What's something modern you won't miss when it becomes obsolete?

[belfastboy]

I'd mind it less if it was reality... Even the better shows that aren't that awful "scripted reality" drivel are still faked to a great extent. More importantly, the fact that they squeezed out so much quality content on grounds of simply being cheaper. While panel shows aren't quite the same thing, they are that much cheaper to produce - and it's no coincidence that the rise of the comedy panel show in the UK mirrors the decline of the great British sitcom. To a great extent this is now being offset by the streamers, though, as tastes change and we near the death of traditional television broadcasting.



News as entertainment is ghastly, especially when it puts the biases of the audience above fact. Journalism is rarely what it used to be.



It's inevitable. Over here I think it's 2040 has been set as the date at which, by law, all petrol engine car production must cease. I don't imagine it will be anything other than a smooth transition: 99% of the UK car industry is now merely assembly plants for Japanese and other, foreign-owned businesses (mostly German), companies with such a reputation for efficiency that it'll not be a big deal. Already one of the Japanese companies is opening a significant battery-producing facility here.



That's already being discussed over here. Ironically, I can see it happening anyhow because of the market: at some point, a bunch of the petrolheads will be persuaded to switch over because they can see all the advantages of an EV, and if it looks, sounds, and otherwise feels like "the real thing", they'll do it. Of course, doubtless there will always be the extremists who refuse to accept the change, and when asked will go on at length about "If it's just the same experience, why change it?", muttering darkly as they retreat into their caves.




Undoubtedly the technology will improve by leaps and bounds. In 1969, men landed on the moon using a computer vastly less powerful than the mobile phone I had in my pocket nearly twenty years ago, itself laughably limited to the one I have now. Indeed, my mobile phone today is vastly more capable than the desktop computer my parents bought in 1993 when I first went to university. That computer cost £1,000 at the time - just over £2,000 in today's money. My mobile phone cost me £100 in today's money. Thirty years from now, 99% of the current drawbacks of going electric will be eliminated completely.



I have a feeling that in a few decades' time there will be one almighty ruck over self-drive taxis versus black cab drivers with The Knowledge here in London. The self-drive capacity on the EV will doubtless appeal to those who like to take their own car on a night out, have a few drinks, then let it drive them home. Of course, for that to happen they'll have to be considered safe enough not to need a sober adult overseeing them... Then again, as (at least here in the UK) more and more young people abandon alcohol, that itself may no longer be a significant issue in thirty years' time.



I'm sort of surprised we've not seem more take-up of the hybrid option because of this, but again that may be price. The Toyota Prius is a very common option for minicabs here in London, of course, as if you drive electric you don't have to pay the congestion charge. The latest generation of London black cabs are all-electric too. That's one market which will increasingly refine the tech, I suspect. (Many of our buses are hybrid, with the electric used in and around the centre, and petrol to drive them back out to the garage on the outskirts at the end of a shift).



The batteries will improve over time, and recharging speeds will get faster. I have no doubt there will soon come a time when the car can be powered off a battery the size of a current car battery, and every car can carry two or three more so you can fire up and drive just by switching them over. The real chicken and egg imo will be the spread of recharge points. Simple enough in a fairly small area like the UK, but somewhere like the US with such huge tracts of rural land, you either need a much better network, or better batteries, or both. There's the chicken / egg thing: a lot of folks won't want to take up EVs until there are enough charging points, but will there be enough charging points without market demand for them?

The other US specific issue is that petrol has been relatively cheap there for so long. Look at all those classic US cars where a V8 was a norm for the shopping runabout back in the day - as compared to here in the UK, where tiny engines abound because petrol costs about three times what it does in the US... I'd say electric (especially for those who can charge their car at home with solar) will find a market more rapidly where petrol is expensive and there isn't quite the same car-culture as in the US. Start-up costs are indeed currently big with electric, though if they come down enough I wouldn't be surprised if it saw more private vehicles on the road here in London for a bit, given that currently it is otherwise so expensive to own a car here in top of it being a luxury at best for most of us, given the public transport infrastructure. (I notice that big time as I moved here from a rural area of Ireland where you'd never be able to get to half the place without a private car, and haven't felt the need of a car at all these twenty years here.)

