Column

ONEONTA MAY BE AHEAD OF CURVE

In Our Brave New World,

No Parking Lots Needed!

Editor’s Note: In sending this along, Oneonta’s Laurie Zimniewicz observed, “Based on these predictions, Oneonta is ahead of the curve regarding the parking spaces at the Dietz Street lot,” focus of a public debate on whether 80 parking spaces should be given up to allow construction of the Lofts on Dietz, 64 artists’ lofts and studios, and middle-income apartments.

Auto repair shops will go away. A gasoline engine has 20,000 individual parts. An electrical motor has 20. Electric cars are sold with lifetime guarantees and are only repaired by dealers. It takes only 10 minutes to remove and replace an electric motor.
Faulty electric motors are not repaired in the dealership but are sent to a regional repair shop that repairs them with robots. Your electric motor malfunction light goes on, so you drive up to what looks like a Jiffy-auto wash, and your car is towed through while you have a cup of coffee and out comes your car with a new electric motor!
•
Gas stations will go away. Parking meters will be replaced by meters that dispense electricity. Companies will install electrical recharging stations; in fact, they’ve already started. You can find them at select Dunkin’ Donuts locations.
•
Most (the smart) major auto manufacturers have already designated money to start building new plants that only build electric cars.
•
Coal industries will go away. Gasoline/oil companies will go away. Drilling for oil will stop. So say goodbye to OPEC!
•
Homes will produce and store more electrical energy during the day than they use and will sell it back to the grid. The grid stores it and dispenses it to industries that are high electricity users. Has anybody seen Tesla roof?
•
A baby of today will only see personal cars in museums.
•
Uber is just a software tool, they don’t own any cars, and are now the biggest taxi company in the world! Ask any taxi driver if they saw that coming.
•
Airbnb is now the biggest hotel company in the world, although they don’t own any properties. Ask Hilton Hotels if they saw that coming.
•
Artificial Intelligence: Computers become exponentially better in understanding the world. This year, a computer beat the best Go-player in the world, 10 years earlier than expected.
•
In the USA, young lawyers already don’t get jobs. Because of IBM’s Watson, you can get legal advice (so far for right now, the basic stuff) within seconds, with 90-percent accuracy compared with 70-percent accuracy when done by humans. So, if you study law, stop immediately. There will be 90 percent fewer lawyers in the future, (what a thought!) only omniscient specialists will remain.
•
Watson already helps nurses diagnosing cancer, it’s 4 times more accurate than human nurses.
•
Facebook now has a pattern recognition software that can recognize faces better than humans. In 2030, computers will become more intelligent than humans.
•
Autonomous cars: In 2018 the first self-driving cars are already here. In the next 2 years, the entire industry will start to be disrupted. You won’t want to own a car anymore as you will call a car with your phone, it will show up at your location and drive you to your destination. You will not need to park it, you will only pay for the driven distance and you can be productive while driving. The very young children of today will never get a driver’s license and will never own a car.
•
This will change our cities, because we will need 90-95% fewer cars. We can transform former parking spaces into parks. In the meantime though, having a parking space in a busy, modern city is essential for residents and professionals working there; using Adelaide Parking with Parkhound can guarantee you’ll be able to make use of a dedicated parking space without having to compete against others for the one remaining space in a parking lot.
•
1.2 million people die each year in car accidents worldwide including distracted or drunk driving. We now have one accident every 60,000 miles; with autonomous driving that will drop to 1 accident in 6 million miles. That will save a million lives plus worldwide each year.
•
Most traditional car companies will doubtless become bankrupt. Traditional car companies will try the evolutionary approach and just build a better car, while tech companies (Tesla, Apple, Google) will do the revolutionary approach and build a computer on wheels.
•
Look at what Volvo is doing right now; no more internal combustion engines in their vehicles starting this year with the 2019 models, using all electric or hybrid only, with the intent of phasing out hybrid models.
•
WELCOME TO TOMORROW; it actually arrived a few years ago.