From the March 2016 issue
Automakers and tech companies alike seem to be pushing us toward an autonomous future in which streamlined, sustainable-bamboo-trimmed robotic taxis and luxury cruisers zip within inches of one another as they reel around turns and through crowded me­tropo­lises like pulses of light beamed through fiber-optic cables.
The bots won?t crash as often as humans, but that doesn?t mean they?ll be infallible. The high-profile hacking of a Jeep ­Cherokee last summer calls attention to a particularly scary ­vulnerability in an interconnected web of self-drivers. And it?s not hard to imagine far bleaker worst-case scenarios: All vehicles make an immediate hard left when Doctor Evil presses CTRL+L, and so forth. But long before we reach that level of dystopia, autonomous vehicles will prove to have their own negative social impacts. Here are a few: JOB LOSS

At the University of Oxford in England, the Oxford Martin School?s Programme on the Impacts of Future Technology recently predicted that computerization would eliminate nearly half the jobs in the U.S. over the next 20 years. Autonomous vehicles may soon replace human drivers to our north. Development companies working Canada?s oil sands plan to lay off thousands of off-highway mining-truck drivers by the end of the decade in favor of automated trucks that render human operators unnecessary. When autonomy expands to on-road services here in the U.S., some 200,000 taxi drivers and 3.4 million truck dri...