Autonomous Cars

Great potential, but it is uncertain both when they can be used in large-scale and how much they can reduce costs and increase productivity.

Could take >10 years for Autonomous Vehicles to have large societal effects -- and it's not clear how much smartphones have raised welfare!

Ten years ago, iPhones were already in use. But self-driving cars are still some years from even beginning to enter common use.

Inclined to disagree on the grounds that roll-out will be slow (pedestrians opportunistically stepping out in front of autonomous cars...)

adoption will almost surely be much lower than adoption of smartphones but per unit gains seem likely to be larger

I don't think they will be as transformative. There are too many potential safety issues and they will not solve congestion problems.

Hard to predict the future impact of new technologies. Smartphones the most recent example. Very unlikely to be matched by autonomous cars.

This will be great for people who, like me, hate driving.

Autonomous cars likely to be important, but hard to beat smartphones for impact.

technology faces major challenges, and regulatory limits are likely to be pretty onerous, good reasons to doubt the 10 yr impact from today

-see background information here

Seems unlikely they'll be adopted as fast, but large potential benefits from fewer accidents, less traffic jams, fewer parking lots, etc.

if my uncle had wheels, he would still not be an autonomous car.

A decade may be optimistic, but autonomous vehicles promise productivity gains, and (alas) perhaps also serious implications for inequality.

A decade seems too optimistic for most of the positive effects of autonomous vehicles

I have my doubts, but they are swamped by uncertainty.

It is hard to predict technology, but regulatory barriers are still significant. This will be true eventually.

I am confident that I have no idea. My only choice was between uncertain and no opinion. Not an economics question.

Commercial vehicles first, I think. Which means important distributional changes as well, with many losers as well as many winners..