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Intel Businesses The Almighty Buck Transportation Hardware Technology

Intel Predicts a $7 Trillion Self-Driving Future Where Over a Million Lives Will Be Part of the 'Passenger Economy' (theverge.com) 142

Posted by BeauHD from the passenger-economy dept.
Intel has released a new study that predicts a $7 trillion annual revenue stream from the emerging passenger economy. In the report, Intel says that the companies that don't prepare for self-driving risk failure or extinction. Additionally, the report finds that over a half a million lives could be saved by self-driving cars over just one decade. The Verge reports: The study, prepared by Strategy Analytics, predicts autonomous vehicles will create a massive economic opportunity that will scale from $800 billion in 2035 (the base year of the study) to $7 trillion by 2050. An estimated 585,000 lives could be saved due to autonomous vehicles between 2035 and 2045, the study predicts. This âoepassenger economy,â as Intel is calling it, includes the value of the products and services derived from fully autonomous vehicles as well as indirect savings such as time. Autonomous technology will drive change across a range of industries, the study predicts, the first green shoots of which will appear in the business-to-business sector. These autonomous vehicles will first appear in developed markets and will reinvent the package delivery and long-haul transportation sectors, says Strategy Analytics president Harvey Cohen, who co-authored the study. This will relieve driver shortages, a chronic problem in the industry, and account for two-thirds of initial projected revenues. One of the bolder predictions is that public transportation as we know it today â" trains, subways, light rails, and buses -- will be supplanted, or at least radically changed, by the rise of on-demand autonomous vehicle fleets. The study argues that people will flock to suburbs as population density rises in city centers, pushing commute times higher and âoeoutstripping the ability of public transport infrastructure to fully meet consumer mobility needs.â
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Intel Predicts a $7 Trillion Self-Driving Future Where Over a Million Lives Will Be Part of the 'Passenger Economy' More

Intel Predicts a $7 Trillion Self-Driving Future Where Over a Million Lives Will Be Part of the 'Passenger Economy'

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  • Than most people seem to think. Even 2035 is being too optimistic.

    • Even 2035 is being too optimistic.

      Progress in this field is impossible to predict, because it's not proceeding in a linear fashion, but rather it jumps forward every time someone has a good idea. Look at AlphaGo. Given the progress before that, people thought such a program was at least a decade away, but all of a sudden it was there.

      • What does a computer playing a game with a strict set of rules have to do with self-driving cars? Nothing. You are one of those AI nutters who thinks just because computers get more powerful every year it will continue indefinitely. After all, you had a C64 when you were a kid, and WOW, look at computers now! In 50 years they will be sentient, because...well...progress always happens, right?

        Here is a shock: progress isn't inevitable. Digital computers are not going to get faster and faster indefinitely. Al

        • Re: (Score:3)

          by ranton ( 36917 )

          Here is a shock: progress isn't inevitable. Digital computers are not going to get faster and faster indefinitely. Already we are seeing that processor speed is only marginally improving year over year.

          Barring a major catastrophe such as a nuclear war, progress is nearly inevitable. Moore's law may break down, but that isn't even the biggest driver of progress in the computing industry. In one estimate provided by a Berlin professor stated that algorithmic improvements were 43x more influential than hardware improvements in solving complex numerical problems he studied [wordpress.com].

          Computers don't have to infinitely increase in speed for our progress to continue for quite some time.

          • Just because you get to the end of what silicone can do also doesn't mean another tech doesn't take over from that point, either.

            I read one interesting posit that said that if you consider the *processing* part of Moore's law only that our ability to calculate as a speces has been following Moore's Law for thousands of years. Silicone wafers took over at the limits of paper and pencil, by hand calculation.

            • Re: (Score:2)

              by mspohr ( 589790 )

              Silly fellow, silicone is for breasts (and it can do a lot for them, no tech required).

        • Re:Self-driving a lot farther away (Score:4, Insightful)

          by religionofpeas ( 4511805 ) on Friday June 02, 2017 @10:01AM (#54534047)

          What does a computer playing a game with a strict set of rules have to do with self-driving cars? Nothing.

          The rules of the game are simple and strict, but evaluation of the board is extremely hard and fuzzy. Comparable to driving, actually. There is a strict number of rules driving a car, but complicated evaluation.

          Already we are seeing that processor speed is only marginally improving year over year.

          My point exactly. The sudden breakthrough of AlphaGo had little to do with slowly improving processor speeds, but mostly with some guys coming up with a few clever ideas. And this year's version was running on dedicated hardware, not general purpose processors, so it could gain orders of magnitude improvement in a single year.