London 2019, Heathrow. I wanted to take black cab instead of an Uber or such...just because. The cab next in the queue, driven by a guy in his 80's had no idea where our B&B was located and his GPS was down. I thought great I got the only black cab driver in London without a clue.....the guy that just barely passed the exam (if they still have them). I unloaded our bags, went to the supervisor and asked for a new cab. He asked why? He went to the cabbie with his phone and showed him how to get there. If I had been a bit ambitious we could have walked. Used Uber from there on in. If I am going to get lost I at least want a cheaper price.

 

[Fifty150]

2019

by a guy in his 80's

I wonder if that guy is still driving.

 

[belfastboy]

I wonder if that guy is still driving.

probably as it was only 20 months ago and it was likely his own cab. That length of time would not have made him much worse than he was at that time.

 

[Fifty150]

Covid happened in the last 20 months.

 

[Zombie_61]

Covid happened in the last 20 months.

Right; the old fellow is surely dead then. I wonder what happened to his cab...

 

[Edward]

London 2019, Heathrow. I wanted to take black cab instead of an Uber or such...just because. The cab next in the queue, driven by a guy in his 80's had no idea where our B&B was located and his GPS was down. I thought great I got the only black cab driver in London without a clue.....the guy that just barely passed the exam (if they still have them). I unloaded our bags, went to the supervisor and asked for a new cab. He asked why? He went to the cabbie with his phone and showed him how to get there. If I had been a bit ambitious we could have walked. Used Uber from there on in. If I am going to get lost I at least want a cheaper price.

I've never had a bad experience with a black cab - unless, of course, you include the price. They ain't cheap. Studiously avoided Uber, but I do have two night buses stop right outside my block, so it's very rare a taxi is a necessity. It'll be interesting to see if the Knowledge ever falls at the hands of satnav, though I'd be surprised as it's one aspect of what has long allowed black cabs to charge more.

 

[tonyb]

…
It'll be interesting to see if the Knowledge ever falls at the hands of satnav, though I'd be surprised as it's one aspect of what has long allowed black cabs to charge more.

If satnav doesn’t do it in, the self-driving car surely will. I don’t know that I’ll live to see that day, but I have little doubt that day is coming.

There are still people who have committed to memory the Bible and the Koran and other lengthy texts. There are people who can recite Pi out to some incredible string. There are people who can sculpt stone in a manner so faithful to the subject matter that you half expect the statue to put on a suit and go to work. Those are impressive skills indeed. And largely obsolete.

 

[Edward]

If satnav doesn’t do it in, the self-driving car surely will. I don’t know that I’ll live to see that day, but I have little doubt that day is coming.

There are still people who have committed to memory the Bible and the Koran and other lengthy texts. There are people who can recite Pi out to some incredible string. There are people who can sculpt stone in a manner so faithful to the subject matter that you half expect the statue to put on a suit and go to work. Those are impressive skills indeed. And largely obsolete.

Largely obsolete until some Millennium Bug style catastrophe does actually turn out to be "real" (not that the MB wasn't - simply that it was spotted and mitigated against in time!), and the digital versions all get wiped, or somebody goes to access something no-one has needed in years, only to discover the password has long been forgotten, or the format of old software no longer works with the current version, or the cables have changed shape.... Digital storage has its advantages, of course. As of last year, our University now has a "digital first" policy for new acquisitions, whereby if we want the print option we actually have to make a case for it. The intent is to prioritise available study space over physical collection - and provide greater access to a digital collection off-site. This was very much a plan in motion before Covid, though the pandemic has certainly helped shore up its validity. This has its downsides - chiefly price-gouging by the publishers - though its definitely the way forward. I can foresee an era when all academic publishing is done entirely online in order to reduce publishing costs of relatively low-volume sales (compared to mainstream fiction, say). Not that the publishers will stop underpaying (or, often, not paying) the content providers or gouging the consumer by way of knock-on...

It's going to be interesting to see how self-driving cars affect the taxi business long-term. Perhaps the big divide will no longer be the traditional black cab versus minicab or Uber-style hobbyists, but human driven versus machine. I have a feeling that a mix of safety laws and companies wanting to protect their fleet from customer damage will ultimately see a middle way emerge: a cab that drives itself, but with a human attendant to override it should there be a problem (as well as to act as a deterrent to vandalism). We already have this sort of super-conductor on the driverless Dockland Light Railway here in London. On the tube, the Victoria line has trains which self-drive but have a qualified driver in the cab to oversee then at all times. Various authorities over the years have pushed for the tube to go entirely driverless, mainly to try and break the Unions, but I can't see that becoming a reality any time soon. It does, of course, raise bigger questions that don't seem to be much thought of in terms of the number of jobs that could be lost to automation in future as these sorts of technologies spread. I do question the point of automation for its own sake.

