Technology...creates itself out of itself. As new elements are added and combined with existing technologies in original ways, breakthroughs happen. Often technological breakthroughs take time to bubble up. Their impact on business and society is deceptive. They require experimentation and sharpening by pioneers to knock the kinks out of them, or bring in missing bits of technology or process. Sometimes these pioneers sit in disparate disciplines or locations. Eventually, things take shape and people begin to discover new phenomenon, behaviours or business models exposed by the technology. A catalyst. A trigger. An acceleration of adoption occurs. Reconfigurations and additions powered by the democratisation of creativity. A connected world. The drip-drip of linear growth gets replaced by the power of doublings. Price (reductions) and performance (improvements) feed off the converging forces of digitisation, dematerialisation and demonetisation. Things go exponential...everything changes; technologies, businesses, industries, domains, society. From deceptive...to disruptive.
And so it is with autonomous electric transportation. Autonomous and electric technology evolves at pace, in parallel with improvements in capturing, storing and distributing sustainable energy sources.
These converging technologies feed each other, sucking in capital, resources and new ideas as their various sub-parts are improved across a connected planet. Fuelled by a global living laboratory which democratises technology improvements in mobility. Things get integrated in new ways, stuff gets adopted, good things happen, accidents happen, we learn, we adapt, things improve...sometimes deceptively, eventually disruptively. In this endless cycle of causality...
How cities and interconnecting transportation arteries adapt to cater for the acceleration of autonomous electric technology will be fascinating to watch and participate in. Layer over that autonomous drone taxi ports and hyperloops as well as autonomous shipping ports, and we expose an abundance of infrastructure development work that can power employment...augmented by a serious dose of robotics, A.I. and mixed reality capabilities.
As this chemical mix of transportation technology expands, old technologies will get thrown away, replaced by newer open ones. Old activities (aka jobs-to-be-done) are also thrown away and replaced by new ones evolving out of the phenomena emerging from autonomous electric technologies.
Industries will reconfigure themselves or be merged, swallowed or disappear. Insurance, banking, servicing and refuelling are all up for a major recycling exercise, and these effects will set off chain reactions across their respective ecosystems in terms of new opportunities and problems that additional new technologies will be required to solve.
Privacy, ethics and safety will face a steep learning curve as autonomous modes of transport merge into human driver lanes...
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