Replacing the car

Do you remember your first car? More specifically, do you remember what came with it? The car brought responsibility: you were being placed in charge of this lethal weapon, capable of killing you and anyone around it. It was terrifying. But it also brought freedom: you could now go anywhere, unbound by the limitations of public transport.In the first few months after I passed my test, I experienced both things. I promptly crashed into another car after taking a corner a little too enthusiastically. But I also got to drive my friends on trips, down to Cardiff to get a taste of university life, and out to the countryside for some extreme sledging (Beetles are surprisingly good in the snow). I drove up to Manchester to see my then girlfriend (who promptly dumped me, but that’s a different story).

Expanding horizons

The first car I bought myself a few years after graduating holds perhaps my greatest memories of the freedom a car brings. I had been living in Reading and working in Maidenhead for two or three years when I finally decided it was time to buy a car. Until that point, I had been getting public transport everywhere and that worked fine for me. I bought a car more because I liked cars than because I thought I really needed one. Though I was reaching the stage in my career where I was starting to go to meetings on my own and many of the meeting locations were on business parks outside nearby towns and cities. Hard to access by public transport.Once I got the car though, I realised how much I had been missing. I stumbled across a local lake where you could water-ski and wakeboard – something I had grown up doing. Without a car this facility would have been utterly inaccessible to me. Now I could stick my wakeboard on the passenger seat (not much space in my BMW Coupe) in the morning and detour on the way back from work to the lake. What freedom!

LTN battles

This all came to mind because my neighbourhood is in the middle of an intense debate about traffic and cars. There is a planned scheme, of which I am very much in favour, to trial a low traffic neighbourhood or LTN. The scheme is controversial. Some people don’t like the idea of limiting where cars can go. Some have concerns that the main roads and those bordering the scheme will be negatively affected.I have some sympathy with the latter concerns, which speak to a larger issue of class divides in developing neighbourhoods. The leafy backstreets tend to benefit first from LTNs, with traffic displaced onto main roads that tend to have more flats and fewer private homes. But ultimately, we have to do something about congestion, road deaths, and pollution. And LTNs are what’s on the table.The evidence supporting LTNs is thin, but growing. They have an immediate and very positive impact on the streets where measures are added. In the trial, my street will no longer be a rat-run for cars trying to escape clogged main roads or cut between them. This, I hope, will prevent the street being used as a drag strip: cars frequently top 40 miles an hour (by my estimate – I don’t have a speed camera) down this narrow 20 limit. Over time there is some evidence emerging that LTNs reduce car use overall.

Reducing ownership

What many LTN proponents really want though is to reduce car ownership. They make sound points about the impact cars have on our streets even when they aren’t moving. Parked cars take up a lot of our shared spaces. They make it less safe for pedestrians and cyclists. They frequently block pavements. And they make it harder for kids to use the streets for play.I don’t disagree with any of this. And yet, we currently own three cars. Well, two and a half: two are parked on the street while my EV project takes up our small driveway. One of those cars is practical. It’s the 10-year-old MPV in my wife’s name that carries us (in non-lockdown times) to family gatherings, walks in the countryside, to the shops and to the tip.The others…are not.My little Alfa, ultimately to be replaced by the EV when that is complete, is used for practical purposes once a week, on the rare occasion we need two cars so that I can run one child to dance classes. This is one of those journeys that is notionally do-able by public transport. But doing so would mean writing off my afternoon (I couldn’t get there back before having to turn around again), and be very costly. The bus fares are absurd (£6.80 for me and my daughter), and since there is no waiting room, I would need to spend two hours in a rather expensive café nearby.People say owning a car is expensive, but the Alfa currently costs me less than £50 a month to own. It only cost me £1200 to buy and with prices on the rise, I will probably sell it for that or more. That £10 a month over the cost of public transport and coffee buys me eight hours a month of free time and an object that gives me great joy. For all the issues, that still feels like a good deal.For the rest of the week, my Alfa is largely an ornament. It’s not an expensive car, but it is beautiful. Having it there reminds me of that first sense of freedom I felt when I first got my Beetle or my BMW.

