Recently, I read an internet article titled “Driverless Hotel Rooms: The End of Uber, Airbnb and Human Landlords.” In it, the author describes a vacation scenario from the year 2025, in which it is possible to live in luxurious “driverless hotel rooms” that can be stored in “modular skyscrapers.” Once a person goes there, autonomous drone food deliveries and laundry pick-up services can meet their every need. And best of all, through the magic of the “peerism economy,” everything is dirt cheap.
I read the article about three times, and each time, I peeled back another layer of “jargon” and eventually saw that the author’s future scenario was actually conventional in some respects and totally unrealistic in others. Analyzing it was an interesting exercise that actually yielded a few new insights about the future for me. But before I go into that, read the article for yourself:
Now let’s begin…
First, let’s consider the description of the “driverless hotel room” and think about what it really is:
‘[After your plane lands in Sydney and you exit the airport] You giggle, then follow the augmented directions leading to a sleek driverless hotel room. It’s about the size of a mini bus but without the seats, steering wheel and engine. ‘
This futuristic “driverless hotel room” sounds remarkably similar to…a recreational vehicle. Specifically, since it’s described as being the size of a ‘mini bus,’ it sounds like a “B-class” RV. An example is this 2018 Winnebago Travato:
It goes on: ‘Inside is everything you’d expected. On the left, a couch seat that folds into a queen-sized bed with the push of a button. To the right, a small kitchenette with electric stove, running water, sink, microwave and bar fridge. Behind that is the detachable bathroom module with toilet, shower and wash basin.’
If the placement of the furniture and appliances is rearranged, that describes a Winnebago Travato:
The Travato’s bathroom is not ‘detachable,’ but I can’t see how, aside from a small fuel efficiency penalty, that makes it any worse. In fact, the inconvenience of not always having a permanently attached bathroom that you can use without delay would probably make the article’s “driverless hotel room” worse than the 2018 Travato, but we’ll get to the “detachable” stuff in a minute.
For now, let’s stop and think about what the article has discussed so far. The futuristic-sounding “driverless hotel room” is actually just an RV, but with the self-driving capabilities we will surely have in 10 – 20 years. The concept is not exotic, nor does it take any ingenious insight to envision it: driverless cars are talked about in the news every day, and all the author of this article has done is taken the next step to say that RVs will someday have the technology, too. Hence, his use of “driverless hotel rooms” irks me because it makes the idea sound more abstruse than it really is. This sort of thing continues:
‘You look up at a lego-like modular skyscraper reaching high above the moonlit clouds. Your room docks with an electric skate and is elevated thirty stories up before slotting into a window-facing position.’
Translation: Your self-driving RV takes you to a multi-story parking garage and parks itself in one of the upper levels. Glimpse the future!
Anyway, the story continues. Since this is only the year 2025, you’re not a real Posthuman yet, so your feeble human body still has to ingest biomatter to survive.
‘”Hi there, welcome home. Hungry?”
“I could go some pad thai and a beer thanks”, you respond.
“That’ll be here in 6 minutes.”
…Exactly 6 minutes later, a drone lands on the roof and lowers your order through a compartment in the ceiling. If you need to order any package you simply ask the room and a drone arrives; it even does laundry!’
Translation: Amazon quadcopter drones will transport small amounts of stuff to and from your temporary residence. While I’m sure that automated delivery of light cargo to your doorstep will be even faster, cheaper and more common in 2025 than now, I think we’ll be using self-driving cars for it, with small vehicles handling local deliveries of light loads like dinner and your laundry. Again, this is nothing exotic: we’d just have to replace pizza delivery guys with autonomous vehicles, and in one step, we’d be there. By describing this delivery service as being done by autonomous quadcopters instead of autonomous cars, the author again makes something conventional sound exotic.
However, this brings up an interesting side thought: If mobile delivery gets cheap enough thanks to autonomous vehicles (no wages for human drivers), then it might make financial sense for people to buy smaller and hence cheaper houses that lacked laundry rooms and kitchens, and to instead have their laundering and cooking needs handled by outside vendors. It’s already common for people in apartment buildings to not have private laundry machines, and they get by fine, so I think widespread use of automated laundry services is possible. However, I think its far less likely people will delete their kitchens (unless we’re discussing a distant future scenario where no one eats food since they’re Posthumans or robots) as it would actually be inconvenient to get every one of your meals delivered (faster and cheaper. Kitchens might get smaller, and only having a kitchenette will get more common, but people will not totally forsake their ability to refrigerate and cook food for themselves anytime soon.
