The assassination of Henry Ford by the coward Sebastian Thrun

It all began with a conversation with my friend D.K. back in my shabby, office green carpeted apartment room with retrofitted kitchen and toilet. It was her who mentioned the Google Driverless Car project. Recently watching an overview of which you can see being given by Sebastian Thrun on TED, I was struck by the irony that his main drive was to save people's lives lost to car accidents but that its true impact may be much more profound...

There's three points to this, an ecological one, an economical one and a cultural one.

Ecology: Take a small revolutionary business project like Streetcar and merge it with the Driverless Car. What you get is a "perfect" public transportation system. It's fast since it requires no schedules (you could book a car as you book a taxi). It's cheap to operate having eliminated the expense of chauffeuring. It's efficient since it would deliver a vehicle of the right size for the transportation job. Imagine the convenience of having transportation at your disposal at any time without actually needing to "own" a car, pay its insurance, parking/garage, etc. If we join with a system where people go to work at staggered time intervals, we could make traffic jams a thing of the past and speed up transport with a car fleet many times smaller than we have today. The fall in pollution- and stress-related death and disease could easily outweigh the impact it has on motor accidents.

Economy: The system outlined above would save vast amounts of natural resources: The saving in energy is by itself worth the trouble, but so are the savings of raw materials such as metal, as well as the man-hours wasted by individuals driving to work, truckers, taxi-drivers and so forth. It is time we left routine jobs to machines, instead devising and expanding industries that make better use of human intellect and creativity.

Culture: In such a utilitarian state of affairs, car ownership becomes a mostly antiquated concept, and with it our affluenza could start to be eroded, and a different sort of status symbol could arise. Perhaps we might even start caring more about how much "happiness" we earn, and how much of a positive difference we make in other people's lives, rather than how much money is in our bank account.

So, shall we one day kill the roaming ghost of communism Henry Ford? I hope so.