7. The Seventh Law of Zero: Transportation

Let's explore how transportation has continually reshaped the way we live, work, and play — and how Autonomous Vehicles (AVs) will drive the next transformative shift. Imagine a world where the cost of transportation plummets, where your car drives itself, where distance no longer matters, and where drones deliver emergency aid or forgotten groceries right to your doorstep (or landing pad). That's the focus of this week's serialization of my book, "A Brief History of a Perfect Future ," coauthored with Paul Carroll and Tim Andrews .

Throughout history, each new form of transportation has redefined our world. The steam engine fueled expansion and global trade; cars reshaped cities and created suburbs; trucks revolutionized commerce via the interstate highway system; and jet engines compressed world travel into a single day.

Consider the Erie Canal, completed in 1825. This "big ditch" connected the Great Lakes to the Hudson River, reducing travel time across 363 miles from 45 days by wagon to nine days by barge. More critically, cargo costs dropped by 99.5%, as two mules could now pull a barge carrying 100,000 pounds, unlocking the North American interior for settlement and trade. Boom towns including Buffalo, Rochester, Syracuse, and Albany sprang up, and New York City emerged as a global commercial hub.

AVs promise to trigger another seismic shift in transportation, following a "Law of Zero" where costs plummet and accessibility soars. While transportation won’t be entirely free, expenses will dramatically decrease. For example, eliminating human drivers could transform ride-sharing services and long-haul trucking.

And it's not just about cost. The time cost of driving will disappear with full autonomy, making distance much less relevant. Even long journeys will become productive, as passengers transform vehicles into mobile offices or entertainment hubs, carrying their digital worlds — phones, computers, VR goggles — with them.

AVs will unlock new possibilities, break design constraints, and inspire unforeseen innovations. This isn't merely about the future of transportation; it's about reimagining how we live, work, and interact with the world around us.

Read or listen to the full chapter now and explore the future of transportation with us.? We'd love to hear your thoughts.

CHAPTER 7 — The Seventh Law of Zero: Transportation

Although the enthusiasm for autonomous vehicles (AVs) took a hit for a couple of years — they’re a really hard problem — momentum is building again, and the multitude of startups and brilliant scientists tackling the issues make us confident the Future Perfect will include an unlimited number of fully autonomous vehicles.

The implications are mind-boggling. The cost of driving, in terms of the time you devote to it, will essentially disappear once we reach full autonomy. With time no longer a factor, distance won’t be one, either. Even if you have to travel a couple of hundred miles or spend two to three hours in a vehicle, you’ll take your world (your phone, computer and VR goggles) into the vehicle with you and can act just as you would sitting on your couch at home or your desk at the office.

Now, a lot of metal will need to be shaped and maintained even in an autonomous future, so transportation won’t be free. The power for the cars won’t be free, either, but it should cost much less than it does today because all cars will be electric, and energy prices will benefit from that Law of Zero.

Still, all in all, the costs of transportation will be so much lower than they are today that we can be profligate in throwing transportation resources at anything we want to design for the Future Perfect.[1]

You won’t need to go get things — they’ll come to you. That ingredient you forgot for a dinner dish, or, for that matter, the dinner itself? Just summon it. You’ll pay a monthly fee to be part of the circuit for those who, like you, forget things, but you won’t need to spend 20 minutes on a trip (more if you have to wrestle small kids into the car with you).[2] Everything you’ll need will come based on a sort of Amazon Prime to the nth degree. You won’t need to take your kids to soccer practice. The cars will do it (only opening their doors once a coach or other designated adult has acknowledged the kids are accounted for). The elderly parent whose keys you’ve had to take away or the physically challenged relative who can’t drive? No problem. That person can now get around just like anyone else.??

Autonomous drones will kick in, too. They’ll not only drop off packages at your doorstep but will provide emergency help. Imagine drones stationed throughout neighborhoods that could do CPR or administer naloxone to someone suffering from an opioid overdose. Or imagine drones that could deliver a flotation device to someone adrift at sea; provide food, water, and medical supplies to someone lost in the mountains; or airlift out individuals trapped by a wildfire or flood.

You may even get that flying car we’ve all been hearing about for decades.[3] You still won’t be George or Jane Jetson and be able to be-bop anywhere — helicopter-like flying cars are mechanically probably too tricky to be deployed widely, and car/planes require runways for taking off and landing, even if you can figure out what to do about the wings as the car/plane drives down the highway. But the airways should certainly open up to new forms of passenger traffic. The limitations of flying cars up to this point have really been a computing problem — it’s so hard to keep track of all those objects in the air that major airlines still fly primarily via the equivalent of freeways that criss-cross in the sky, rather than just going straight from the starting point to the landing spot. But the Law of Zero for computing means we’ll have orders of magnitude more computing power and can manage far more objects in the sky, without them running into each other. And you have a lot more room for vehicles when you’re working in three dimensions rather than two. There’s also no need to pour concrete to create those routes in the sky.