          • It's also ridiculous to point at clock rate and say "see? processors aren't getting faster!" okay, so single thread performance is improving only incrementally, and slowly. But for parallelizable problems, the performance is continuing to improve.

          • Nothing about Go involves understanding the world or people. Everything about driving involves understanding the world and people.

            • Nothing about Go involves understanding the world or people. Everything about driving involves understanding the world and people.

              My point was not that Go is equal to driving. The point was that progress comes in leaps and bounds, not gradual.

              Playing Go means you have to understand vague concepts like "influence" that are not defined by rules. Driving means understanding vague concepts like "pedestrians". Even though these are different concepts, they are comparably fuzzy in their definition, so it's likely that progress in autonomous driving will also happen in leaps and bounds.

              • What part of playing Go was really an advance in what we already knew about neural networks. Maybe they added a clever spin to make it good at go but did they not just use a Google neural network? Does AlphaGo even learn from game to game at all? Have they demonstrated it getting better and better as it plays and self-adapting (meaning no code changes) . or do they need to make code changes each time?

                • What part of playing Go was really an advance in what we already knew about neural networks

                  The playing strength was suddenly far beyond what people were expecting. They were not the first to try out neural networks for Go, but they certainly created the biggest jump.

                  Have they demonstrated it getting better and better as it plays and self-adapting (meaning no code changes) . or do they need to make code changes each time?

                  It acquired most of its knowledge from self-play at rapid time controls, using a few weeks of training time. Once it is set up, no more code changes or human input is necessary to improve playing strength. They bootstrapped it by letting it watch human games first, but I've read that people are working on a new version that starts com

                  • Except for the fact that there are way more situations in driving that come up then in a game of go. I don't care how many possible board positions there are.

        • Re:Self-driving a lot farther away (Score:5, Insightful)

          by Kiuas ( 1084567 ) on Friday June 02, 2017 @10:22AM (#54534263)

          What does a computer playing a game with a strict set of rules have to do with self-driving cars? Nothing

          Wrong. In fact, massively so.

          The whole reason that Go is so signifficant as a milestone for AI is because despite the ruleset being simple and straightforward, the amount of possible board configurations exceeds the number of atoms in the known universe.

          Ask a good chess player why he made a certain move and he'll be able to give you a very well defined answer. "I moved the knight there because by doing so I have a guaranteed mate in 5 moves" or some such. Now go to a pro Go player and ask the same thing and they won't give you the same answer, they'll often give some variety of 'it felt right'. You cannot number crunch Go in the same fashion you can many other games simply due to the fact that the complexity and amount of possible plays far exceeds what even the current top of the line algorithms, let alone a human brain can handle. Thus there's a huge component of essentially intuition involved in Go.

          This is why even a couple years ago people were still saying it's not possible for computers to beat humans at Go because it requires actually learning to evaluate moves entirely differently from chess. It requires a level of essentially creative thinking.

          You are one of those AI nutters who thinks just because computers get more powerful every year it will continue indefinitely.

          Most people do not think the progress will continue indefinitely but it doesn't have to do so in order for for computers to a) achieve human level general intelligence or b) achieve consciousness.

          Digital computers are not going to get faster and faster indefinitely. Already we are seeing that processor speed is only marginally improving year over year.

          What he was trying to point out is precisely that these days the key developments are happening in the software, not the hardware.

          That's the whole reason alphaGo is a good example. It's not that google beat Go because they suddenly got a slightly faster supercomputer able top crunch even more numbers, it's that they beat it by creating better algorithms that ran on existing hardware and learned to play the game better than humans.

          Self-driving cars are the exact same thing. You're trying to teach a computerized system to play a game (traffic) which has fairly simple rules that even relatively stupid people manage to follow but has an almost infinite amount of possible outcomes (comparable to the amount of board positions in Go). the problems that remain to be solved are not related to processor power. We already have more than enough processing power in self-driving cars to vastly exceed the capacity of any human. The challenges to be solved have to do with machine learning and actually teaching that cars to become good drivers in various different weather and road conditions.

          And just like with Go the car will also have to know how to deal with entirely new/unforeseen situations and pick the best move with no prior experience of such a situation.

          That's why it's relevant. The key to AI is first and foremost the algorithms used, and those algorithms are improving at a pace which vastly exceeds the linear pace of hardware improvement, as evidenced by alphaGo.

          • Most people do not think the progress will continue indefinitely but it doesn't have to do so in order for for computers to a) achieve human level general intelligence or b) achieve consciousness.

