Driverless taxis, driverless trucks, and totally unstaffed grocery stores are in the news.
- In the “already here” category, Sweden boasts the first unstaffed grocery store.
- In the UK, fleet testing of driverless trucks begins in 2017.
- In Japan, 2020 is the deadline date for driverless taxis.
How far behind will the US be?
World’s First Unmanned Grocery Store
Please consider In Sweden’s 1st Unstaffed Food Shop, All You Need is a Phone.
Swedish IT entrepreneur Robert Ilijason shows how to use a cell phone to scan a purchase at the no-staff, app shop in the southern Sweden village of Viken in this photo dated Jan. 27, 2016. Customers to the new general store need to register and download a cell phone app, then customers simply use their cellphones to unlock the door with a swipe of the finger and scan their purchases then they get charged for their purchases in a monthly invoice. (AP Photo/Jan Olsen)
Home alone with his hungry son, Ilijason had dropped the last baby food jar on the floor, and had to drive 20 minutes from the small town of Viken in southern Sweden to find a supermarket that was open.
Now the 39-year-old IT specialist runs a 24-hour shop with no cashier.
Customers simply use their cellphones to unlock the door with a swipe of the finger and scan their purchases. All they need to do is to register for the service and download an app. They get charged for their purchases in a monthly invoice.
The shop has basics like milk, bread, sugar, canned food, diapers and other products that you expect to find in a small convenience store. It doesn’t have tobacco or medical drugs because of the risk of theft. Alcohol cannot be sold in convenience stores in Sweden.
“My ambition is to spread this idea to other villages and small towns,” said Ilijason. “It is incredible that no one has thought of his before.”
He hopes the savings of having no staff will help bring back small stores to the countryside. In recent decades, such stores have been replaced by bigger supermarkets often many miles (kilometers) away.
Ilijason receives deliveries at the shop and stacks products on the shelves. Then he lets the customers do the rest.
He has installed six surveillance cameras to discourage shoplifting in the 480-square-foot (45-square-meter) store. Also, he is alerted by a text message if the front door stays open for longer than eight seconds or if someone tries to break it open.
UK Fleet Tests Driverless Trucks
Next on the list, the Mirror reports Driverless Lorries Heading for Tests on UK Motorways Next Year.
A fleet of driverless lorries will be road-tested on a quiet stretch of British motorway next year, it has been claimed.
Chancellor George Osborne pledged last year to invest millions in automated car technology as a way of improve efficiency and reducing traffic congestion.
And the seed of those plans could come to fruition as early as 2017, with a “platoon” of driverless HGVs set to be tried out along an unidentified UK motorway.
According to The Times, that motorway will be the M6 near Carlisle, where up to 10 vehicles will be tested, with a driver sitting behind the wheel of every lorry as a precaution.
The computer controlled lorries will be driven just metres apart from one another in a “platoon” formation – one of the much-heralded advantages of driverless technology.
Communicating through radar, the trucks are able to detect the exact distance between one another, locking into a tight, single row that would hopefully free up road space for other vehicles.
If a lorry is forced to break suddenly, a signal is sent within half a second to the truck behind, which also breaks instantly and maintains the distance.
For those who claim the Mirror is not a reliable site, the BBC had nearly the identical story. I used the Mirror because it had better images.
Similarly, SBS News in Australia comments “Platoons of driverless trucks are to be road-tested on a major motorway in the UK.”
Driverless Taxis Operational by 2020
Via translation from El Economista, Japan Introduces the Robot Taxi.
The Japanese company Robot Taxi has begun testing a driverless taxi service for residents in Fujisawa (south of Tokyo) with the aim of driving these vehicles operate automatically in 2020 Tokyo Olympics.
The Japanese company intends that its fully automatic driving taxis will operate during the 2020 Tokyo Olympic Games to transport athletes and tourists from the Japanese capital to the Olympic venues and vice versa.
The Japanese government announced last October that the driverless vehicles can drive through Tokyo in 2020 and also aims to have in place a legal framework for such cars before the end of the next fiscal year, which ends in March 2017.
Winner is Japan
Every time I do one of these stories, naysayers tell me it won’t happen.