As to satnav, that's going to be interesting. I find it's a great tool when used as such - the problem inevitably comes in when people over-rely on it. I once had a cab come to pick me up for the airport driving up and down the main road outside unable to find the entrance gate (which is at the back of the building) because it kept telling the driver he'd arrived. Didn't occur to him to drive round the back of the building he was outside to see if there was a break in the fence. I guess it must have been a rare pick-up he had that gave that issue (it's always easier not to make the mistake a second time), but yeah...

 

[tonyb]

In another life I was a taxicab driver (started at age 18), and then a dispatcher, and then a company manager. That was in the pencil-and-paper and two-way radio days. Dispatchers *had* to come off the street, *had* to have a mental image of where they were sending the drivers. Anyone who thought otherwise plainly didn’t understand the business. And lotsa people who thought they knew the business didn’t know it for beans.

The best fire department dispatchers were firefighters and inspectors. They’ve been to the structures they’re sending the crews into. They know the back stairs are narrow and kinda rickety.

As to vandals damaging unmanned autonomous vehicles …

If we can come up with reliable self-driving cars, we can come up with ways to thwart vandals. The technology to capture their images is already widely in use. And still in its infancy. It’s almost chilling to think what it’ll be when it grows up.

 

[tonyb]

And really, most humans have capabilities that are never realized in their current occupations. Labor-saving technologies might just as well be called drudgery-saving technologies. (Not that white-collar workers don’t know drudgery.)

Driving people around can be entertaining (the stories we could tell) and necessary to the functioning of society, as was horseshoeing, before automobiles came along. But I’ll shed no tears when those days are, um, in the rearview mirror.

 

[Fifty150]

If we can come up with reliable self-driving cars

And an infrastructure to support the cars.

 

[Fifty150]

Driving people around can be entertaining (the stories we could tell)

I used to run into this guy at my neighborhood grocery store.

 

[tonyb]

How many gas stations were there in, say, 1906?

 

[EngProf]

How many gas stations were there in, say, 1906?

Very few...
The point to be taken from this is that the support infrastructure for the gasoline-fueled car has had 115 years to grow gradually.
The "environmentalists" have this strange notion that an equivalent infrastructure for electric cars can be built in less than 10 years (by 2030).
They also are leaping to the conclusion that people will want and buy electric cars up to 40% of the total vehicle fleet. I'm skeptical of that, also...

 

[Edward]

As to vandals damaging unmanned autonomous vehicles …

If we can come up with reliable self-driving cars, we can come up with ways to thwart vandals. The technology to capture their images is already widely in use. And still in its infancy. It’s almost chilling to think what it’ll be when it grows up.

The UK already is the most CCTV'ed nation in the world; here in London, the biggest city in Europe, we have somewhere around one CCTV camera for every nine people. Much depends really on whether that offers a deterrent to vandalism - which seems to vary between some and none, alas. I suppose because much of it is done under the influence of alcohol or by individuals generally too young to have the fully developed sense of risk and consequence. Still, it'll be interesting to see what does come in future. It's not unthinkable that the new employment windows for former drivers could be in observing livestreamed CCTV footage from driverless cabs and hitting a panic button if a problem occurs. The button would set in motion a system which both called police (who would track the car by Satnav), and locked up the car to keep the occupants inside until arrested - or perhaps just drive them straight to the police pen. Sooner or later, we'd see a case where the wrong car got buttoned, or some vandal managed to suffocate themselves trying to burn it when stuck inside, and there would be a huge liability case providing significant employment for a lot of former RTA lawyers. It's going to be interesting watching it happen. I do think in my lifetime we're going to see the self-drive car become a reality, if not the norm.

And really, most humans have capabilities that are never realized in their current occupations. Labor-saving technologies might just as well be called drudgery-saving technologies. (Not that white-collar workers don’t know drudgery.)

Driving people around can be entertaining (the stories we could tell) and necessary to the functioning of society, as was horseshoeing, before automobiles came along. But I’ll shed no tears when those days are, um, in the rearview mirror.

