make it cheaper per mile to run cars, why in
the world would you expect the world the roads to
get empty and there'd be less congestion. There might be
more congestion. There's a lot of trickiness when you throw
this new technology. Like any new technology, you're going to
have all sorts of unforeseen common sequences, and traffic getting
worse instead are better might be one of them. But
maybe we don't care because we're in our mobile living
rooms and we're doing other stuff and we get there
when we get there, it's really hard to know how
that turns out. But the timeline, and back to the
trucker jobs and the timeline, the timeline is longer than
anyone you're probably listening to is promising. This is a
multi decade journey, and so if you're a truck driver today,
you probably can retire as a truck driver. Even if
there's robot trucks, it's going to be a long time
before they're all robot trucks, so they just And now
why do I say that. It's simple. Let's say every
single car was a robotaxi today, which we are very
far from. Let's say every robotaxi is a car today.
Every car is a robotaxi today. The average car is
more than twelve years old. So that's more than a
decade just to turn over half the fleet, and we're
nowhere near being able to produce them at that scale
right now.

Speaker 1 (06:00):
So I find this interesting that you're saying multi decade
because if you look at specifically the end of the
eighteen hundreds in America, and we talk about history a
lot on the show, even though it's a show about
the future, but that was really when the automobile first
came onto the scene, and in around nineteen hundreds, horses
still dominated transportation in cities like New York London.

Speaker 2 (06:26):
Right, it took a long time, a long time, and.

Speaker 1 (06:29):
It really there were twenty one million horses. Twenty one
million horses. I didn't even know.

Speaker 2 (06:34):
That that's a lot of horsepoo, by the way.

Speaker 1 (06:37):
Well, and by the way, I bet you there was
a job for cleaning up horse poop, and.

Speaker 2 (06:41):
There was also a job for cleaning up the horses
that would die in the city, because there are a
lot of horses in the cities and they don't live forever.

Speaker 1 (06:48):
And those jobs were then replaced. And there were only
eight thousand cars in about in about nineteen hundred, so
the nineteen tens, Henry Ford and the Ford Model T
which you know, don't fact check me. Around nineteen oh eight,
this was the affordable middle class car. Nineteen fifteen, even
more cars than horses on American streets in some major cities.
So it took about twenty years or so for there
to be more cars than horses. But in the nineteen twenties,
so to your point, it took multi decades for cars
to replace horses. That became the primary mode of transportation
in most US cities, and the infrastructure shifted, and that's
really you're talking about as an upgrade to America's auto infrastructure.
But there were several issues that arose. We needed new roads,
new traffic lights, We needed gas stations, obviously, so the
number of horses plummeted from twenty million to about three
million in nineteen thirty and then by the nineteen thirties
and most industrialized nations, horses were largely limited to just
recreation or farming. So is that the right history to
be looking at? And what are some of the transitions
that we're going to have to make over the next
several decades to prepare for what I'm arguing would be
an inevitable future of autonomous vehicles.

Speaker 2 (08:06):
I think that's a great way to look at it.
This is it's a profound social change, but also millions
of vehicles. That's a lot of money. Tends what do
we have more than one hundred vehicles? It's one hundred
million vehicles in the US. It's the number of cars
per person is pretty high in the US, right, So
more than a hundred million vehicles, that's a lot of money.
That's a lot of vehicles. They don't build them that fast.
It's not happening. And saying well, robotaxis mean no one
will have to own a car, and it's not going
to work out either. Some people will do robotaxis, some
people own cars. The other thing along with it is
that there were social changes, and I want to point
out one. There's a my friend, Peter Norton is a
historian who does this. If you follow him on social media,
he'll put out news one hundred years ago. And the
news one hundred years ago was people having huge protests
against the safety problems caused by cars. I love this,
so people that will say, well, when cars came on,
no one was upset, Oh oh, no, oh, you have
no idea. There were protests and there were women carrying
pictures of their kids who had been killed by a car.
It was really of huge social upheaval.

Speaker 1 (09:11):
That is so interesting, Phil. I'm fascinated by that, and
I think it's so spot on because I always talk
about especially with artificial intelligence, and today we're focusing on
driverless cars. But I always say, if Thomas Edison came
out today with the light bulb in Westinghouse, he'd be
accused of putting candle makers out of business.

