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We present the best case scenario over the next 25 years across different domains of life.
Kevin Kelly (00:00)
Welcome to the best case
where we'll try and examine what the best case most optimistic scenario is in the coming years, next 25 years. My host is Dan Pink and our guest for this session is Brad Templeton. Brad is a long time friend and expert on many things, particularly on the arena of transportation, which is what we're talking about.
And so as we think about the next 25 years,
Brad Templeton (00:24)
Great to be here.
Kevin Kelly (00:28)
Give us what you think would be some of the most optimistic visions and expectations we could have if everything worked out the way you like it to work out.
Brad Templeton (00:40)
And
that is the theme of the show, although I'm usually reluctant to do that because people, you know, they'll say, you're just being ridiculously dreamy and optimistic and the reality won't be as good as everything you dream. Well, sometimes it's better. This is a safe space for that.
Kevin Kelly (00:51)
Yeah,
Daniel Pink (00:52)
This is a safe space, Brad. You can be optimistic here. Yeah.
Brad Templeton (00:59)
Particularly
in the transportation world where there's a, you know, the people who work in the traditional transportation world are unfortunately very marred in the 20th century, sometimes in the 19th century. And they even have a term for people who predict grand future transportation technology, changing transportation. They call it a gadget bond, like the German, yeah, like the German bond. Okay, so that, you know, you just basically stuff some gadgets on there.
Kevin Kelly (01:09)
Yeah.
Gadget bond? German bond. ⁓ yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Daniel Pink (01:20)
⁓
Brad Templeton (01:26)
So I'm going to talk about some gadget bond today and be pretty optimistic about it. I think, and for the reason I got into this is because I looked at the numbers in transportation and the numbers in what technology could do for transportation and found them to be some of the biggest numbers in the world. have, for example, in car crashes, we have one and a half million people every year dying in car crashes. And one of the largest causes
Daniel Pink (01:29)
Go for it!
Kevin Kelly (01:50)
Yeah.
Brad Templeton (01:53)
of death in the United States, about 44,000. One of my favorite calculations I made for the United States was we spend 50 billion hours every year doing this. ⁓ So to put that in context, the entire productive labor output of the United States is 240 billion hours. So 50 billion hours is spent turning steering wheels. That's a pretty remarkable thing.
Kevin Kelly (02:05)
Yeah.
Daniel Pink (02:13)
Holy smokes.
Kevin Kelly (02:18)
You
Daniel Pink (02:20)
And that's just
for those of us driving along. Those are not people whose job it is. There are plenty of people whose job it is to turn steering wheels. Yeah. Yeah.
Brad Templeton (02:24)
Well, it's everybody. It's including the job people, but it's mostly ordinary folks. That's absolutely
Kevin Kelly (02:30)
Right,
right, right.
Brad Templeton (02:30)
right. I worked out that, well, it varies from city city, but there are some cities where 60 % of the land belongs to the car. Houston is the poster child here. It's actually worse than LA. Most people say it's probably LA that's the worst in this case.
Daniel Pink (02:40)
my gosh.
Brad Templeton (02:46)
You know, there are European cities, at least in the downtowns that are not that bad. And then a number I worked out, which was one of my favorites, it doesn't really pertain to this very much, but it just is to stagger you. The entire human race every year, I calculate drives about 1.7 light years. So how often do you use light years in your work as a unit of human activity? You know, so if we all got together, we're beating the Starship Enterprise, at least at warp one. So, that's, that's just how.
Kevin Kelly (02:48)
Okay.
Daniel Pink (03:06)
Uh-huh.
Kevin Kelly (03:09)
Alright.
Daniel Pink (03:10)
Yeah.
Ha ha.
Brad Templeton (03:14)
big the numbers are. Now, what we're of course talking about is something that, and this is apropos, because today another company joined the race in Las Vegas. I'm dating, when are we making our show? Because I know we'll air a little bit later, but Amazon's unit, Zucs, started opening to the public there this morning in a very simple way. adding to the collection of companies around the world, there's now about, I think, seven or eight companies.
that are offering self-driving car services. And that's the key technology that makes a lot of the changes I'm going to talk about possible. It's not just to cars. We can talk about other types of technology, including things that fly, including buses and vans and other vehicles. But that's the key technology that I am predicting in the best case scenario takes over the world of transportation. And it's no longer something that people can say, won't happen in my lifetime. Because if you're in San Francisco, as you are,
Kevin Kelly (03:42)
Okay.
Yeah.
Brad Templeton (04:03)
I don't have to tell you, you see something go by several times a minute. You'll see a Waymo go by. You'll soon be seeing it even more and you'll be seeing it in more cities. So it's definitely here. It's just not evenly distributed to quote a well-known writer, but it's getting evenly distributed. And of course these things distribute themselves, which is better than most technologies can do.
Kevin Kelly (04:16)
Yeah, yeah, Great, great.
Daniel Pink (04:17)
Hmm.
Kevin Kelly (04:22)
Right,
So how distributed do you think we will be by 2050, 25 years from now?