            That statement right there is what qualifies you as an 'AI' nutter, buddy. We have NO IDEA yet how the human brain achieves what we consider 'consciousness', 'sentience', or 'self-awareness', and until we do we cannot build machines capable of those qualities, we can ONLY create the false illusion of them, a parlor trick, fakery, on a very limited level. I don't care how many games of 'Go' or Chess some computer can win, until it's capable of passing the Turing Test at the strictest levels, over and over an

            • we can ONLY create the false illusion of them, a parlor trick, fakery

              That's good enough. My brain also creates false illusions, parlor tricks, and fakery, and they allow me to drive a car.

              Scientists who study the human brain agree with me

              citation required.

          • that even relatively stupid people manage to follow

            This deserves repeating.

            People tend to expect flawless behavior from AI for it to be viable, but we have little issue with 50% of drivers on the road 'driving like shit'. People lose their shit if you even suggest that people should retake their driving exams every five years.
            We literally regularly say that tons of other people are terrible drivers. There are at least 3 people in my group(s) of friends that I do not trust at all and actively avoid as drivers. One of them has actually almost gotten me killed

          • What percentage of playing the game of Go is the same ruleset applied over and over and over, and what percentage is an actual unique idea? I'd say it is 95% repetition with 5% decision.

            • What percentage of playing the game of Go is the same ruleset applied over and over and over, and what percentage is an actual unique idea?

              Every game and every position is unique, once you get past the initial opening moves. The computer has learned to recognize patterns of patterns, and apply these patterns in new situations.

              • You're not understanding me. The game is picking the next move over and over based on a small set of rules. How many times is it required to go outside those rules to make an actual decision about the next part of the game?

        • Here is a shock: progress isn't inevitable.

          When the financial incentives are as huge as they are for something that's already clearly possible as self-driving cars are? Yes it is.

    • At least Intel seems to be breaking away from the hype a bit, by delaying the self-driving future to 2035 instead of next year.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by elrous0 ( 869638 )

        At least Intel seems to be breaking away from the hype a bit, by delaying the self-driving future to 2035 instead of next year.

        Yeah, I'll give them that. I've heard some pretty ridiculous hyperbole lately on the self-driving trend. Just look at ridiculous articles like this one [fortune.com] (claiming that self-driving trucks will dominate the trucking industry within the next ten years):

    • All the baby boomers will be retired, retirees will outnumber workers, and two-third of the federal budget will go to Social Security and Medicare. There won't be enough workers to drive all these senior citizens to their beauty and golf appointments. Hence, self-driving cars in 2034.

  • Have they figured out who's liable yet? (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    Who's going to pay when these cars get in wrecks?

    • criminal liability as well + tickets both to the driver and to the car. also turning it over to a real person with 1 sec to crash does not move the blame to the person.

      Hit and run is an criminal case.

      Some photo speeding tickets to go to driver. Most other ones are like red light ones go to the car.

      Tickets from a cop other then parking go to the driver.

    • Who's going to pay when these cars get in wrecks?

      The insurance company, and they get the premiums from the passengers riding in them.

  • Cabs without drivers = no one to ensure passengers don't vomit, urinate or defecate in them. Drunks will LOVE it!
    • Eh they don't prevent that now, they just clean it up afterward.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by PPH ( 736903 )

      What do you think goes on in the back end of transit buses today?

      • What do you think goes on in the back end of transit buses today?

        The transit system for Silicon Valley would declare a bio hazard and take the bus out of service. The new buses have anti-bacterial seat covers that won't absorb fluids, making it easier for the cleaning crew to spray down the interior with bleach.

    • They will have cameras on the passengers and know who did it.

      I was in Chicago recently and they have cameras in the cabs already (to dissuade unruly passengers), and they have a posted $50 fee for vomiting in the cab. The rates didn't address lower body activities.

  • If putting 1 million lives "into the passenger economy" can save 1/2 million lives from traffic accidents - does that mean that half of these people would have died in traffic accidents? Wow. /s

  • That money has to come from somewhere (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Weaselmancer ( 533834 ) on Friday June 02, 2017 @09:40AM (#54533887)

    Intel has released a new study that predicts a $7 trillion annual revenue stream from the emerging passenger economy.

    Remember, that money has to come from somewhere. There are a lot of people that drive for a living that will suddenly be out of a job. 7 trillion for some company to provide transportation-as-a-service, but you'll have millions of people out of work as a result.

    I'm not saying self driving cars are good or bad, I'm just saying we as a society better prepare for this. That's a lot of able bodied yet suddenly unemployed people for the economy to absorb.