‘One of the side panels opens smoothly to reveal a large adjoining living room module.
Extra modules are optional and can be requested ondemand: an extra bed, private gym, spa, snackbar, office and more. On various levels of the tower are cafes, restaurants, retail stores, entertainment areas, communal kitchens, laundromats, a gym and even a cinema.’
So far, this is the only truly original aspect of the hypothetical experience. It sounds like the author is saying that smaller, single-purpose autonomous RVs will, at your request, pull up next to your primary RV so that their sliding cargo doors align. Both of the doors will open, letting you step from one vehicle to another as if you were crossing a door threshold (would something like an accordion canopy extend around the two doors to keep out the cold air and bugs?). The idea of being able to customize a vacation home based on your needs is interesting, but why would this “modular” solution be cheaper or less of a hassle than renting a single RV that already had exactly what you needed inside? RVs already vary considerably in overall size, layout and features, so if you were on a working vacation, wouldn’t you just order an RV in the beginning that had an office desk and equipment? And why would you want to order a detachable private gym module when the scenario says the parking garage–er, lego-like modular skyscraper–has a built-in gym you can use?
In considering the value of this concept, let’s not make the mistake of giving it bonus points simply because it includes a bunch of technology. Instead, let’s ask a more essential question: How is this “future working vacation scenario” any better than a much lower-key scenario where you take a taxi to a normal hotel, and then pick among rooms of different sizes and luxury levels according to your needs and budget? Won’t the normal hotel also have all the same stuff–gyms, spas, snackbars, office space, cafes, restaurants, etc.–either inside of it or within walking distance of it? In touristy places and cities like Sydney, this is almost always the case. I don’t see how staying in the high-tech RV would be more pleasant or useful.
‘Luxury living at $30 per night.’
The author never explains why the price would be so low. On RVshare.com, I found an ad for a 2018 Travato rental, and it was $245 per night! Older, more beaten-up RVs in the same size range didn’t go for less than $139. The glorified parking garage would also surely charge RVs parked there a daily fee, just like today’s run-of-the-mill RV campgrounds, raising the overall cost even more. I don’t see how better technology or some kind of “peer economy” innovation could lower the cost point to anywhere near $30. The RVs themselves would still have to charge money for fuel, cleaning and sterilization services, insurance (even machines will get into accidents, and every 1,000th human tenant will somehow manage to burn the RV down), and taxes. I assure you that local and state governments will DEFINITELY cash in on this type of business if it ever gets common.
The parking garage might have low overhead if it uses robots instead of expensive human workers, but that still doesn’t get us to the $30 price point. Also, note that normal hotel buildings could also take advantage of the same automation technology to get rid of their human staff, which would keep them price-competitive with the autonomous RV/parking garage hotel setup. I’m not convinced the latter would be any cheaper than renting a nice hotel room that came with an office desk and chair.
‘Your six week experience will be personalized to your precise ondemand preferences including invites to local communities, events and interest networks.’
This is much more plausible, and might be the one aspect of this hypothetical future vacation scenario that yields the clearest benefit. It stands to reason that as AIs gain better understandings of individual human tastes, they’ll be able to design vacation itineraries tailored to each person. This would benefit humans by saving them time doing vacation planning, and it would save them time and money during the vacations by steering them clear of attractions they probably won’t like.
Also, the article makes me realize that self-driving technology will have some real benefits for the RV industry and for the hobby’s popularity since it will eliminate the worst part of the travel experience–hours of highway driving. If people could spend that time doing something relaxing like watching videos or talking with their family members, the lifestyle would get more attractive, and most importantly, people would have more fun. Deleting the steering wheel, console and dashboard would also free up space that could be used for something else.
With the description of the vehicle and the user experience done, the author moves on to explaining how the autonomous RV/hotel garage paradigm will arise by 2025.
‘The image above is a screenshot of the thousands of new, unsold cars sitting at a dock in a town named Sheerness in the United Kingdom. This is one of hundreds of locations where new cars sit empty and unused. And while auto manufacturers typically keep a 60 day supply, US manufacturers hit a record high of over 4 million unsold vehicles in their inventory in 2016.