Brad Templeton (04:29)
Well, 2050, don't ever like to make predictions for dates like that.
Kevin Kelly (04:33)
Okay,
what, again, we have a 25 year runways. So give me your best case scenario.
Brad Templeton (04:38)
Yeah, I know.
Well, it's going to actually be a mix of better than our expectations and worse than our expectations. The thing that makes things better than our expectations, and we see it all the time with new digital electronic technologies, whether it's smartphones or so on, and one day there's a smartphone and then 10 years later everyone is carrying one in their pocket. They take over the world at rates that no one anticipates. One of the best charts for futurists in the world is a chart of the forecasts that were made by cell phone analysts.
every year about how cell phone deployment would go. every year they say it's going to be some kind of like, you know, basically near increase and every year it doubles and just keep it does that 10 times in a row. Like they never know knocking in their head doesn't matter. They they can't figure it out. So we're going to get some of that, some of that surprising deployment. But there's also some pretty hard stuff to do here because there are over a billion cars out there in the world right now.
There are, so they're on the roads. They're meant to last for about 20 years when they're made. And they won't all be replaced tomorrow so that they can all be gone in 20 years. So they'll still be around in a lot of places. There's resistance in a lot of places. there's just markets are more urban than rural. So I think we'll see a lot less of this in rural areas until much later. And even to deploy in a new city. Now, if you want to deploy a robot taxi fleet in San Francisco, like Waymo has done.
Kevin Kelly (05:49)
Great, great,
Brad Templeton (06:00)
That takes a lot of work and a lot of money. Some people dream that they could just do it all at once, but they can't. Even Uber, which began in San Francisco, although Sidecar and Lyft both did it before Uber did, but they began in just one city, even though for them to move to another city is pretty easy. And they're in 10,000 cities now, but it's 2025. They started in 2009. So it took them a long time to even get.
reasonably ubiquitous in the world with nothing but just writing an app that deploys in the cities. If you've to do everything to deploy this great new technology, there's just some physical stuff that moves at human speed there that can't fill the whole world in 20 years.
Kevin Kelly (06:28)
But right, right.
Wait, wait.
Daniel Pink (06:38)
Brad,
Brad, give us a sense of the of your view of the before and the really the now and then let's let's put it that way. The now and later. What what's a metric? What's a metric we can use right now to get a handle on how popular, how widespread self-driving vehicles are, robot taxis are, and then to what what do you think that's going to be in, say, 10 years, 15 years, 20 years?
Brad Templeton (06:47)
A Beatles reference.
I mean, there are a lot of pretty easy metrics. You can put the number of vehicles out there, but mostly you can look at the number of vehicle miles traveled or passenger miles traveled and compare them to their technologies. Passenger miles traveled in cars in the United States is three trillion. So it's a lot. As I said, these numbers, that's where you get, you're to get light years. need, you need a lot, you need trillions of So there's, there's, there's a lot of driving to do, but we can in fact.
Daniel Pink (07:11)
Okay.
Brad Templeton (07:28)
get some numbers about what percentage of that we're taking over. As I've said, the rural stuff will take longer to go. So I'm not going to forecast that we take over that much of that on day one. Interestingly though, I do forecast that we're going to make riding in a personal car cheaper than it is today. And you make anything cheaper, you get more of it. Now that immediately caused all of the car haters to blanch and post people in transportation planning are autophobes, I'll call them.
Kevin Kelly (07:53)
And so how does
this happen? So you're saying this is not just auto driving cars, this is like regular cars that people are driving will become cheaper. Is that what you're saying?
Brad Templeton (08:01)
No, regular cars won't necessarily become cheaper. Although the Chinese automakers are definitely working on that. But the governments are working to stop them from doing that outside of China, as we know. No, I'm talking about the ability to get a ride. So today, if you own your own car, the estimate runs that you spend about 60 cents a mile that you travel. And that's for a new medium or lower priced car. It's more if you get a fancier car.
Kevin Kelly (08:06)
Yeah.
Okay, so what did you mean?
Brad Templeton (08:26)
I think we can deliver rides to people. Now, an Uber or Lyft ride today or a taxi ride is about $2.50 or $3 a mile. It's much more expensive than riding in your own car. Although the riding your own car is only when you spend a lot of money and then you can drive for 12,000 miles a year in it. But I think we'll be able to offer rides to people for less than that in time. And when you do that, you make it accessible to more people of lower incomes. You make it accessible in other parts of the world.
where they can't afford to own their own cars. And so you actually do get an increase, but there's still gonna be lots of people who want to own their own cars. There will be people who will say, you can pry the steering, the bent steering wheel from my cold dead hands. And that will unfortunately be literally true in a few cases.
Kevin Kelly (09:08)
Okay,
so just so I understand, you're suggesting we lower the cost of the ride by having robo taxis. In other words, you don't own the car, you're just getting a ride in a Waymo.
Brad Templeton (09:16)
Yes.
That's right. And that cost reduction requires a bunch of things. requires a few interesting things that people don't predict. Today, the robotaxis are actually much more expensive than normal cars to build. I think in the future, they'll be cheaper. And our good friend, Elon Musk, I'm afraid we're going to mention more than once or twice in this conversation, although God knows we talk about him way too much already.