    • Based on Department of Labor and other numbers, something like 2 to 3 percent of the U.S. workforce is primarily employed as a professional driver of some sort, adding up everything from short and long haul truckers to taxi drivers and so forth.

      On one hand, even a 3 percent jump in the unemployment rate wouldn't be catastrophic, given where we're at right now (4.3-4.4%). Adding three percent would put us at mid-2013 unemployment levels. It would also be reasonably geographically distributed, so no one ar

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by Anonymous Coward

        Based on Department of Labor and other numbers, something like 2 to 3 percent of the U.S. workforce is primarily employed as a professional driver of some sort, adding up everything from short and long haul truckers to taxi drivers and so forth.

        Your numbers are far off. Just "Heavy and Tractor-trailer Truck Drivers", which only account for freight movers, not package delivery drivers, not taxis, are 5% of the national jobforce. Then there are the support jobs. Truck stop workers, dock workers, hotels, restaurants, and so on. In many industries for every one primary job position, three are created to support it. I'd imagine that in transportation the number is less, and many people will have a job regardless of whether a machine or a man is driving

      • How many of them are going to be able to learn to do something better/more valuable? If they could have, wouldn't many of them already have done so?

        The move to the "passenger economy" will create a bunch of new jobs, just like every other time that we've invented technology to take over jobs in the last 1000 years. Before we had alarm clocks, people had jobs to go down the streets and wake people up by knocking on their bedroom windows with a long stick, or lighting the street lamps. We had pinsetters that would set up the pins in a bowling alley. We had professional leech collectors for bloodletting, switchboard operators at phone companies. We had

        • You aren't the only person saying this, but neither you nor anyone else has bothered to mention what those jobs might be. OP is exactly right:

          How many of them are going to be able to learn to do something better/more valuable? If they could have, wouldn't many of them already have done so?

          If we can automate driving, we can automate a lot of the other possible jobs for these people. Driving is not a trivial job to automate. However, driving is not a skilled job in most circumstances. Most people can be a driver. (Maybe not a good one, but the actual skill bar is rather low.)

          If we can replace human drivers, we can replace humans in most other

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by dj245 ( 732906 )

      Intel has released a new study that predicts a $7 trillion annual revenue stream from the emerging passenger economy.

      Remember, that money has to come from somewhere. There are a lot of people that drive for a living that will suddenly be out of a job. 7 trillion for some company to provide transportation-as-a-service, but you'll have millions of people out of work as a result.

      I'm not saying self driving cars are good or bad, I'm just saying we as a society better prepare for this. That's a lot of able bodied yet suddenly unemployed people for the economy to absorb.

      "Driver" is a very common job for new immigrants. You don't have to know much english or education to drive a vehicle. Our company ships something by dedicated freight (18-wheeler, step deck) about once a week, and it is somewhat rare for the driver to not be a 1st generation immigrant. Immigrant drivers for passenger services are common enough that it is a well-known stereotype. Adjustments to immigration policy might soften the self-driving transition significantly.

    • Money doesn't have to come from somewhere. The global economy grows.

    • Remember, that money has to come from somewhere.

      True, but your next sentence seems to imply you think it's a zero-sum game. Far more of that money will come from increases in productivity as from lost wages of professional drivers. In fact, assuming Intel's estimated figure is correct, it's not possible to get that much money from lost wages, unless each driver makes millions per year, which they manifestly do not. Further, unless the current wave of automation bucks the trends of all previous technology-driven economic restructurings (which is possible,

  • >> relieve driver shortages, a chronic problem in the industry

    ELIMINATE driver PAYROLL, a chronic problem in the industry

    FTFY

  • Self driving car + network along the highway (Score:4, Interesting)

    by spiritgreywolf ( 683532 ) * on Friday June 02, 2017 @10:04AM (#54534077) Homepage Journal

    Aside from the fact that just about any self-driving algorithm is better than a human behind the wheel distracted by texting, I personally welcome owning a vehicle with self-driving capability - especially if it means I can focus on working on projects on my way to work.

    I occasionally have to drive from my location to my largest client in Denver, which is a 6.5 hour drive for me. Whether I drive or take a plane, it's a wash for me. Going to the airport, getting on the plane, flying, getting a rental car and driving to the site vs. just driving there is roughly the same time. If that time could be spent productively working on my laptop while the car drove itself the entire way it would be frigging awesomeness.

    In fact, if I had that ability, I would far rather drive to my clients (I actually like road trips) and just work along the way. I personally have nothing but contempt for the airlines and all the bullshit TSA crap that goes along with it.