The Law of Zero for transportation means you could very well take an AV to a local airport in the Bay Area, catch a flying car for the half-hour flight to Truckee, California, and have an AV take you to the resort where you’re staying in Lake Tahoe — avoiding what today could be two hours sitting in bumper-to-bumper traffic on the San Mateo Bridge over the San Francisco Bay on a Friday afternoon in winter, followed by a potential slog through a snowstorm as you climb into the mountains.[4]

Sometimes, nothing will even have to move in the Future Perfect. While virtual reality has had its fits and starts over the past 25 years, it will have so much more computing power and bandwidth that it will let you “drop in” to some situations without ever having to leave your home or office — and the pandemic greatly accelerated remote work, both in terms of the technology and in terms of general acceptance.

All these changes will be phased in, of course. The dangers of having a drone drop something on you from 150 feet in the air, for instance, are great enough that restrictions will be severe until the technology really proves itself — never mind the restrictions that will govern autonomous planes filled with people. But the changes will happen soon enough that they can be assumed for a Future Perfect world.

So much will change about transportation, time, and distance that the interactions are hard to project with certainty. But don’t be lulled into complacency: Changes that may seem like simple, linear improvements can produce decidedly nonlinear effects.

Consider an example as unsexy as the Erie Canal, known as “Clinton’s Big Ditch” or even “Clinton’s Folly” after the New York governor who championed it in the early 1800s. All the canal did was provide a faster connection between Buffalo and Albany once it was completed in 1825. Travel time over the 363 miles dropped from 45 days by wagon to nine days by barge (still a long trip, but a lot less long). The cost of cargo declined 99.5 percent because a team of two mules, which could pull a wagon carrying about 500 pounds, could pull a barge laden with 100,000 pounds of cargo. But the changes the canal caused stretched far beyond what those improvements would suggest. Boom towns exploded along the canal — including at Buffalo, Rochester, Syracuse, and Albany — that grew into major cities. Even more important was that having the canal connect the Great Lakes port of Buffalo to the Hudson River port of Albany by water, 150 miles upriver from New York City, opened the interior of the continent up to settlement and transformed New York City into a dominant port and a world commercial center.

All because of a “ditch.”

We’ve seen new forms of transportation cause tectonic shifts repeatedly. James Watt’s dramatic improvement to the steam engine enabled the river steamboats, steam-driven trains, and ocean steamships that drove expansion, integration, and global trade throughout the 19th century. The car — initially seen as merely a better version of a horse — reshaped cities and created suburbs. The internal combustion engine that powered those early cars also produced trucks and, enabled by the interstate highway system, reshaped commerce and just about everything else about how we live, work, and play. The jet engine enabled planes that shrank world travel into a day — forget about getting from Buffalo to Albany in nine days; you can get from Buffalo to Moscow in nine hours.

AVs will provide the next such step-change in transportation and will transform how we live and work. We can already see that vast amounts of space will open up in cities, where nearly a third of space is devoted to parking cars that will no longer need to be parked — cars will just drop people off and then move on to their next user or head to a waiting area. In the U.S., there are 2 billion parking spaces for 275 million cars, or more than seven for every vehicle,[5] so doing away with parking areas will provide lots of flexibility to redesign public spaces.

We suspect that lots more people will live in cities because they’re efficient and because they’ll become much more attractive once you get rid of parking spaces and the noise and air pollution that come with vehicles using internal combustion engines. Still, others will take advantage of their newly free time and distance and live near that lake in the country, knowing they can get to a city any time they want, with zero inconvenience.[6] Cars, buses, trolleys, and subways shaped the urban/suburban landscape a century ago, making cities more attractive by getting rid of the steaming piles of horse manure that built up on every corner and allowing for suburbs to thrive, too. Similarly, AVs will create forces that impel new shifts, including many that aren’t immediately obvious but that will develop as AVs remove design constraints and as brilliant imaginations run free.

Yes, lots of people and businesses will have to adapt. Most notable are the 4.5 million professional drivers in the U.S.[7] (whom we firmly believe will have ample opportunities for new employment, though we acknowledge the transition will be painful for many). Autonomous vehicles will also change emergency rooms; they currently treat some 2.5 million people each year related to auto accidents and, based on current estimates, might treat only 10 percent as many once AVs become ubiquitous. Car insurance will essentially go away — why do you need insurance when there are almost no accidents, and you aren’t driving, anyway? Police departments won’t need patrols on the road watching for misdeeds by drivers. And so on.