His cyber cab model that they've shown concepts of shows a little bit about where we might go. It's a very simple car. It's got nothing in it. It's got no pedals. The seats don't have to move forward. Most of the features in a car, if you go into the car brochure and download it and look at all the features they tell you the car's had, almost all of them are for the driver. And when there's no driver, you don't need the tilting mirrors and the tilting steering wheel and all the...
Frankly, you don't even need the fancy infotainment system because your phone that you're carrying with you is a better infotainment system anyway. So we can make all those things go away and so we can make things cheaper. We do need to add some sensors. We need to add some computers and we have to add some software, which of course is very expensive to write, but very cheap to reproduce.
Kevin Kelly (10:22)
Okay, so what we see going forward is self-driving cars, which may not be primarily owned by individuals, are rented, know, it's solicited, you have robotaxies. What about into outside of passengers? What about like in the freight, the freight?
Brad Templeton (10:36)
Yep, no, absolutely. And that's about a trillion of the $5 trillion ground transportation industry in the world is moving the freight. And so there are several companies that are trying to automate all levels of freight. There are some that are running trucks with no driver in them in Texas right now. You can do anything in Texas. So they've got the big 18-wheel semi-trailer trucks, which are pretty scary.
We've got one company doing smaller trucks just for the local deliveries between warehouses and stuff, what they call the middle mile, the long haul in the middle mile. And finally, there's a company I helped build actually called Starship, which is based in Estonia and it's now got a few competitors that make little robots that run on the sidewalks and deliver you your pizza. So we're, yeah, we're going to move a lot of things. In fact, it's interesting that of that freight industry,
Daniel Pink (11:17)
Mm.
Brad Templeton (11:25)
A large fraction of the movement of goods is you going to the store to pick them up. It's 75 % of goods movement is done by individuals who travel to get their stuff, which can be replaced by the sidewalk robots. It's not replaced by the 18-wheeler.
Kevin Kelly (11:40)
So if you do have the self-driving UPS Amazon delivery truck, what about that last 10 yards from the truck to the house? Is that going to be contingent on having some kind of automatic delivery mechanism that does that? Or is there actually a person in the truck, but that person is not driving, they're doing other work? What do you see for that?
Brad Templeton (12:02)
Well, mean, the sidewalk robots, like the Starship one, we can go up the pathway to your door, but we can't go into your house. We can go into apartment buildings. No, no, no, they run from a little depot, and they don't go very far. These particular ones only go a couple kilometers. There are other ones that go further, and there are ones that are based on trucks. And there are some who have done what you just suggested. They thought, we'll have a truck, and it will deploy a bunch of little robots that scurry out.
Kevin Kelly (12:09)
Are they riding on the truck and then they get off the truck? that the idea? ⁓
Right. Right.
Right.
Brad Templeton (12:29)
These
small robots are super, super cheap, you see, and they use almost no energy. They use much less energy than you driving to the store. So they've got a lot of benefits there. ⁓
Kevin Kelly (12:38)
Do you see that happening
in 25 years? If you want to be ridiculous.
Brad Templeton (12:42)
well,
no, mean, our robots are, Starship has done, I think, eight million paid deliveries already. And it's active, its biggest market today is on university campuses, which happened to be an easy market with people who don't own cars and like to eat a lot of takeout. And so there's millions and millions of deliveries going on. There are companies in China that have also done millions of deliveries. Now, nobody has done, but many have talked about.
Daniel Pink (12:47)
Hmm.
Brad Templeton (13:04)
legged robots that can actually climb the stairs and knock on your door and stuff like that. Well, I'm sure you've seen what's going on in that field and it's still nascent, but in 25 years now I wouldn't be too surprised if they do that. But most people don't need someone to bring it right to their door. Most people can come to the door or they can step down to the sidewalk and pick something up.
Kevin Kelly (13:26)
really, so like ⁓ UPS would notify you, I'm in front of your house, come down and get your package.
Brad Templeton (13:31)
Well, you'd get a notification before it arrived.
Daniel Pink (13:33)
So you meet,
yeah, meet, so the package comes to you, instead of you going to get your goods, the goods come to you and you meet them when they arrive.
Brad Templeton (13:41)
Yeah.
And you haven't asked me my favorite question about this, by the way. So I'll ask it for you, which is what does the robot do if you're not home? Because my answer to this is why on earth do you want the robot to come when you're not home? Right? You don't. That's what UPS drivers do because UPS drivers have their schedule, which they have to follow. And that means they come by your house when you're not there. In fact, they actually sit there waiting for you to leave just so that they can put a tag on your door saying that you weren't there. ⁓ But they
Kevin Kelly (13:44)
Okay.
Right.
You
Daniel Pink (14:07)
Ha ha!
Brad Templeton (14:09)
The robots don't do that. The robots, if your phone doesn't say, hey, master is home right now, it's a good time, the robot just turns around or never comes and waits until your phone says, I am home, now is a good time to get the package. So that's the great thing about robots. They don't really mind waiting. They don't mind anything being robots. And so a lot of the things in our current infrastructure system are based on the fact that human beings do mind waiting. We have schedules, we have to do stuff.