Instead, I suggest my often-forecast 2020 date for taxis may have been too pessimistic, at least for Japan. 2019 now seems likely.
What Japan does, others will follow. In France, expect massive protests and shutdowns.
In the US, Uber drivers will vanish, perhaps not by 2020, but well before 2025.
Naysayers cannot stop the march of technology.
Mike “Mish” Shedlock
I wonder how well that store in Sweden will work out when the Muslim Refugees find out.
Many informed readers must have the same thought. And in all countries, Muslim migrants are disproportionately employed as drivers – one of very few vocations they are, or could become, qualified for. But, maybe robotic drivers will make people smuggling much more difficult, though that’s a relatively small positive.
From what I read, most of the more Modern Immigrants are really not that big on jobs. The big attraction is “something for nothing” from a dying society begging to become dominated by a more fundamentalist ideology.
You should look at some of the automated warehouse videos on YouTube. 5 years ago the ROI was questionable. A lot of these now show a positive ROI in 12 months in smaller and smaller footprints and volumes.
This same technology could eventually turn your average big box store or supermarket in to giant vending machines. (Because Big Box stores at their core are giant warehouses staged for customers to do the picks themselves.)
How about turning government into a vending machine … can do ?
At least you would get to vandalize it when it doesn’t work and probably not be charged for much for doing so … obviously , it would be the fault of ‘government’ .
Japan has very few lawyers or lawsuits. The USA has many many lawyers, and infinite numbers of laws…..I believe we will see driverless long distance trucks in the US, but not within city areas for a long time.
In this same thought, Japan is a very monolithic society and as such I can imagine is much more accepting of a uniform transportation system. America is much more individualistic and resistant to conformation. It is hard to imagine that self driving cars will be compatible with Mad Max on the motorways. Eventually, for self driving vehicles to become wide spread, they will necessarily become dominant….and that will be a tough road indeed. But then again, if it is mandated by an all loving government only seeking our best interests, they will also find it necessary to deprive us of our weapons, personal vehicles, and naturally request we all live in little boxes of ticky tacky, stacked neatly in a row. The important thing is that everything becomes more EASY. It is apparent that our lives are excruciatingly laborious and it is only fair that things become much, much easier. My dad started out shucking corn by hand for 25c a day and I started out digging foundations by hand for $2 an hour, but nothing as tough as we have it now…..these smart phones are just too damned hard to manage. they. must.be.made.easier…..and free education for all.
All the store in Sweden needs is RFID chips on all items and the phone. Walk through a reader and all items are logged, purchase applied.
And a guard at the door? Costco had self checkout for years at our area store until they took them out six months ago due to continued losses. And that was with someone checking receipts at the exit door. Of course I do live in a more culturally diverse area but I’m sure that has nothing to do with it…
It was the guard .
The economics of a Costco warehouse in the US, differ greatly from those of a small, rural shop in Sweden. Paying someone $10/hr to process a continuous stream of gigantic shopping carts worth of stuff, vs paying someone $25/hr to see a customer buy a jug of milk every two hours. As the Swede said, he is hoping the development will enable small rural shops to stay open in competition with that country’s “Costcos.”
RFID does not have a 100% read rate when it comes to tags mixed together. (i.e. Not fed through a reader one at a time.) It is one of the main problems that has kept it from becoming the default in logistics for years.
Your constant theme of driverless vehicles is driving me nuts! (it shouldn’t be long now).
You may be right but I don’t see it as a good thing. We are in constant pursuit of efficiency without taking any of its collateral damage into considerations. There is just too much money to be made from it, just like importing goods from China or hiring illegals.Profit is not universal in its benefits and when corporations profit by firing people, we find ourselves in the downhill slope we are currently in. How much of this new efficient technology is funded by debt? Our economy is NOT a closed system that is forced into balance. We are printing money, creating debt, all while displacing employees, people who will find themselves on entitlements funded with more DEBT. There is no balance enforced on this process. All costs are pushed forward until some point where it can no longer happen. Decades of negative trade balance all funded with debt and devaluation, and now we have technology acting in the exact same way as trade imbalances created through enabling debt. Hiring a robot that works at half the price as an American is no different that having the work done by an illegal or a Chinese worker. Life will get easier and easy until the day we starve.