Speaker 2 (09:29):
I agree that it's not about doom and gloom in fear.
It's about making sure that the people who are going
to lose have an exit plan, have a reasonable exit plan,
and making sure the transition is just and equitable. So
one of the other things that happened hundred years ago. Well,
I said, there were all these protests and the cars
were dangerous, and the way it got solved was that
the car companies rammed a bunch of laws through to
basically take the streets away from people and give them
over to the cars. So the crime of ja tuck
got invented at a thin air.

Speaker 1 (10:02):
So actually I was talking about this in the prep
for this, you know, especially over the holidays. If you
get in the you know, first of no one is
supporting drinking and driving, but people shouldn't think that they
can get in a driverless car after they've had a
couple of drinks.

Speaker 2 (10:16):
Right, Well, that one's tricky. If we're talking about an
autopilot type car, you absolutely should not drive that drunk
because you're still the driver. You're still in charge. If
you're getting in the back of a robotaxi, the robotaxi
companies are saying that's what they're for is to give
you a right home. A robotaxi should be the same
as a human driven taxi, which means, yeah, you can
drive it home. But then you have all these interesting
social and practical issues. First of all, who cleans up
the mess if the person has an accident, right, But
the other one is what if the person passes out?
What if the person has a medical emergency and there's
no human driver in the car who's dealing with all
this stuff. And there's some legal things that if you
have access to a stop up a button, an emergency
stop button, which is for some things a good reason,
there's a good reason to have that in robotaxi if
something where it happens you want to get out, you
want to stop now button. But does that make you
the driver? And it might in some states and make
you liable of this crash. So going into robotaxi in
some states and some configurations could amount to drunk driving.
It should not be that way. The laws have to
be adjusted. But there's just so many nuances in details.
We're going to have to spend the next decade working
through to get all that sorted out. Well, and the
code that we really can use the robotaxis for where
they're going to do social good.

Speaker 1 (11:33):
Well, the company that figures that out, Because nobody wants
to go driving around in a four wheeled port a potty,
you know what I'm saying. I mean nobody.

Speaker 2 (11:40):
Well, they're gonna have to clean them. Yeah, so people
say robotaxis no people, It's like no, somebody still has
to clean them, someone has to maintain them, and someone
has to provide the human touch when a passenger needs
service or help or distress or or the robotaxi breaks
down in the middle of nowhere and they need help
getting out of that neighborhood. There's all sorts of stuff
beyond just being able to drive down the road. You know,
setting up a business is way more than just being
able to drive down the road. And that will be
worked out. But that's part of the decade long process
to figure all this stuff out and getting it to
work seamlessly, getting it to work at scale, getting it affordable.

Speaker 1 (12:19):
What about roads? So obviously the toll road structure is
something that was kind of around with the horses and
then it's stuck with it and the interstate highway system.
Will this technology cause us to reimagine roads and could
it be roads that charge vehicles? How will roads be
in the future.

Speaker 2 (12:43):
It could cause that, but it's not required for multiple decades.
I know, I keep saying multi decades. I just this
is a long.

Speaker 1 (12:51):
I got you yeah, I appreciate that. I'm beyond that,
but in like multi okay, So, whether it's forty or
fifty years into the future, though, what will the how
could it change roads and how them?

Speaker 2 (13:03):
Particular for the midterm, regular cars and robotaxis are gonna
have to co exist. Electric vehicles and internal combustion vehicles
are gonna have to co exist, and so there might
be some improvements made in high density areas. They're already
putting transponders on traffic lights, so the traffic light can
tell the car, hey, I'm green, and that benefits regular
cars as well as robotaxis. But you can never count
on it because it might be broken, it might not
be installed yet.

Speaker 1 (13:29):
What does that mean? You just lost me there?

Speaker 2 (13:30):
Oh?

Speaker 1 (13:31):
Sure?

Speaker 2 (13:31):
You can have a radio beacon on a traffic light
that says, hey, everybody, I just turned red. And so
if you're having trouble because of sunglair seeing my color,
I'm red, just see you know, so you should stop.
But that works for that helps robotaxis if they're having
trouble seeing the light because of sunglare or or stuff
on the camera. But it also helps human drivers because
you can put a system in your car that yells
at you if you're about to blow a red light.

