Driverless Hotel Rooms: The End of Uber, Airbnb and Human Landlords

So the article talks about three concepts: “Driverless rooms”, “Lego skyscrapers” that are powered by smart contracts that these driverless rooms park at, and “decentralized cities” that result because these rooms can rearrange themselves on demand.<p>We can already have a “driverless room”; it’s called a Winnebago. Most prominent politicians, musicians, and celebrities will have well-appointed RVs that carry them around. Even if you take the driver out of the equation, logistical issues abound: Where do you do laundry? What about plumbing? Where do you put out the garbage? I am reminded about that episode in “The Office” where Dwight crams everyone into an overcrowded bus and has them do work there.<p>Second, the article complains about overproduction and waste, but the proposed solution is to create skyscraper-sized parking lots? Even the picture that is supposed to idealize this shows the lego skyscraper half-empty. How will Bondi Beach look when this monstrosity looms over it?<p>Finally, moving things around isn’t free. Yes, solar energy and electric cars means that it’s renewable. But doesn’t mean it’s unlimited. We are going to dedicate a large amount of energy generated in moving “mobile rooms” around 24&#x2F;7 for lots of people. That power still has to come from a power plant somewhere. Life isn’t like AWS; you can’t just spin up a solarpanel2.large.<p>I know this is essentially a piece of utopian fiction, but there are glaring flaws in this just aesthetically, let alone with other factors.

I liked how this piece tied all the trendy emerging tech into one short narrative. You could play Techcrunch bingo: driverless cars, drones, voice commands, blockchain etc.<p>But I couldn’t buy the part about a drone delivering food in 6 minutes to a vehicle that’s travelling between cities.<p>At first I figured the food would be prepared in the closest town or city. Assuming that there could be distances of tens or even hundreads of miles between adjacent localities, drones would have to cover at least 10 miles every minute (or 600 mph).<p>But instead of traditional restaurants, you could have driverless food trucks everywhere. Presumably, given enough density and clever routing algorithms, you could significantly cut down on the drone travel distance.<p>Edit: If the mobile hotel room in the story was only travelling between the airport and a nearby city, that would make it more plausible, but also less useful.

I don&#x27;t really think we need all of those amenities constantly flying around and intercepting your trajectory so that you can always be &#x27;on the move&#x27;.<p>My dream for the future is less density. I&#x27;d love to move inland to where land is cheaper and invest in staying in place. Setting up solar&#x2F;water to be self sufficient while I work at home remotely in peace from the constant thunder of garbage trucks and screaming taxi horns.<p>I&#x27;d still race a Tesla during the day that I charge at night from stored solar while I watch Netflix on a massive screen hung between two trees outside my living room.

<i>&gt;&gt;&quot;The issue of overproduction is a common crisis in Capitalism where more goods are produced than there are customers to consume them.<p>In a free market this should result in prices dropping until the excess supply lowers to meet demand.<p>But what typically happens is that manufacturers either artificially restrict supply or resort to simply destroying the unsold goods. &quot;&lt;&lt;</i><p>---<p>Seems like a correct observation, pointed out by the article. I had not given it a thought before.<p>But, by the same token, isn&#x27;t setting up this type of &#x27;smart city&#x27; with human-less services, also a significant investment, and also can be overdone. What will happens when this type of infrastructure is overdone ?<p>I personally think, that &#x27;de-urbanization&#x27; with increased mobility across cities, 80%+ telecommute work force, and a 4 day work week, is the answer to many of today&#x27;s issues in developed and yet-to-be-developed economies (still corruption, political militarization of law enforcement -- are huge issues that must be addressed).

Why do I need to be moving around constantly? Where is the office going while I work and then have the gym connect to it? It seems like most people pretty much stay in place. They live in one place and work in another place. They travel between them, but they don&#x27;t need to move much while they&#x27;re in one or the other. So what&#x27;s the point of making my home or my office move and why waste all the energy to move my home from one city to another, when I only really need to move my body and make use of other homes that are already in the place I&#x27;m going to?

The article is okay, but I&#x27;m disappointed about a lack of larger big-picture thinking. It <i>assumes</i> (instead of questioning) that we will live in cities or often visit cities. The internet economy already decentralized cities by making visiting them less relevant than before, you can work from anywhere. Snowden has given many conference talks without leaving his middle-of-nowhere cabin in Russia.<p>Even if this vision were true, what about other problems like motion sickness when working (or reading books) in a moving vehicle? That&#x27;s just one question of many.

What to say, other than &quot;sensationalistic, clickbaity, clickfarmy medium.com crowd yada yada&quot; the criticism of the idea is following - there are no such thing as a self driving car on sale, nor will be in coming years.<p>Car sales are down because of demand side issues, nothing else: the potential car buyer demographic of this generation is comparatively poorer, average second hand car lasts longer, public transport in Western countries is slowly getting better, road congestions are hitting developing countries where there were no such issues before. That&#x27;s it.

I doubt this will work on a plain economics standpoint. A pallet container housing tower would be incredibly expensive in comparison to a normal skyscraper or wooden medium rise. Most housing cost issues stem from policy than from actual price.<p>A lot of the costs of driving and parking commons is subsidized through government policy and taxes. If the commons gets abused even more easily because driverless electrics reduce the friction of doing so, cities and government will react through policy and user fees.

The driverless [insert accommodation here] thing is a great idea, but no one ever discusses how the hell these things are cleaned.<p>One thing that keeps me from being all about car-sharing is the idea of having to sit in someone else&#x27;s funk. Humans are nasty and disgusting and constantly outgassing, consciously or unconsciously, and some of those emanations are downright hazardous.<p>So why is everyone completely ignoring how we clean all these driverless, shared things?

Autonomous vehicles can be a useful tool for making the tragedy of the commons vastly more tragic without smart policies in place to direct their implementation.

I&#x27;d love this to exist, BUT -- the road infrastructure I don&#x27;t think does... cars take up enough road real estate, this would be like self-driving truckers or mobile homes there&#x27;s not enough room on roads as there is... Maybe if we level all the high rises and office buildings in lieu of mobile ones, but that just doesn&#x27;t seem feasible.

I can see living in a vehicle, but I can&#x27;t see having a board room drive to me, as that would be a waste of resources. It should take me to the nearest rent able space or the nearest gym. Still a really cool idea, and I would totally do one of these rooms if I had the chance.

Interesting idea, but...<p>&gt; As such it’s predicted that by 2025 all new vehicles produced will be 100% electric[.]<p>This seems grossly unrealistic.

While, I&#x27;m not a fan of ready player one, this could be how &quot;the stacks&quot; would form in real life.

I do like the idea of a mobile, driverless hotel room: it picks you up at the airport, drives you around the city to visit the next site while you shower, and so on. Hotels of the future won&#x27;t have a single physical address. Instead, they will become fleets of driverless rooms.

Toyota&#x27;s new e-pallet concept, anyone?

Infancy?

So, in this imagined utopia where you talk to a driverless room and, boom!, food arrives while you are on your way to some destination or other, what happens if you talk to yourself habitually? What happens if you get on the phone? What happens if you speak American English and you touch down in Australia and your room understands some American expression completely differently?<p>This sounds like it has very serious pitfalls for mere mortals who don&#x27;t know exactly what they want every minute of the day and for real world scenarios where language is not static nor universal. In fact, the same word or expression can mean many different things.