Kevin Kelly (14:15)
Yeah.
But great.
Brad Templeton (14:37)
And so that's where you get to enable some new things.
Daniel Pink (14:39)
Brad, go back to the passenger cars for a moment here. So they're the cars that are just taking people from place to place. You said there are three trillion miles a year of that, or is that total in the US? Okay. What's the number, if we even have a number for how many of those miles right now are being traveled by autonomous vehicles, by self-driving cars?
Brad Templeton (14:42)
Yeah.
In the US, it's even more global.
I mean, guess we do have, I think, I'd have to double check. Waymo, did they just announce, I think 20 million miles they had done? I think something in that range. So that's still pretty small in the grand scheme. But they're doing... ⁓
Daniel Pink (15:10)
Yeah, Tony, it's so it's a fraction of that. And then what's the cost? What's the cost
per mile compared to the 60 cent cost per mile of a medium passenger car?
Brad Templeton (15:16)
Yeah. Well, Waymo doesn't
say that and it's much higher today because it's a prototype project and it's custom made vehicles and it's custom made software. So they wouldn't want you to say the number. anyway, it is going to be much harder. In the best case scenario, we want to talk about what happens when we get to scale. And one thing that we know, Kevin and I are both high priests of the idea that anything that's based on digital electronics, once you do it at scale, it becomes close to free.
Daniel Pink (15:42)
Mm-hmm.
Brad Templeton (15:43)
and, ⁓ and you start to not noticing the costs. always get weird when people say, well, these things are too expensive. say, yeah, my first hard drive costs $3,000 and had 10 megabytes. So I guess I should have concluded that hard drives will never amount to anything. We're never going to store anything on these things. No, that's, that's just, that's just nuts. This is digital electronics software. ⁓ that scale is so wonderful. And I didn't mention by the way, I think what are the biggest benefits, which is not a necessary benefit, but it's turned out to be always the case.
Everyone doing this is doing it with electric vehicles. So all of this is happening with no emissions. And so I gave you some of those big numbers. And I forgot to mention the 25 % of the greenhouse gas emissions of Western society is from our cars. And so there's other forces trying to make that go away. And those are good forces. And I drive an electric car myself when I manually drive it.
Daniel Pink (16:17)
Mm-hmm.
Brad Templeton (16:34)
This is, this is a tremendous opportunity. I often would say that even though there's like one or two things like power generation and building construction materials that also generate huge amounts of greenhouse gases, they are not one thing. They are a thousand things and cars are sort of one thing. And so you can, if you're not working on cars, you're actually not working on climate change. I've sometimes said to, to, to annoy people because that is the big one target where there's just one, one industry.
Kevin Kelly (17:01)
Yeah. Yeah,
Brad Templeton (17:03)
One product that is, well, oil is the real product that's making all the stuff, but, and taking
Kevin Kelly (17:04)
yeah.
Brad Templeton (17:09)
the oil out of it is such a big deal. So you want best case scenarios. I can give you, I'm not even done with the best case scenarios, but there's lots of them.
Kevin Kelly (17:17)
Okay, well, let's keep going. One of the things that I think there is something strange that happens when you get to ubiquity. It's like, again, there's something that goes from a few people having cell phones to the point where everybody has one. It kind of, there's a whole phase change. What happens when there is basically no self-driving car, very, very, very few self-driving, I mean, not self-driving,
People-driven cars. do you, yes, cars, they'll be called cars. Do you see more than three trillion miles a year being used by, I mean, was like, what happens when it does succeed and you have only self-driving cars? Does that increase the number of miles because it's now so cheap and so everybody's driving everywhere or?
Brad Templeton (17:41)
Yeah. Cars, we used to call them.
Yep, I think
so. But I don't think it's a problem, because I'll get into that and into one of our next sections.
Kevin Kelly (18:07)
Okay. so, yeah, tell
us all the other wonderful things that comes from that.
Daniel Pink (18:13)
So the
mileage and driven in cars will go up.
Brad Templeton (18:18)
Now, by the way, we don't get rid of all those manually driven cars. First of all, I don't think we're going to be grabbing the keys from people and saying, you must leave the roads. We're going to have some people driving until the end of their days, unless we have major life extension, maybe then we won't have that. And we'll have, it'll be a choice. In fact, the first thing to happen, I think the big opportunity from this, actually, I should say before we get into this, is that these companies, the way for them to make the most money is to replace car ownership. Convince you, we now have a service.
Kevin Kelly (18:32)
Yeah, yeah.