Speaker 1 (13:59):
This is fascinating to me because I don't understand why
we can't. There's nothing worse than when you get up
at four o'clock in the morning to beat the morning
rush and you're driving down the road and nobody's looking, Phil,
nobody's looking. You're at a red light. Yep, you're sitting
there for it feels like five years, okay, And and
you're and you're thinking, there's a camera on top of
that red light. So if I run this, they're gonna
see me. And you have that that you have that
negotiation with yourself. Could I could I run this red
light and nobody sees Why can't they just turn it
green automatically if there's no one around, Phil.

Speaker 2 (14:32):
Well, they they can, by the way, that's cultural dependent.
Some cultures they say, of course you go through the
red light. What do you what are you talking about?

Speaker 1 (14:39):
Uh?

Speaker 2 (14:39):
But no follower, Yeah, that that's not this country that
they feel that way. This has been around for decades.
You could you have smart traffic lights that know where
the cars are and if there's no traffic the other way,
it'll turn it green for you.

Speaker 1 (14:54):
You.

Speaker 2 (14:54):
You've probably seen there's a little cut marks in the
pavement by traffic lights, right, and so there's aired cables
that sense cars, and they can adapt the traffic lights
to that. They can put cameras on traffic lights, they
can do radars, and they can do all sorts of things.
But all that costs money and they have to upgrade
the traffic light. So if you have a twenty five
to fifty year old traffic light, it's.

Speaker 1 (15:14):
Not going to have that like fifty seventy five years
into the future. What are some of the conversations that
are being discussed for modernizing or transforming America's highway systems
to fit with this future of which I believe which
is inevitable, which is this embrace of autonomous vehicles, whether
it's fifty years from now or one hundred and fifty
years from now, I do believe it's inevitable.

Speaker 2 (15:36):
Well, it depends who you talk to, because there's some
folks who say that downtown should not have any things
that look like cars. There's other things than personally owned vehicles.
There's other folks who say, yeah, it's all going to
be personally owned vehicles because that's what they like that's
what they want. And if you have those, you could say, well,
you don't need on street parking because you can share them.
But you know, if you have a little kid and
you're lugging one hundred pounds of little baby stuff around
with you, do you really want to have to lug
that in and out of the robot taxi put the
car seat in. So every time you hear someone say
this is my vision, in about ten seconds, you can
come up with five reasons why that's not going to
work for everyone. Right, So it's going to be some mix.
But there's a lot of reasons to not have a
lot of personally owned autonomous vehicles in down downtown urban centers.
Maybe cabs work for that, Maybe public transit. If you're
in other places where it's not cost effective to have
heavy duty public transit, then sure robot drivers and don't
even have a steering well, sure you could go there. Charging.
The nice thing about gas stations is you're in and out.
Electric vehicle recharging gets faster. There's a lot of energy
denseated things. I think people will work on that charge it.
Roads that charge you. We've had that for a long time.
You know, a lot of this where we've had small
examples of it, not at scale, but that the test
roads have been out for years and years to show
proof of concept. But a lot of this comes down
to do we want to pay for that? A lot
of this is economics. You can have all the giz
science fiction stuff you want, someone's got to pay for it.

Speaker 1 (17:16):
I hate to interrupt you, but this seems like such
a And one of the things that I love about
Hello Future and why I got into this was I
believe we need to demand new ideas and it seems
like such a no brainer that we have the capabilities
for roads that can charge your car. I mean, just
think of the imagination and if you're listening to this, how,
how how what what that means for the world, What
that means for geopolitics, what that means for our future.
So I love using the imagination to to envision a
society where you can get in a car and you're
and it will charge for you.

Speaker 2 (17:54):
So that's great. I'm an engineer. I why did I
get into engineering Because I love coming up with new things,
new ideas. And then as I progressed in my career,
I figured out that you have to pick the winners
at some point something someone somehow. You have to pick
the winners because you can't have all the good, good
ideas and it ends up being economics. So if you
want to have the cool idea the thing, if you
want to advocate for it, first you have to have
the vision and the sexier and cooler the vision of
the user. It is sell absolutely, but then if you
want to go on past that, you have to figure out, well,
someone's going to have to pay to get this installed.
What's the value I can provide to get people eager
to pay for it.

Speaker 1 (18:33):
I'm really optimistic about it. I think that it will
unleash a whole new era of economic innovation, just in
terms of people being able to go and to just
work more efficiently. And I do think the upside will
be will be more jobs. I just want to touch
lightly on You know, there are obviously security concerns, but
you touched on some of them at the start of
the episode, but just from a hacking, I mean, these
systems just have to be cyber secured and they're not.

