Again, the imaginary future is that we got rid of personal car ownership (check this and this post). There will still be cars on the road, but they belong to corporations or public entities and are driving autonomous. Like an Uber/Lyft today a driverless car will be at our disposal with the push of a button.
Dependence on technology
I believe reaching the point at which we trust machines enough to drive us around, will also be a watermark for human-machine interaction. Through daily use, our concerns will disappear and we will allow machines to take over tasks unthinkable today. Very likely we would no longer drive our kids anywhere, we would just trust the cars to do that. I don’t think it’s too far-fetched that we’d easily become totally dependent on technology at this point.
If you think about that, the fossil fuel consuming cars of today are the last analog stronghold for most. We now live in a service and office culture, a lot of the manual labor has been outsourced. And so is the conventional car already a relic of a time when fossil fuel powered engines changed the face of the earth. Now electronic devices have taken over and soon regular cars will be history.
The new cars will seamlessly integrate into a digital world. When our fridge tells us to buy more milk and ham, we’ll use an app to order more, and the same day a drone or self-driving car will deliver the order to our doorstep. Although this sounds like fantastic science-fiction to me, every single step of this process has already been realized today. The combination is only a matter of time. We will not only depend on technology as individuals but as nations. One power outage, one failing server can have drastic consequences
Isolation
This is all very convenient, but convenience is the killer of social life. Is already very convenient to communicate via Snapchat or Facetime, why leave the house to meet in person? Instead of going to the library or asking someone, we can look up the answer online when we have a question. Emails have replaced many phone calls long ago. Even if it sounds counter-intuitive, but ubiquitous self-driving cars will keep us at home, for the sole reason that our involvement will no longer be needed for the transport of goods between places.
Less downtime
When people realize they can work while they commute, they will also realize that you can do the same. As a consequence, the commute will no longer be an excuse for not working or not being available.
Surveillance
Our phones already record where we are and where we go. So the question of using this data has already come up. But now consider the scenario, individuals no longer own the cars on public streets. Thus, a bank robber will find it hard to find a private escape vehicle. But let’s say some criminal is on the run. Wouldn’t it be sensible to utilize the many external and internal sensors of the self-driving cars to find him? Suddenly, there will be millions of cameras on the streets and somehow the thought doesn’t make me feel safer.
Monotonous Cities/Streets
Computers prefer repetitious patterns. In order to accommodate self-driving cars, it is therefore, ideal when all streets look the same.
Many American Cities are already cookie cutter copies and chances are, this is not getting better. Especially if the now obsolete parking spaces are used for more buildings.
Jobs
A lot of people will lose their jobs when cars shed their drivers. For example, the US has currently 3.5 million truck drivers. Yes, in the past industrialized countries already managed to shift their workforce from agriculture to manufacturing to service. And the world hasn’t ended despite new technologies. But this shift has to happen again, and now very quickly on a very large scale. According to a study by researchers from the Oxford University in the UK, as much as 47 percent of the US workforce may get replaced by automated technologies in the next 20 years. That’s a lot of people.