Brad Templeton (18:48)
that is so good that you are going to say, don't need to own a car. But you won't say that at first. What you'll do is you'll say, my household owns three cars, which a lot of households do. And my household owns two cars. And it's going to drop down to two cars. Instead of buying a car for my teenager, in which they'll probably kill themselves, I'm just going to give them a subscription, a card instead of a car, and let them get around and give them the freedom and mobility, which is what they're really looking for. And by the way, there's already been a drop.
in driver's licenses among people of that age. When I was 16 years old, it was the rite of passage to go out and take that driving test. And that is no longer as true as it was. But so you get people to say, I'm going to switch. And again, mostly urban people and most of these multi-car households. But that's more than half the households in the United States are multi-car households. So you do that. And then you start going further and you start getting people to say, you know what, why do I need any car at all? Especially now with these
Kevin Kelly (19:21)
Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Great.
Brad Templeton (19:44)
things that I can summon is I can summon a pickup truck today and an SUV tomorrow and a single person pod that's very cheap the next day, the right vehicle for the trip. You don't have to go into a car dealership. Today you go into that car dealership and you say, what's the car I need for everything I'm gonna do for the next five years? That's why SUVs are what everyone buys in the United States, because they're gonna ski once a year. And they say, I'm a skier. I'm a mountaineer. I gotta go up in the mountains. I gotta buy this Chevy.
Kevin Kelly (20:04)
Wait, wait, wait.
Brad Templeton (20:12)
a superb or big SUV. So now you can satisfy that need without having to answer it that way.
Kevin Kelly (20:19)
So what's, you mentioned a pod. Tell us about this pod, which you hadn't mentioned before.
Brad Templeton (20:23)
Well, 80 % of the trips that we do are alone and across town. And so when you have a taxi service, you eventually want to get to the point where you're saying, let's send the right vehicle for the trip. We don't ask what car do I need for the next five years. We ask what car do I need for the next five minutes. And the answer to that is often a single-person car or a two-person car. Half the width of a regular car, it takes up less room on the roads. It takes up less room to store it. It's much cheaper to build.
Kevin Kelly (20:27)
Okay.
Brad Templeton (20:51)
So a lot of it, you know, it's not as roomy, but you're only going to be in it for 10 minutes and you know, nobody's going to see you get out of it if you think you're embarrassed to have a small car as some people are. So I think the right answer is when you're building a self-driving taxi fleet that you'll actually have it be half single person cars. Of course, you can still send a larger car for one person if that's what you need to do. And if I have a group of friends with me, of course, I'll just say, yeah, we are a group of friends.
Kevin Kelly (21:13)
Mm-hmm.
Daniel Pink (21:16)
Mm-hmm.
Brad Templeton (21:18)
The car that launched in Las Vegas today, the Zooks vehicle, which is a unit of Amazon, is not done by traditional car design. That's what's interesting about this company. And theirs is four seats facing each other. So it's not four seats in line like a regular car is. It's symmetrical, so it doesn't have a front or a back. It goes either way, depending on which way is best for it to go. And it's a social experience for the people in it. And so that's, or for families, most parents sort of think, I wish my
Children engage with me more, but we get in the car and we just hear them playing video games in the back and asking, are we there yet? And now it'll actually be that mommy and daddy can look at the children, the children can try to ignore them.
Daniel Pink (21:54)
So that kind of configuration
you often see on trains. mean, I'm on the East coast of the United States riding Amtrak all the time. And you see that kind of, it's like a little four person setting there. What about for these, I think that interior design of cars is super interesting. Do you see, can you imagine people summoning, know, need an office car. I need a car with a desk and a big monitor or something like that. Or I need a bar car. I need a car with a fully stocked bar.
Die, woof.
Brad Templeton (22:22)
You can already get those.
Kevin Kelly (22:25)
Yeah.
So, I mean, again, if we're increasing the number of miles and decreasing population, I don't know what in 25 years. So what are we going to be doing for those extra miles? And I think why not put your headset on and play a game or whatever?
Brad Templeton (22:44)
Well,
I think for most people, I mean, we already know if you've looked in the back of any Uber or looked at people on the train, they're all just sitting there staring at their phone. mean, it's a little obsessive, frankly, we do it too much. But yes, we're going to continue to do that. There's a lot of people who've tried to imagine other entertainments, but I'm afraid, you know, two of the companies that are making these technologies are Google and Baidu, who of course make the reason that you're staring at your phone and Apple was going to make one, but they decided to give up.
But that's actually a coincidence. They weren't doing it just so you'd stare at your iPhone more, or otherwise Apple would have stuck at it, I think. No, but yes, actually, I believe you will have different configurations, which include some ones that will scare people, like the sleeper car. Although I think the sleeper car is kind of interesting because, you know, Katherine's family has a place at Tahoe, which is four hours from where I live. And I would actually be pretty happy if I could just get into a bed.
at night and wake up at Lake Tahoe rather than spend four hours driving there, even though the car would not, it would go very slowly, which is a vision by the way, because it's only four hours, but it would take no time as far as I'm concerned. I call it the poor man's teleporter because you're just unconscious and then bang, you're there. For the run from San Francisco to Los Angeles, it's just about perfect. Again, you could sleep.
Kevin Kelly (23:41)
Yeah. Yeah.
Daniel Pink (24:00)
Yeah. I mean, there are buses
that do that now. There are overnight buses that go.