Speaker 2 (18:59):
Oh absolutely, But something I think folks need to appreciate
is that there isn't that much of a difference between
a robotaxi and an ordinary average car, a current car.
The computers are involved in steering, they're involved and breaking,
they're involved in acceleration. When you press the gas pedal,
that's just a suggestion to a computer that the cable
to the throttle has been gone from.

Speaker 1 (19:21):
Cars are computers already, is what you're saying.

Speaker 2 (19:23):
Cars are full of computers already. So if someone breaks
into a regular car, they can make it so crazy
and have a crash. It doesn't have to be a robotaxi.
So that's not to say security doesn't matter. Security absolutely matters,
but there's nothing so special about robotaxis. It's actually all
cars right now have a security problem that needs a
lot more work.

Speaker 1 (19:42):
And it sounds like what you're saying, though, is that
digital ecosystems and highways, and we sort of got this.
I think the public consciousness accepts that the Internet is.
I think it was first marketed as as a digital highway.

Speaker 2 (19:56):
The information is super highway.

Speaker 1 (19:58):
That was it.

Speaker 2 (19:59):
That was Oh, that was so worn out.

Speaker 1 (20:03):
But it sounds like they were just a little early
and by multi decades, because the real what is it
called the information super Highway.

Speaker 2 (20:11):
So I think that was a callback. So I was
there when all this was happening. I was around, okay,
and we just finished building the Interstate highway system, and
so this is a call to action that there was
a national concentration of resources and a will to spend
the money. Like I was talking about, we decided highways
are what we wanted, so we spent the money. We
got the Interstate highway system that wasn't around forever. That was,
you know, an Eisenhower era kind of thing, and we
were done with that. It's like, okay, let's do the
same for computer networks. And I think maybe that's more
why it was called.

Speaker 1 (20:43):
That last question to you, do you think that it
will take in the future, whether it's again ten, twenty, thirty,
forty fifty hundred years from now, do you think that
history will repeat itself in the sense of another Eisenhower initiative,
of of some type of demand by America infrastructure to
better invest in driverless car infrastructure? Is that where all
this is eventually headed.

Speaker 2 (21:13):
I would prefer to have a demand to invest in
mobility solutions, and those are a part of it. The
ability to get where they need to go, and that's
trains and it's cargo trucks and it's cars, and its
subways and its bicycle paths. I think the country is
better off if everyone has equitable access to mobility options,
not just one kind of thing.

Speaker 1 (21:39):
And sure, self America has got to get move in phil.

Speaker 2 (21:42):
So yeah, self driving cars absolutely need to be a
part of that. But if all you have is a
hammer and you go around looking for nails, you're not
going to be as effective as you say. No, what
we need is a toolkit.

Speaker 1 (21:52):
Well, I mean, and again I don't want to knock
anyone because I don't really want to do that, but
I think we can all think of a train that
we've been on that is very very slow in our
country that we wish was faster, such as what they
have elsewhere in the world.

Speaker 2 (22:08):
Why I've spent five weeks out of the last nine
in Europe. They actually have transit there. You know, they
complain about it, but as an American, it's like, yeah, goodness,
they have transit, right, So, and I'm not saying that
we're Europe. I'm not saying that there's the reasons were different,
but the ability to get where you need to go
without it being a huge pain in the neck really
makes a difference to quality of life. And that's the vision.

Speaker 1 (22:35):
I want the ability to sit in a traffic light
at four o'clock in the morning when it's read and
to be able to go through it and not get
a ticket, buy one of those cameras. That's the future
that we all want in the short term fill that
shouldn't take multi decades. Phil Coopman, the genius, the go
to guru on all things driverless cars. I had so
much fun recording this episode because you really made me
understand just the shift is going to be gradual, it's
going to be over multi decad aid. It's some of
the you've dispelled, some of the myths for us and
some of the potential working class opportunities for job creation
over the next multi decades. And you know, you made
it realize that those robotaxis is just the.

Speaker 2 (23:13):
Tip of the iceberg.

Speaker 1 (23:15):
Bill Coopman, appreciate you.

Speaker 2 (23:16):
Thank you, my friend, thanks for having me on