What will we do with all that time?
SELF-DRIVING CARS WILL FREE US UP. TO DO WHAT? WELL, ‘PAYING ATTENTION TO THE ROAD’
What will we do with all the extra time? Actually, if you’re IPSOS, the French market research giant, the question is actually WTF. No, it’s not what you think it is; it stands for What The Future, the name of its latest study into mobility and what we will do once we no longer need, want or are allowed to drive our own cars.
Boredom, as philosopher Soren Kierkegaard says, is the root of all evil. And, according to IPSOS’s research of 130,000 car owners in nine countries, it seems a lot of the 52 minutes we spend commuting every day is going to be spent doing … well, nothing.
So, while we say we will spend about five of those 52 minutes reading, another five perhaps spent watching a movie or playing computer games and up to 10 minutes catching some extra ZZZs, the No. 1 thing we think we’ll be doing with all that free time will be … “Still paying attention to (the) road.”
Yes, it seems we’re all going to just sit there with nothing to do, bored out of our skulls, waiting, just in case our self-driving car’s computer goes all “access denied.” If that isn’t the Devil’s playground, I’m not sure what is.
Now, it’s possible we’re all simply fooling ourselves, that we’ll fall under the spell of our robotic Chevys and start looking for something else to occupy our time. According to the WTF study, the alternative is not much more inspiring: the second most anticipated pastime in our now self-driving cars is — you guessed it — playing on our damned cellphones.
But what’s more interesting about the WTF study (you can’t imagine the joy I am getting by being able to use that acronym legitimately) is how clearly our current crop of futurists, at least the ones IPSOS chose to interview, are so clearly out of step with the consuming public’s needs, wants and habits.
For instance, in answering that same question — How will you spend your time in an autonomous automobile? — the least popular option, by far, was online shopping. Indeed, in a section of the questionnaire devoted specifically to “What advertising features would you want in cars in the future?” the least popular notifications were for “passing restaurants” (27 per cent), “stores you’ve shopped at before” (29 per cent) and “coffee shops” (30 per cent). If we are to be annoyed in-car, the study says, we want it to be for appointments with doctors (67 per cent) and “letting you know you are near a gas or charging station if you are low on gas or charge” (76 per cent).
And yet Alex Salkever, author of The Driver in the Driverless Car, talks about advertising run rampant: “I could totally see that “why don’t you go to this bakery” flashing on the screen or something like that.” He cited examples of Uber letting customers stream Pandora and Spotify (both music-providing services) as proof future passengers in autonomous automobiles will welcome annoying advertising.
The mobility expert IPSOS chose to feature would seem to have an even more tenuous grasp on reality. In responding to the question, “What is the future of walkability in an autonomous world?” Jeff Speck, city planner, urban designer and Walkable City author, decries the results: “Who are these people? Why do only 34 per cent of people want to be able to walk to a public park? It doesn’t match the data that I’ve seen and repeated.” News flash to Mr. Speck: people are lazy.
Despite the mist of rose-tinted glasses that pervades much of the futurists’ responses to IPSOS’s results, there is one extremely pertinent conclusion.
In response to the question “How necessary is it for you to have a car to get to work?” 78 per cent of Americans said they definitely needed personal transportation for their daily commute. Robin Chase, co-founder of the car-sharing service Zipcar, noted that answer may be the key to the future growth of car-sharing services.
“What I learned from Zipcar,” said the author of Peers Inc., “is that if you need a car to get to work, you will own a car. And for each and every trip you make in your life, which is a huge diversity of trips potentially, your cheapest and most convenient option will always be the one sitting in your driveway. So that one decision — the one reality of ‘I need a car to get to work’ — dictates every other transport decision.”
Chase says the future of car sharing is entirely in large, densely populated urban centres. As many are projecting, he notes “we are not going to outlaw driving cars for many years” at least in part because of the inconvenience of car-sharing in lower-density suburbs and rural environments.
The lasting message of this study — and perhaps all prognostications of the future — is how so very wrong our crystal balls can be. We of a certain age — I just got offered my first senior discount the other day — can perhaps remember a time when analysts were asking similar questions in the face of the onslaught of computers in our workplaces.
“What will do with all our free time?” was the refrain of futurists past — seemingly an eon ago, but it was just the 1990s — their logic was that, since computerization will make us so much more efficient in the workplace, we’d all be struggling to find things to occupy our time in the face of drastically reduced work weeks and dramatically increased vacation time.
How’s that working out for you?