Brad Templeton (24:03)
There was a
guy who had a bus that did that. They went out of business, unfortunately. yeah, so it's not... Yeah, but this one had actual bunks.
Daniel Pink (24:07)
they did. Yeah.
Kevin Kelly (24:08)
Yeah, but there are overnight buses all over the rest of the world.
Daniel Pink (24:11)
Yeah, yeah, yeah. mean,
what you're describing in so many ways is essentially everybody has their own train, you know, like sleeper, I mean, sleeper trains, commuter trains, trains where you hang out with your friends. But instead of it being a service, public or something offered to everybody, it's your own private little train that takes you where you want to go, not to a train station. Yeah.
Brad Templeton (24:18)
Yeah, sleeper trains of course do this.
Now some people would
call this the worst case scenario, but I think we will also see a limited amount of RVs. And not just one RV, but if you're rich enough, you could travel with five RVs that when you get somewhere, they dock and form a house for you. Now, I don't think that's very efficient. Now, if it's electric, it's not gonna make any emissions. And if it runs at night, it's not gonna be a congestion problem with our roads because otherwise you could see a lot of congestion problem from this.
Daniel Pink (24:41)
Hmm.
Brad Templeton (24:59)
But some people would definitely call that the worst case scenario in terms of loading up the roads and putting too much transportation. But I don't think that'll ever be very big. But I think it will happen.
Daniel Pink (25:08)
Do you see
in the future, can you imagine something in the future where driving a car becomes what like, like what is like today's version of riding a horse where it's essentially a hobby? Um, where yeah, well there'll be like, like, like, like in the Hudson Valley, there are these equestrian places where people go and they ride horses. You're going to see kind of driving equestrian, you know, automotive farms.
Brad Templeton (25:18)
good Lord, yes, it'll still be a hobby. I was just down in Monterey for-
Kevin Kelly (25:30)
Vermont becomes
drivers only and you drive around Vermont.
Brad Templeton (25:36)
Yeah, no,
I was just down there for Monterey car week, which is where all the people with way too much money buy their cars. And, you know, so they'll spend a million dollars on something that they just want to drive up in the mountains and take the corners up there. And I don't think that'll go away by any stretch and racetracks and so on will exist. and again, I don't think we're taking people's keys away. I mean, I think you'll be able to go out there and drive. Now, if you, get into a lot of crashes, I think they might take your keys away a little more easily.
Daniel Pink (25:36)
Yeah.
Brad Templeton (26:02)
They might take them away as you get older a little more easily if, again, if you have the crashes. Now here's a little dark secret, because we always talk about the ability of these cars to reduce this death rate on the roads, is that a large fraction of people, there's no hard number out there, but I'm guessing about a third of people never have a car crash in their lives. I never have. Other than like once in a parking lot I did make a small dent. But I mean, in terms of an actual car crash, yeah, so.
Kevin Kelly (26:22)
That's the overhead.
Brad Templeton (26:28)
There's a lot of people, it's pretty hard to argue, I got to take your keys away from you. You've never had a crash in your life. so I don't think we will be doing that. So I think it'll be not just like the horses where, you know, the horses also just became entirely impractical on the city streets. Here's a funny story you may know, but when New York switched from horses to the horseless carriage, the biggest benefit everyone saw was a reduction of emissions. Right. ⁓ yeah, we think of cars as being bad for their emissions and they are.
Kevin Kelly (26:31)
Right, right.
Right, yeah, poo, Yeah, the poo.
Brad Templeton (26:55)
But that's what people actually thought was the biggest benefit of the car was it got reduced emissions.
Kevin Kelly (26:59)
⁓
I want to go back again to this idea. if, it's say the majority of vehicles on the road or self-driving, is there, are there, can you kind of imagine what would happen if you are a person driving among 95 % self-driving, which are all driving better? So is there, is there some things that we can imagine that we have to do in order to accommodate that mixing?
Daniel Pink (27:15)
Hmm.
Kevin Kelly (27:25)
of a minority of personal driving with the self-drivers.
Brad Templeton (27:30)
I don't think so. I mean, first of it takes a while to get to them being a minority and you have to go through a long period where they're a majority. In fact, the first self-driving car has to go out on the road where everyone else is a crazy human. In fact, a lot of people have imagined, this will only work if every car is like this. But the reality is everyone building it has eventually come to what I call the first law of robo cars, which is you got to drive on the road you're given. You don't get to change the world.
Kevin Kelly (27:42)
Yeah, right.
Brad Templeton (27:56)
to suit your software needs. There are people who still talk about that, but your job is to deal with everything that's out there on the road that people do and to drive well with them and be a good road citizen. And so that is what everyone is focused on doing. most people think it'll actually be a pretty pleasant experience because these people will all drive very regularly and very politely and they'll let you in when you want and they won't give you the finger very often. So, you know, I don't think that's a worry.
Kevin Kelly (28:07)
Mm-hmm.
Brad Templeton (28:21)
Is that the COVID that's going around? Hope not.
