How to conquer autonomous mobility.

Despite being a complete car nut and driving enthusiast, I actually look forward to the day, that I can get into my car, tell it to pick up a couple of friends, and have it drive us to go enjoy a good long hike together. Of course I would have selected the route, so there are a couple of deliciously curly asphalt spaghetti on the way. At which point I would take the wheel and take my friends on a little roller-coaster up the mountain. Never would I want to miss that opportunity. After the hike the car would just come pick us up wherever we ended up and drive us home, maybe while we all slept, since we would be exhausted, of course.

Wouldn't that be fantastic?

Well, not so fast. There are plenty of critical voices out there warning us of the effects that making human drivers obsolete could have on society. And I think we should listen to them. A good example of these voices can be found in this post by Pedro Ramon Lopez Garcia, Blockchain Projects Mentor and technology expert about a video from the world economic forum, telling a narrative not unlike my introduction, upon which Keith Ferazzi, Author of bestselling Books on business and interpersonal relationships offers his concern. Two valid contrary positions worth exploring and a contradiction worth solving.

Keith Ferrazzi righfully fears that we don't need truck drivers, delivery drivers and taxi drivers anymore, thus creating unemployment and an increased burden on society, leading to financial hardship and ultimately uncertainty, unrest and chaos.

However I think, the fear that autonomous cars will harm our society will only come true, if we stand by idly, while not pursuing the opportunities that autonomous traffic will provide.

Let's see how we can do that. Keith Ferrazzi delivers an interesting recipe himself in his book "Never eat alone". He writes about the concept of serendipity, an idea, caused by a happy accident. For me the serendipity is in my story at the beginning and how I came up with it. What I did was to try and imagine a world, where autonomous traffic is a reality and an integral part of my life. Within that world, I just thought about how I would do something I love.

Now it's time to try it yourself. Try to imagine yourself in that world and what businesses you might encounter during your daily routines, your work or doing things you like in this world. Also maybe remember that even Elon Musk recently learned that there are tasks, that are just too much for automation to handle. That kind of job and what kind of business can be built around it is exactly what you need to be looking for.

I'll show you just one example, I found. To find it, let's not dive into our fictious world just yet, but explore the case of a classical freelance trucker today and what tasks they encounter on a daily basis. Of course, most of their time they will spend on the road, driving, but during their time there, they will also handle job procurement, planning and to some extent customer relationship management. Once they arrive at their destination they will often have to load and unload their trucks themselves. Only when they arrive at big warehouse hubs or freight companies, their load will be handled by specialized warehouse staff.

Now in my imaginary world, they will still be proud owners of their trucks, have them customized and will deliver goods all over the globe. Only their job will involve less actual driving . The customer relationship management, job procurement, planning and especially the load handling portion of their job will not change. All these remaining tasks could well be bundled into a new business: Load handling.

To make it more obvious, let's explore a more specialized real world example, you will probably be familiar with: the moving business. You see, ironically, despite the name, in moving the most labor intensive part is loading and unloading and not driving. In fact, if you've lived through a corporate reorganization. You will likely also have witnessed cubicles being shuffled chairs and tables moved. More often than not, inside just one building or complex without trucks at all, but in most cases by professional movers.

In the moving business, careful planning, obtaining the right permissions to access the site, intricate maneuvering of the transport vehicle, proper positioning of the truck and supporting equipment, delicate handling of the moving load as well as the immense diversity of the load are key for success. Most of them are also a large a factor prohibiting automation. The moving business as it is today is the template for what load handling will look like. So looking at freight in general, in a world where autonomous vehicles are prevalent, wherever the factors mentioned before come into play, human load handling will become ever more important, because there are no more drivers present to load and unload.

Okay, we have a thesis, let's test it against a different scenario in our fantasy world, maybe a building site. I could see a specialized load handler taking control of an arriving autonomous transport vehicle, maneuvering it through the site and into position using a remote control or driving it classically. Then the load handler and perhaps extra hands or even heavy machinery can load and unload. Afterwards the vehicle is maneuvered back out of the site and sent back onto it's autonomous route. Clearly, manual load handling could become a need that simply does not exist without autonomous transport vehicles.

Of course, there is a catch though. On our fictional building site, if it is serviced by say five trucks delivering mortar, with the load handler on site, there are five jobs lost and just one created. Let's even call it just a half job created, because more likely than not the load handling is done by a crane operator or any other equipment operator already on site. Realistically only larger sites will have dedicated load handlers. The same goes for general freight and deliveries, wherever the freight is standardized and the loading environment is controlled and predictable or easily accessible.

Does this mean that this kind of thinking does not work? No. There are plenty of cases, where automation simply isn't possible. We have also clearly made progress, however little it may be in the couple of examples we've explored. And even if through pure imagination and dreaming you can not come up with the tasks specifically necessary to leverage autonomous transport, you can always apply a more structured approach like Design Thinking or even a rigorous approach like TRIZ to come up with viable solutions. But even with more structured approaches, you need to imagine the world as it will be with autonomous traffic in place, to find solutions.

So I hope you can see, that the ingredients to conquer autonomous mobility are the enthusiasm and imagination of a technology advocate like Pedro Ramon Lopez Garcia and the empathy offered by a cultivator of human relations like Keith Ferrazzi. When it comes to autonomous mobility, we need to, embrace it, imagine it and then systematically start developing businesses around it. Businesses, which thrive when autonomous transport is complemented with the unique capabilities, which only the human touch has to offer.