Well, it is true that thus far humanity has always evolved new roles for those who have seen their jobs evolved out of the labour market. I do think that has to come to a logical end at some point (in which case we'd need to find a new societal model), but that said, I have the limits of my own time, culture and imagination; even Bill Gates thought the web was a fad that would never catch on, and Microsoft very nearly missed the bus on that (arguably, they'd have been stumped entirely had they not been in a position to abuse their OS near-monopoly at the time).

Very few...
The point to be taken from this is that the support infrastructure for the gasoline-fueled car has had 115 years to grow gradually.
The "environmentalists" have this strange notion that an equivalent infrastructure for electric cars can be built in less than 10 years (by 2030).
They also are leaping to the conclusion that people will want and buy electric cars up to 40% of the total vehicle fleet. I'm skeptical of that, also...

Though by the same token, it's not quite like for like. The network of service stations already exists now - converting those to electric is a little more of a task than the shift from four-star to unleaded petrol, but not as big a shift as rolling out those stations in the first place. Don't forget it took centuries for man to achieve powered flight - and only a mere six further decades to get into space. I think much of it will be situational, though. I'd expect EVs to become a norm much faster across Europe. The Honda E can go 200 miles on a full charge, and gets to 80% battery charged in just thirty minutes. That's a third of the way from John O'Groats to Land's End. Allowing for safety breaks, that would get you the length of Britain in the same time as possible with a petrol car, no stopping overnight for a charge. Obviously, the US being much bigger and having those large areas of wilderness where you don't have a gas station for miles is going to be more of a challenge.

The other situational element is economic: petroleum is predominantly an imported product in the UK (and I believe across Europe as a whole), which means price can fluctuate significantly outside of local control, plus for lots of other reasons (including local taxes), it has long been expensive in the UK. When I last drove twenty odd years ago, a gallon was three times the price it is in the US; I hear from friends who drive now that if anything this disparity has increased. Given how much cheaper electric is (cost varies per model, but I gather it's not uncommon to be able to do 200 miles on a charge which cost GBP2.50, just under USD3.48 currently; petrol is presently around GBP5.70/USD7.40 a gallon in the UK, and a gallon will get you about sixty miles max in most any petrol car on our market), that's going to be a very powerful force in pushing over to electric.

It's definitely something that is going to vary with location and culture. I suspect we'll also see faster take-up among younger people, new to driving, for whom a car that needs charged is just one more electric gadget that needs plugged in every so often, like a phone, tablet, or whatever. As the tech seems less 'alien', there's going to be much less suspicion of it. The greater ease of driving electric may also appeal to them - this of course also has a cultural component. Here in the UK, an automatic box is almost unheard of in a private car - usually limited to the more expensive, bigger "luxury" motors and rare in a personal car. I can see a lot of new drivers opting to go electric as much as anything because it is easier, no gears to manage. I learned way back when in a manual box, and while I'm glad I did, I can certainly see why a lot of people might prefer to drive an auto box - or electric equivalent - for ease. Of course that wouldn't be a shift from the norm in the US, where automatic boxes have long been vastly more common than they are here.

 

[belfastboy]

Covid happened in the last 20 months.

It was late October 2019 and Covid had yet to hit the news. Jan/Feb 2020 things were still 'normal' here in my neck of the woods. Taking classes, meeting with friends etc.. The distancing and isolation hit in March/April here...so about 17-18 months ago life changed. Before then things were normal and we were still holidaying abroad.

 

[tonyb]

The person I stole this image from says it’s from 1967.

 

[LizzieMaine]

"Because god forbid a publicly-owned utility might get involved!"

 

[Fifty150]

Who was the power company in NY, in '67? Con-Ed?

 

[Fifty150]

publicly-owned utility

Utilities, just like public safety, should be a government operated service. Almost like an entitlement of sorts, like fire protection. Then you won't have to hear about some poor person who can't afford heating during the winter. But then again, public safety really isn't free either. You get a bill for an ambulance ride. You get a bill for a fire engine response. In some places, you have to pay a subscription fee to the local fire department, or they will not fight your fire. Even in today's world, there is still private policing. Those cops, who are armed & fully sworn peace officers, specifically provide aide to the person or people who are paying them to be there. And private ambulance companies have taken over in most locations, where the ambulance service used to be provided by Department of Public Health or fire department paramedics.