On the other side of all that adaptation, we know that health, wealth, education, economic mobility, and more will all improve, because access to resources currently constrains so many people, and the Law of Zero for transportation means those limitations will disappear in the Future Perfect.

We also know that women won’t have to worry about being attacked by a driver, as there won’t be one, and that the vast majority of the roughly 40,000 people who die on U.S. roads every year will miss that appointment with death and will keep living full lives.

***

Drawing on all seven of the Laws of Zero will now let us start to design the future we want, pulling from both our research and from the thinking of some awfully smart friends we’ve worked with over the years. Based on the Laws of Zero and other likely advances in technology, in the next section we’ll explore key areas where we think we can collectively design wonderful — yet plausible — futures. We’ll also introduce you to the key tool, called a future history, that we use and that we will, at the end of the book, turn over to you so you can start to fill in the many blanks.

As we’ve said, not all these Laws of Zero will kick in right away. The laws will all evolve within today’s reality and will require time to supplant it. For instance, the fleet of cars on the road typically takes about 15 years to turn over, so, even if autonomous vehicle technology were perfect tomorrow, people wouldn’t just throw away their current cars and switch over to AVs — and AVs certainly won’t be perfect tomorrow.

But we still think the core question here is a fascinating and important one: How will these Laws of Zero (and assorted other developments) let us design as grand a world as possible for our kids and for their kids in 2050? What can removing today’s actual and cognitive restraints let us realistically project for them?

The short answer is: a lot.

The longer answer follows in the following chapters.

Other parts of this serialization (Subscribe to be notified of upcoming chapters as they are released):

A Brief History of a Perfect Future: Inventing the world we can proudly leave our kids by 2050 by Chunka Mui, Paul B. Carroll, and Tim Andrews

Table of Contents

Introduction

Part One: The Laws of Zero

Chapter 1 The First Law of Zero: Computing

Chapter 2 The Second Law of Zero: Communication

Chapter 3 The Third Law of Zero: Information

Chapter 4 The Fourth Law of Zero: Genomics

Chapter 5 The Fifth Law of Zero: Energy

Chapter 6 The Sixth Law of Zero: Water

Chapter 7 The Seventh Law of Zero: Transportation

Part Two: The Future Histories

Chapter 8 Electricity

Chapter 9 Transportation

Chapter 10 Health Care

Chapter 11 Climate

Chapter 12 Trust

Chapter 13 Government Services

Coda What is the Future Isn't Perfect?

Part Three: Jumpstarting the Future (Starting Now)

Chapter 14 What Individuals Can Do

Chapter 15 What Companies Can Do

Chapter 16 What Governments Can Do

Prologue: Over to You

Footnotes:?

[1] We acknowledge measuring progress on the Law of Zero for transportation is fuzzier than for the other laws. There isn’t a straightforward measure, like cost per transistor on a chip, watt of energy, or liter of water. Transportation involves tradeoffs among speed, cost, and quality, depending on the what, how, and why of the person or thing being transported. But, in spite of all the provisos and difficult-to-exactly-measure ambiguities that economists and historians will rightly point out, it’s clear that quantitative improvements in the time and cost of moving people and things have repeatedly driven qualitative changes in the long arc of human history. And, viewed from the vantage point of that long arc, both time and cost are now moving rapidly down that trendline toward zero.

[2] Kroger is already testing such an autonomous delivery service: https://arstechnica.com/cars/2018/12/kroger-owned-grocery-store-begins-fully-driverless-deliveries

[3] ARPA-E is working with researchers to fund various renewable energy approaches to aviation, including the REEACH and ASCEND programs. Ammonia-powered engines and more powerful electric engines are among the areas being pursued. https://arpa-e.energy.gov/sites/default/files/documents/files/REEACH_Project%20Descriptions_FINAL.pdf , https://arpa-e.energy.gov/sites/default/files/documents/files/ASCEND_Project_Descriptions_FINAL.pdf

[4] Not that we’re smarting from personal experience or anything but what is, under decent conditions, a 3 1/2-hour drive from the Bay Area to Tahoe City once took one of the authors 14 hours.

[5] https://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/08/arts/design/taking-parking-lots-seriously-as-public-spaces.html

[6] Google’s buses are already showing the possibilities. Googlers who live within even 2 ? hours of the headquarters in Mountain View, CA, can board a bus right near their homes that’s as functional as their office and can work all the way to HQ, spend a few hours available for face-to-face interaction, and then be driven back home, working all the while.?

[7] 3.5 million truck drivers, 230,000 taxi drivers, and 750,000-plus drivers for Uber and Lyft.