The car's the star

The problem for those seeking to reduce car ownership is that we have built our world around cars for the last hundred years or so. Because this is how we have structured our world, cars don’t just bring a sense of freedom, they bring actual freedom over and above what is achievable via public transport or cycling – especially for families. Is there a public cost to that freedom? Absolutely. But a lot of people will feel they are giving up something very significant if they gave up their car. Purging the streets of cars will only serve to further restrict those freedoms to the wealthy, who can afford to store their cars off the street.In the long term, I think we can achieve these ends without disproportionate effects on the less wealthy. Though they are further away than many think, we will, eventually, have self-driving cars. These will make point-to-point travel in relative luxury more affordable than car ownership. They will park and charge themselves in out of town warehouses rather than on streets. They’re not an ideal solution for everything: mass transit still makes more sense for busy routes and intercity travel. But they should offer the freedom we crave with less of the downsides.We can’t wait thirty years to tackle this problem though. We need to find ways to give people the freedom a car brings without its consequences. That means trialling schemes like the LTNs. And it means finding alternatives to car ownership that work today, investing in public transport and cycling infrastructure, minimising the car’s impact on other road users. Car lovers like me might have to make some sacrifices or at the least pay more for keeping a second (or even third) car on the street.But the only way we make rapid progress on issues of congestion and indeed wider environmental issues is to make change a net luxury. Right now, the loss of the car feels too painful to too many people. And any threat to it will continue to be met with anger.

A race between the four horsemen

In a recent post for for Locus Magazine, Cory Doctorow laid out his scepticism about general AI in a piece entitled 'Full Employment'. He argued that there is no sign that a general AI - one that can replicate human adaptability in tasks - is on the horizon. And that the work required to address climate change is so great that we are much more likely to see full employment than the AI-driven unemployment that many have predicted.I disagree with Doctorow's analysis of AI. Right now, I don't believe that we are close to a general AI. I am more open minded than Doctorow about the idea that current AI systems have the capability to 'evolve' into something more generally capable, but the gap remains large.My criticism is that I just don't think AI has to be very sophisticated in order to replace humans in the workplace. It's an argument that I have made many times on this blog, so I won't repeat it in too much detail here. Suffice to say that if you break any job down into its component tasks, today's machines are eminently capable of handling many of them. If you accept that machines take work - tasks, rather than jobs - then you can see that the remaining work can be redistributed among a smaller number of humans.Where I don't disagree with Doctorow is on the scale of the challenge presented by climate change. I have little doubt that large portions of humanity will be involved with the mitigation response. But the idea that this will offset any job losses due to automation brings me back to one of the most difficult parts of futurism: seeing not what, but when.

Four horsemen

Even before the pandemic, I was concerned about our prospects for the next 20-30 years. While it's not quite the apocalypse, there are four modern horsemen of disaster racing to cause us problems.

• Climate: In this period, directly or indirectly, climate change will start to affect the more moderate climates. Changes in weather patterns, disruption to agriculture, sea level rises. Until this point climate change has been something most people could ignore, should they so choose. This choice is going away in the next few decades.
• Technology: The prospect of technological disruption to employment and the economy is another major issue. Whether you want to generously call it AI, or prefer the perhaps more accurate 'machine learning and robotics', there is the potential for swathes of workers to be displaced by machines in the next three decades, from administrative, customer service, logistics and manual roles.
• Politics: We are in a rancorous period of global relations. Violence so far has been primarily inside borders rather than between them. But our international trading relationships are collapsing and our diplomatic ties being strained.  And domestic leaders in many countries seem to be incompetent, mad, corrupt, vicious, or some combination of all of these.
• Disease: The latest addition to the line-up is the global pandemic, spreading effortlessly through our international connections, strained as they are. It's unlikely to end quickly and we are likely to see more of its type.

The horsemen analogy falls down when it comes to timing. This isn't about which of these potential challenges will win a race to reach us. All four are here already. The question is the speed and scale at which their effects will be felt.

A race to the finish

Doctorow might be right. Our climate mitigation efforts might start well before we adopt robotics and ML technologies to a level that severely disrupts the labour market. Or he might not. The scale of job losses in the retail sector right now are pretty dramatic. We could attribute these to the pandemic, but really this is just the acceleration a trend towards automation and self-service that has been rolling for years. The pandemic may accelerate the adoption of automation technologies in the retail supply chain and logistics. It might also accelerate their adoption in other fields - administration, customer service, finance, law... Once people are out of the office, perhaps we will be less squeamish about replacing them with machines?Even if you ignore the technological effects, the pandemic has clearly had a terrible effect on our economy. Many are bracing themselves for  job losses in the coming months. During lockdown almost 150,000 people have been made redundant and over 9m have been furloughed. This doesn't even include the many self-employed who sit outside the support schemes or many not be counted as having lost their jobs, despite their income having collapsed. Full employment feels like a long way from here.This is especially true in the current turbulent political environment where it is hard to see coordinated efforts to restore global prosperity. Or for that matter, a coherent effort to address climate change. If we were to start that process now, I can see the creation of an enormous number of jobs that might redress the losses currently being experienced. But it feels more likely to me that these efforts won't start until the effects really start to bite. That is the nature of our politics right now: always focused on today not tomorrow.In the meantime, it is going to be a difficult few years, whichever of the horsemen is leading the race.