Our Future of Fully Automated Transportation Systems

I've already wrote a lot about self-driven passenger cars rolling out from every single international car manufacturer in the world on or near the year 2020.  This is still on track and with so many billions of dollars invested by these monster companies, nothing short of a World War would stop them from deploying according to plan now.

In parallel of course, many of these same manufacturers are helping transportation companies automate as well.  But also, in the non-passenger transportation industries, there are other major firms that have plans of their own to deploy self-driven vehicles designed to ferry goods from point A to point B, and yes, some of them directly to consumers.

In the past few months, I've become aware of a couple of entrants in the self-driving space that have made decisive moves, such as Boeing and Airbus.   Both are in the air scene and do both passengers and cargo.  Now they are making big acquisitions and investments to automate their fleets of vehicles.

Ford and Dominos have decided to pair up to make the Dominos franchise one of the first big fast food franchises to deliver pizzas from oven to dining room without personnel being involved.

Mercedes is doing trials with Matternet in Switzerland now to become a big player in the self-driving delivery scene by combining both cars and drone technologies.

Deutsche Post DHL is developing its own fleet of self-driven delivery trucks to service it's clients in the 220 countries it has presence in. 

We're also seeing some testing (that have been going on for years) in self-driven freight trains too, like this example in the Australian outback.

The UK government is trialing platooning self-delivery trucks on its territory to reduce self-driven and transportation congestion on roads and make transportation of goods more cost effective to boot.

And let's not forget the startups that are still pumping out ideas to push it even further in the hopes to becoming dominant themselves in this very exciting area, or to be acquired by larger firms (like Being, Airbus, DHL and so on):

• Passenger Flying Drone is giving it a go in competing with Chinese Ehang and Volocopter to enter the scene.
• And DelivAir is developing ways to deliver packages directly to the individual smart device that made the order, in the hands of the holder, one would presume, using a specialized drone capable of dropping items from an air tether.

The point is, when we see major, major companies making these acquisitions and trials, we can't have any more doubt our world of transportation is about to change.  What kind of changes should we anticipate?

I discuss this further in my video below:

You can guarantee that first major players will network their self-driven vehicles as most of them will use deep learning AI to operate (or something better) and learn from road conditions.  This will allow individual vehicles to learn from every other vehicle in the network.  A bit later on, one would hope that the software and protocols in these network will converge to a certain type of information that can be also shared with other networks out there. i.e. DHL's fleet of autonomous delivery trucks learning from one another but then also sharing what they learn with the Mercedes delivery truck fleets and vice versa.  

This concept of connectivity is very powerful and important for security and safety reasons because these are all machines working at machine speeds.  They do take time to "absorb" new information from another source, as they are self-learning AI, but they can do it way faster than any human being could.

Can a human learn how to navigate crowds in a vehicle from literally millions of different situations and conditions internationally all at the same time and make sense of the information?  Impossible.  But machines can.

We're heading into a world where human beings can definitively focus on what they enjoy doing without worries on how we will move from A to B or how goods are moved from A to B.  Where this is heading is a networked transportation system that operates through the Internet and some secure networks that talk with each other that communicates all the information needed to ensure humans always have a safe way to go from place to place efficiently and where goods are always minutes away from where it is needed... all at the touch of a button, or a voice command.

This is all structuring itself thanks to the excitement there is around AI these days, and our readiness as a population to embrace such things to make our lives easier, safer and more enjoyable.

I can't wait!