Just not cricket

Should we be surprised by the latest Aussie cricket scandal? I think not, when one considers how Australia was founded (ie, convict ships etc).

After all we only have to look back at the famous underarm incident

Further to ‘‘Census and sensibility,’’ (March 26) this is the text of a letter I wrote to the Census Department.

Dear People, (or computer, as may be)

Ref: Unoccupied Residence (Rural address given)

On or about March 3, on a routine maintenance visit to our otherwise unoccupied holiday home/bach/crib ref. above, I uplifted from its letterbox a set of census forms. I completed the dwelling form online, and in doing so had to make several attempts to submit it on the basis of the residence having no occupant on census night, which your computer seemed unable to comprehend.

I eventually succeeded by putting the word ‘‘no’’ in the first name box, and the word ‘‘body’’ in the family name box, and the form was accepted.

On the next maintenance visit to the property, on March 19, I found another set of forms in the letterbox, with a handwritten memo on the envelope. This memo indicated that the dwelling form had been received, but that obviously had not been read, as it stated that no individual form had been received.

As I stated on the dwelling form, no body was in residence at that address on census night. As I am aware that nobody is exempt from filling in an individual census form, I must assume that this exemption will apply in this case, and that no further action on my part is required.

Finally: Read this very carefully, as I shall write it only once: The unoccupied residence is not registered with NZ Post, so no mail will be delivered to it. If you wish to reply, do so to the address on this letter, or to email (given). Kind regards, (Signed.)

PS: Noted that your return address is in Auckland. Says it all, doesn’t it?

(Reply awaited)

PETER NELSON

Blenheim, March 26.

The widespread use of selfdriving vehicles will almost certainly bring down the death rates sharply everywhere, because even if computers can be as stupid as human drivers, they cannot be as impatient or angry or drunk.

What the robo-cars, trucks and buses are going to kill in very large numbers is not human beings but jobs.

Automation goes in stages. Computers were not very clever in the 1990s, but they were already good enough to run the robotic arms and similar devices that took over the old assembly lines.

The Rust Belt is centred in the Great Lakes states of the US, and in comparable regions of northern England and northern France, precisely because those are the old mass-production heartlands of their respective countries.

Assembly lines had already broken down the complex task of assembling a car, for example, into 100 or so very simple tasks, so they were bound to be the first victims of automation.

The computers are much smarter now, and up to the extremely demanding task of driving a vehicle in traffic. There are still bugs in the programs, but in two or three or five years they will have been fixed and selfdriving vehicles will be available for sale to the public.

Those at the head of the queue to buy them will be the operators of fleets of vehicles.

Most people are aware that companies such as Ford, General Motors, Tesla and Waymo are investing heavily in research to develop self-driving cars. Fewer realise that Daimler, Volvo, Uber and Baidu are already road-testing self-driving 18-wheeler trucks. The goal of this research, quite explicitly, is to eliminate all the driving jobs.

There are approximately 4.5 million driving jobs in the United States: taxi-drivers, bus-drivers, delivery van drivers, long-distance truckers. That’s about four percent of all American jobs, and the driving share of total jobs is around the same in other developed economies.

It’s a safe bet that at least half of those jobs will disappear in the next 10 years, and they will almost all be gone in 15 or 20.

The long-term impact of autonomous vehicles on private car ownership will be just as great. A recent KPMG survey of carindustry executives found that 59 per cent of chief executives believe that more than half of today’s carowners will no longer want to own a car by 2025. Just summon a cheap self-driving taxi whenever you want to go somewhere.

It’s Uber on stilts. Self-driving taxis will be everywhere, and respond to the summons in just a minute or two. No parking problems ever again, and far less congestion on the roads because a taxi fleet one-quarter as big as the current total of private cars would suffice to meet even maximum rush-hour demand.

Privately owned cars are parked on average 95 per cent of the time. In fact, there is hardly ever more than a quarter of privately owned cars being driven at the same time, even at peak hours.

So, in the longer term we will see a drastic decline in the number of passenger cars, and a less dramatic fall in the world demand for oil. (Almost three-fifths of world oil output goes into fuel for vehicles.)

We may also expect to see a major decrease in the number of deaths and injuries in traffic accidents. Self-driving vehicles will no doubt occasionally make mistakes that hurt human beings, but computer programs are bound to be less erratic on the roads than human beings.

It’s a pity about the jobs, but on balance this is change for the better.