In the name of making life harder and harder, you must shun things like a personal automobile in favor of walking and lugging around, and perhaps even simple kitchen tools such as can-openers and spatulas. If you use spatulas on your morning fried egg cooking it will just get easier and easier until you starve.
That can be looked on as a social enigma . Imagine a society that goes and builds this great big machine that supplies everything for that society for (near) free , in terms of human work hours needed .
Start with a clean slate in your thinking to get an idea how it could be – how does that reality affect society , how does society adapt to it , manage it , arrange itself next to that ?
I don’t have an answer , am not sure if there is an answer . Might make people weaker and more dependent , might allow people time to make themselves more independent , might lead to a dictatorship , might lead to a free society .
Maybe a reality like that will allow society to reflect clearly on itself without many of the pragmatic obstacles currently faced , or maybe people will just become detached and somewhat senseless !
Who knows … go nuts with it !
When we hear people lament labor and how it deprives us of our opportunity to engage in more creative activities, I simply look around. I see 95 million people not in the work force. How are their “creative juices” flowing? When I look at violent societies, I do not see large populations of people gainfully employed, even at low wages, engaged in violence. It is always those who are dependent, especially dependent upon largess unattached in any productive activities. I believe that it is work, the pursuit of personal advancement and simple transparent and obvious achievement, that ultimately define our happiness, our contentment. Look for people in the streets and they are not people with jobs. Our society has devolved into not productive, creative activities, but pursuit of happiness through entertainment, and when looking at our economy, it appears that most of our “growth” is in that arena. And regardless of how cheaply anything can be produced it will never be free and it’s production will never be owned by its consumers. It will be owned at first by corporations and eventually the state, in the claim of its public ownership, but as we see before our eyes, our public ownership ultimately holds only title to US. And when we produce nothing, only eating and producing waste that by our progressive’s own admission is destroying the planet, what WILL be our future? As much as so many claim to accept the theories of evolution, many also deny its outcome with every breath in the belief that that which becomes useless and redundant has any place on this planet or in this world. We have spent thousands of years killing each other with ever greater precision and efficiency and in the end come to the conclusion that WE are the problem and in our endless creativity discover the means of eradicating ourselves to create the Utopia so many have pursued since the beginning of time. And maybe, just maybe, we will have a self driving car deliver us to our final destination.
Pingback: Robotics In the Labour Market | thePOOG
Its happening right here in USA too. Just last week one of my clients showed a Mercedes Benz he bought last August with cruise control that keeps the car in lane all on its own and keeps certain distance from the vehicle in front of it all the time and doesn’t let accident happen. All of it without driver doing anything. So they are including those driveless functions into expensive cars. Its always the question of “How much?”. Once price for this thechnology comes down it will be on every model. Coming much quicker than anybody thought would be possible. Its exciting. Wish i could live for another 200 years just to see how live will look for a regular person.
Aggregate individual income will fall at a faster and faster rate.
YOU’RE ALL NASCENT SOCIAL CREDITERS.
“and also aims to have in place a legal framework for such cars before the end of the next fiscal year”
That’s not much ink to spend on the most frightening aspect of this situation.
‘Naysayer’ or not, I will say this: the M6 north of Carlisle is not the M25 or the M4 or the Birmingham Box during the rush hour. I’ll be fascinated to see how technology deals with those challenges by 2020.
Second, back in the 1990s I used to drive the motorway between Abu Dhabi and Dubai. At certain times of day the inside lane would be clogged for miles by a stream of slow-moving trucks driving nose-to-tail, to the point where it was often impossible to break through onto exit ramps. Whilst not as extreme, this happens today on certain stretches of British motorways at peak times.
You’re right about the speed of technological change but wrong about the speed of adoption in highly congested areas. And it will take only one multi-death pile-up to slow the speed of adoption even further.
Once again – Accidents will plunge
Moreover truck convoys will be programmed to allow cars to pass
Trucks will be programmed to go the speed limit
No more will there be blockages caused by one truck passing another going 2 MPH faster
Please think!
Mish