Kevin Kelly (28:23)
No, no, no, no, no,
Daniel Pink (28:24)
Is one of the changes here, Brad, as you describe this, like, I feel like the change from ownership to service is a big deal, not as big of a deal as the self-drivingness of it, but the idea, and I can see, I wonder if there's a, there's gonna be a generational change there, where there's a whole generation of people for whom owning a car was a rite of passage. Owning a car was in some ways a milestone in their path to adulthood.
Brad Templeton (28:34)
yeah.
Daniel Pink (28:51)
Do you, is it the kind of thing where the next generation is gonna say, why would I ever own a car? A car is a service.
Brad Templeton (28:56)
No, that's not in the future. That's already happening. ⁓ are, well, as I say, the number of ⁓ teenagers getting driver's license has dramatically dropped. The amount of car ownership is dropping among that generation. So I am...
Daniel Pink (29:00)
Tell us what you mean.
Kevin Kelly (29:09)
That's just the US.
What about the rest of the world? There's still tons and tons of people who really dream of having a car.
Brad Templeton (29:14)
Yeah.
But as I I don't think that's going away. I think what we have is we have people who some people switch over to transportation as a service. I mean, that's the term everyone uses for what you just described. I like to call it mobility on demand because that's mod and I'm from the 60s. So mod is good. But we'll have people who do a mix, right? We'll have people who go all one way or the other. We'll have people who...
Daniel Pink (29:16)
Mmm.
Mm-hmm.
Brad Templeton (29:39)
Actually, I think children will be liberated because children don't get access to the ownership of cars, but Waymo is already letting lower than 18s and I think that what are they taking 12 and about? can't remember what the age number is, but it'll eventually go to basically as young as the parents will tolerate. So today, 75 % of children are driven to school, which again, being old again, I'm going to say that's just a really weird foreign concept to me. My mother never did that, but that's the norm for kids today.
Now suddenly children have the same mobility as adults which might have big effects on society I if you think about the structure of cities the structure of cities is always defined by transportation when the Tram came along that changed the shape of the city then the car came along and really rewrote what the city is especially in the United States and These new transportation services are going to rewrite the city again We're not gonna like every way by the way that they do so sorry for I drift from best-case scenarios because there will be
negative and positive consequences of that. But I've been focusing on a bunch of positive consequences. One of them, which I touched on very a little bit earlier, is not actually related to self-driving cars. It's related to the fact that every car has a phone in it today and self-driving cars drive like robots, which I think we can solve traffic congestion, which is the bane of car driving. And we can do it through things like Waze. Today, we have built a world where the roads are commons.
Kevin Kelly (30:37)
Mm-hmm.
Hmm.
Brad Templeton (31:00)
I'm sure everyone's heard of the tragedy of the commons. So when a road can candle 3,000 cars in an hour and 4,000 people want to drive on it, what we do is everybody comes and then nobody moves very fast at all and it's a win for nobody. So if you had a system where it said only 3,000 cars will come and the other 1,000 cars will take another route or they'll...
carpool that day or they'll take the bus that day or they'll do whatever they can think of. It's not the government that actually solves the problem for them. It's they who solve the problem. If you can build that world, you just, don't put more cars on a road than it can handle. It gets rid of the transportation planner's nightmare that they call induced demand. When if you build a new road, it suddenly becomes so popular that it's crowded again. And so it doesn't, you've not solved anything for more than a few years when you do that.
Daniel Pink (31:42)
Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm.
Brad Templeton (31:49)
But if you say no, you can never put more cars on it than it can handle. You don't have an induced demand problem because you manage the demand. So this all changed when we all decided that, especially at commute time, we don't drive without pulling out our phone and running Waze or Apple Maps or whatever program is our favorite or the one in our car and obeying it like a little robot. And even being annoyed at the fact that it predicted within one minute how long it would, or one hour trip would take as though we have no free will.
Some people I think deliberately try and drive funny just so they can say, have free will, Waze didn't understand me. But the truth is, if we just change it a little bit and say, you've got to obey Waze now. And if Waze says, take this route because there's no room on that road, you do. There's the potential. This is not a trivial thing. No one's built this. Very much best case scenario here. But there's the potential to make city roads that don't have congestion, which suddenly means reliable travel times for everybody. I'm going to get even weirder.
with what I think cities mean. I think the purpose of a city is transportation. Yes, we share the sewers and some other things, but we live in a city so we can be close and close means short trip. Walking trip doesn't have to be a car trip, but we want it to be a short time to the things in our lives, to our friends, to our jobs, the food, recreation, everything that we do in our lives. We want it to be a short time. It's great if we can walk our bicycle. Sometimes we take a car or...
transit, but that's why we all live close together so that we can make those trips shorter. If we can make a city that flows that way, I actually don't think it's going to be that hard. I'm probably wrong about that. It probably is hard. there's the potential for, it's a rather utopian vision though of a city where just movement is so free and it doesn't take any of your time. So you can be, you know, sitting, if you have that desk car, you could be at work or just staring at your phone and doing the things we do today.
