Will Autonomous Vehicles Bring A Jobless Future? A New MIT Report Says Not So Fast

To imagine the future of work, you have to also imagine how people get to work. If we had believed the prognostications of Elon Musk and others, by 2018 we would be calmly commuting in driverless cars, reading or sleeping in the back seat as robotic chauffeurs smoothly whisked us along highways and city streets. That rapid change did not happen, which is probably a good thing -- for had we experienced that sudden disruption of automation, millions of taxi drivers, delivery drivers, truck drivers, and bus drivers might have been thrown out of work. Nonetheless, visions of a driverless future did spur billions of dollars of investment. The core technologies like AI-enabled navigation, perception, and path-planning are rapidly developing, and increasingly automated of vehicles will certainly be part of our future, emerging in parallel with electrification and digital connectivity.