The issue of overproduction is a common crisis in Capitalism where more goods are produced than there are customers to consume them.’
This is a misdiagnosis of the problem: Car sales are cyclic, meaning sales spike during good economic times, then taper off as everyone who wants a new car gets one, and then get still lower during bad economic times. A textbook example of this cycle played out over the last 12 years, as car sales cratered during the Great Recession because so many people were unemployed, had their pay cut, or became temporarily cautious about spending money on luxuries. As the recovery hit its stride, the pent-up demand for new vehicles was unleashed, and car sales spiked.
By 2016, most of the Americans who wanted to buy new cars had bought them, and sales dropped. Yes, car companies overestimated demand, leading to a temporary glut of unsold cars at the time the article was written (2017), but sales projections are seldom perfect, and the inventory was eventually sold off. Photos of huge parking lots full of unsold, new cars might make good fodder for doomsday articles about the economy, but in context, they mean little. This wasn’t a serious problem or a “crisis in Capitalism.”
‘However if ondemand driverless vehicles come to fruition then your $10 Uber ride suddenly becomes a sub-$1 ride anywhere in the city.’
Again, the author provides no justification for such a massive price drop. Yes, Uber rides will get cheaper once the cars drive themselves and you don’t have to pay human drivers, but fuel costs, maintenance costs, and depreciation will not change. And even if autonomous cars are safer than human drivers, they won’t be perfectly safe, so there will always be some car insurance cost. Messes and damages caused by human passengers will need to be routinely cleaned, and that will also cost money.
Based on the actual cost breakdowns of Uber and regular taxi cab fares, “ondemand driverless vehicles” should be about 50% cheaper, not 90%.
‘At that point the appeal of owning a car will diminish for most of the population, thus creating a massive oversupply of unwanted human-driven vehicles.’
This is another fake problem. In reality, the transition to autonomous cars will take over 30 years, during which time the fraction of the vehicle fleet that is autonomous will grow while the fraction that is human-driven will shrink. Since cars typically last 10-15 years until they’re totaled (by a road accident, other accident like flood or vandalism, or by a mechanical problem that is too expensive to fix), obsolete, human-driven cars will steadily attrit out of the fleet during that long transition period, so there will be no “massive oversupply of human-driven vehicles.” Any excess of human-driven vehicles that builds up in rich countries like the U.S. could also be dealt with by exporting them to poorer countries where they’re still in demand. The international secondhand clothing trade is an instructive example of what will happen.
‘Given the forecasts of 2 billion vehicles on the roads by 2040, and considering driverless vehicles need only be idle while recharging, we can roughly calculate that only 100 million ondemand driverless vehicles will be required to replace all 2 billion human-driven vehicles.’
This is another prediction of a massive (95%) reduction in something that the author inadequately explains, and that is probably wrong. But I’ll bet the author’s reasoning is this:
1) There will be 2 billion vehicles in the year 2040.
2) The typical vehicle is idle 95% of the time, meaning it is parked in a driveway 95% of the time and is only being driven 5% of the time.
3) Therefore, doing some simple multiplication, I calculate that if everyone shared vehicles and used them in “shifts,” we could cut the number of vehicles by 95%, and 100 million autonomous taxis could provide the same level of mobility as 2 billion privately owned cars! You can check my math!
It seems simple, but is fatally flawed by the fact that demand for cars isn’t evenly spread out over each 24 hour day: there are peaks in the mornings and evenings when 50% of the population is moving to or from work or school, all at once. Unless you want to paralyze your economy and put your population into a state of daily aggravation, you won’t allow your country’s vehicle fleet to shrink below whatever level is needed to satisfy that peak daily demand. I guarantee a 95% reduction to the U.S. vehicle fleet would cause massive, daily disruption, even if the vehicles routed themselves with maximum efficiency.
That said, I can imagine a significant shrinkage of the global vehicle fleet happening thanks to greater use of telework. If people don’t have to drive to work each day, then there is obviously less need for them to own cars. In the more distant future, if machines render human workers obsolete, then the need would decline further. And in the REALLY distant future, when we’re all brains floating in jars connected to The Matrix, no one will need to physical travel anywhere for anything. You’ll just use virtual reality to indulge in whatever experience or vacation you want, without leaving your jar.