Will your smart car end the monopoly of Airlines?

No, (but I wanted to have a catchy title, clarifications to follow)

When people talk about cutting edge technologies entering the mainstream the word disruptive gets thrown about way too frequently.  "How quantum computers will disrupt the world of encryption"  things of that nature.  For autonomous cars, the promise of a vehicle that needs no oversite of a human driver, the potential impacts are incredibly, traffic will no longer need to use tradtional traffic lights, cities can do away with the majority of their parking lots, the list goes on.  What has not recieved too much conversation, has been the impact on airports (well so far as this author has run into during casual updates on the tech sphere).

An autonous car means that flightstrips(the party responsible for this mistake has been slapped as a result of this mistake (1/31/17)) to locations 500 or so miles away are no longer as necessary, why spend the an hour inside of a plane, plus the hassle of security, when you can just queue up a destination in a sleeper car, and wake up 8 hours later at your target destination, on its own this will certainly change people's habits but it doesn't necessarily mean that airlines would be quaking in their boots.  Not everyone wants to try to sleep and drive.  An autonomous car, in tandem with smart planning software, and airlines that are willing to collaborate, that's got some real promise.  For someone based in a city Boston, a smart car means that they don't necessarily need to go to Logan for their flight to Bejing instead, they could commute to find the most optimal international airport.  The journey could  be seemless, computers can account for net travel time, you get picked up, driven to a target airport that minimizes how many hours you spend in layover (or at least optimizes the length of your layover).  Every trip a perfect balance of cost, convenience, and transit time.  This augmenting of travel would also mean that hub airports and regional airports would need to compete againts eachother potentially driving down costs, or at least minimizing congestion.

If you have any thoughts, suggestions, feedback, please let me know in the comments.

Utilitarian Philosophers Annoy Me

So I just read an article about the ethical questions associated with the safety goals of autonomous cars.  Generally the question is, "do you want your autonomous car to minimize casualties?"  People generally say "Yes I want an autonomous car that does what it can to minimize how many people die in a car crash" This opinion changes when people are told that this prioritization might mean that their car would end up letting them person die in a crash to save a bunch of toddlers (I'm adding that last bit).  The debate is based on a philosophy question, you are standing next to a switch that controls which path a trolley will take, for some bizarre reason their are people on both paths that the trolley will follow, on one track five people, the other there is one person.  If you do nothing, the trolley will remain on its path and kill five people, if you pull the switch it will go down the path with the single individual.  What do you do?  (this question doesn't need to be answered by you, unless you want to leave a comment)  My answer, who cares, the scenario is so abstract and unrealistic, why does it really matter in real terms?
The likelihood that you or an autonomous car are going to run into a situation where the option is kill a passenger or a group of pedestrians is negligible.  I am more likely to win the lotto, while I am being launched into space on my way to visit my empire of sexy cyborgs (okay maybe not that last detail).  Why can't I shout at the lone person on the track, or the people on the other track.  If a car suddenly finds that their are people in its way, why can't it lay on the horn?  I don't want to get pedantic, that's wasting everyones time, but I have a hard time envisioning a scenario where the options are so binary.  Instead of ethicists telling researchers to build around a one in a billion freak occurrence.  While I do believe engineers have a responsibility to make products as safe as they can, and ideally to the greatest benefit to society possible, we should not ignore solutions that are better than our current options 80% of the time and the rest of the time no worse than what we current have.  History is more impressive with really radical changes, but that doesn't mean we should ignore slow and iterative improvements.

Please feel free to leave a comment, if you agree or disagree please say why.