    Also, telcos and other organizations would be stupid to ignore building out their networks better along all the major highways linking all the major metropolitan areas. If I had awesome connectivity along the routes I would drive all the time? My SUV would become my mobile office and I would be in "work heaven" :-)

    • Oh - and in addition - if I were the airlines I would be seriously worried about this technology.

      I think there are a LOT of people that if faced with a similar situation, that shorter flights where the majority of time is taken up by all the bullshit surrounding TSA and airline hassle, that they'd rather have their car drive them while they could do other things to stay productive.

      Hell, if the tech was seriously _that_ good at some point? I could see ending my day of meetings and just jumping in the car and

      • And heck, I could see specialty companies rent out showers and such to people who have been riding in their car to their destination - their own "red-eye" version but on wheels - so they can get cleaned up and dressed for the day when they get there. Hourly motels might not be "just for sex" anymore. Or a national chain of gyms - or whatever.

        Just FYI, truck stops have this already, and have for decades. Usually they are free if you purchase 50 gallons of fuel or more, but they are also pretty cheap if you just need a shower. I used them when I was mostly broke and driving WAY too far for job interviews in the summer time in a car without a/c.

  • We don't need to save any more lives. The planet is overcrowded already. We need to find more ways to reduce the population.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Shotgun ( 30919 )

      The power to reduce it by one is always in your hands, trevc.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Nemyst ( 1383049 )
      Support education, support ways of reducing poverty, support lowering income disparity. It's readily obvious that this would be the most straightforward way of cutting down on worldwide population without implementing draconian reproduction control, killing people, or even more barbaric means.

  • You will only move about if the government permits you to do so. Sound crazy? Be wary of governments that want to charge you an "exit tax" to leave the country.

  • By 2025 the market for Itanium servers will total 22 trillions a year (* according to low end figures of the current projections), 7 trillions in Itanium for cars will come in addition to that. This points out to Itanium overtaking China as the world's first economy in about 8 years.

  • 585,000 lives saved between 2035 and 2045 = 58.8k lives saved per year.

    Current worldwide traffic fatalities are about 1.25 million per year [who.int].

    That's a 5% reduction. For an outlay that starts at $800 billion a year and scales to $7 trillion.

    How about spending a fraction of that money on real driver education, training, and enforcement?

    Oh, I forgot -- robots are cool. Nevermind.

    • That's a 5% reduction. For an outlay that starts at $800 billion a year and scales to $7 trillion.

      That's the value of the "passenger economy", not the cost. We save money, and we save lives.

      How about spending a fraction of that money on real driver education, training, and enforcement?

      We've been doing that for decades. Why do you think that we could do a lot better ?

  • Headline should read, "Intel are looking for investors for self-driving vehicle technologies." By saying, "if you don't invest with us, the sky will fall in."

    TIFTFY

  • This isn't a study, it's a WAG (Wild A$$ guess). There's way to many variables to even attempt to imagine the economy in 2050
    *Population by then will likely hit food shortages, (edible bio-mass in the oceans is dropping significantly year after year), temp changes, acidification, over fishing are contributors
    * fresh water shortages,
    * global warming will change the earth, it's projected that by 2050 5Bn people will face entirely new climates (again, what will that do to plant and animal habitat)

    • This isn't a study, it's a WAG (Wild A$$ guess).

      If self-driving cars advanced as quickly as predictions about self-driving cars, we would have them by now.

  • 7 trillion dollar industry divided by 1 million customers = 7 million per customer. Math totally checks out, this will save a ton compared to cars.

    Oh wait, did they account for the massive riots when they put every moron who can't do more than drive a delivery truck out of business? This could translate to 7 quintilian dollars when you account for the need of the defense industry to more heavily arm the police to cope and start setting up concentration camps.

  • And then everyone will take their flying cars back to their homes in the sky, and then they'll arrive via their vacuum tube elevators, and then their robotic maids will 3d print their food to their liking, and then they'll take their pets on a walk outside on top of a threadmill suspended 10000 feet in the air with no guardrails

    Predictions predictions. I'm not sure why analysts and companies keep doing this, but seems it's either veiled interests or just pure ignorance on how culture grows with technology.

  • Intel predicts great future for something that Intel has invested tens of billions in.
  • Hmmm .. seems we can't even get thing to work reliably in ONE dimension ... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]

    If you consider the amount money spent on technology over nearly sixty years, crap still happens with aircraft.

    ... wonder what happens when there is a data center outage like what happened recently to British Airways.

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