That 50 billion hours is gifted back to us that we spend. And it's a lot of time, and it's a lot of effort. We can also start directing the traffic away from the nice streets, the high streets. In Europe, they're smarter about this. Their high streets are almost always pedestrianized. And they've managed to get them so that they are very popular. Now, everybody in the suburbs drives into town just so they can walk up and down the pedestrian street.
In almost any European town and it's very pleasant. It's very social It makes these towns way more lively than most American towns. I think we could do that There's another thing and I again, I don't want to make everything about Elon Musk and I'm doing a good job so far But I think his tunneling company is actually a great idea. Most people laugh at it. It's full of Teslas It's good. They're driven by people today. It looks really stupid. Okay, but the core idea there of making tunneling very cheap That's their actual plan
Daniel Pink (34:22)
Hmm.
Brad Templeton (34:32)
because they make tunnels small and there's this whole quadratic thing. You make a tunnel twice as big, it's four times as much digging. So their hope is by making tunnels small, making tunneling machines cheap. If they can do that, they haven't done it yet, but if they can do that, I think that's interesting because we can start moving some of the traffic off of the streets and give ourselves these pleasant, wonderful urban spaces that the Europeans are better at, as I was saying, and the Asians are better at too.
and still have that freedom of movement that Americans have craved and bought cars for.
Kevin Kelly (35:04)
So I like the idea that some people call it the 15 minute city where everything is 15 minutes within reach. Ideally, there would be 15 minutes walking. But if you have 15 minutes with a small pod, that counts too. We've been talking about vehicles, individual vehicles with a small number of occupants. But what about public transport? Does that go away because it's unnecessary and inefficient? Or is this part of the vision of this 15 minute city?
Brad Templeton (35:22)
Hmm.
Well, so do we have another show? Because. Yeah. My best case scenario here is a new type of public transit. So here's a little shocking number for most American fans of transit. The average transit bus in the United States uses 50 % more fuel per person than the average car. Because they have seven and a half people on average. At rush hour, they're full and they are efficient, but.
Kevin Kelly (35:31)
No, we're talking best case scenarios. What's your best case scenario there?
Okay.
Daniel Pink (35:49)
because they're often empty.
Mm-hmm.
Brad Templeton (35:55)
You know, can't make buses that only run at rush hour. That's not interesting to people. So here's an even worse one. The most efficient transit line in the United States is the New York MTA subway. And it's pretty heavily used. And we've all ridden it, I bet. That uses the same amount of energy per person as my electric car, my personal electric car. And all the other systems in the US use more.
The way we do transit in the United States, least, the Asians are better. Tokyo is actually very, know, Tokyo's opposed to your child for the other direction and several European cities are. But in the United States, we don't. And that's because I believe the vehicles are too big to be efficient. And now that people go, what do mean? Big is more efficient. Everyone knows big is more efficient. It's not. Because the bigger you make it, the more compromise there is among the people who are trying to ride it. The more people who try and share, the more each is deviating from what they really want it to do.
And so they move to other modes, like their own private car. So it turns out the ideal size isn't, it's not a car or a pod actually, the most efficient size is a van. And in fact, in the United States, van pools, which run full and take people to employers mostly, they are very, very efficient because the only thing they do is run pretty much full on a nonstop trip. So let me give you the transit of the future.
which is you say, as you would today with Uber, you say, I'm here, I wanna get there. And it says, look, we got about 10 people that live not exactly where you live, but in a square mile where you live. And they all wanna get somewhere within a square mile of somewhere else like downtown. And the system says, great, a pod's coming for you in six minutes. A pod comes, it takes you just a mile and there's a van waiting. And...
10 other pods are showing up at exactly the same time. Because again, we're little robots with ways. We're actually more predictable than we think. And we all get in that van and it takes a minute, less than a minute to get into it. And the van then drives nonstop the long part of our journey, the part that we all would have shared if we had all driven it individually. And gets into town and stops at one of the office buildings that two of the people are going to and there's eight pods waiting there. And off you go. So you had a, I would call an almost nonstop
a door-to-door trip, but it cost a lot less money because 10 of you shared the most of the cost for the van that took you over the long part of the trip, and it didn't take up much capacity on the roads. If you go out to our highways today and you say, at this nightmare, all these cars with only one or two people in them going by, you think this is a total waste, this is why public transit is needed, this is, we've got to be more efficient.
But if you looked at those cars and said, how many empty seats are going by? You'd realize, my god, there's more capacity than the subway here. And so it is possible if, again, in our best case scenario, if you can plan it, if you can make this work, and it becomes possible today because now we've gotten people used to the idea of you pick up your phone when you want to get somewhere. That's my vision of public transit in the future. It adds also some of those tunnels. In fact, this will really get people angry.
I think the best thing to do is tear up the tracks in those tunnels and let the vehicles go through them. Because the vehicles go one second apart if they're robots. Humans need about two seconds apart. But trains go five minutes apart, right? There are some trains that go three minutes apart, but most of the train lines in the world are more than five minutes apart. Yeah, there's 800 people on the train. But you actually get more people through and their trip is nonstop. And it don't even have to change lines. Your van just changes lines for you.
because you're all going to the same thing in the different line. If you've ever gone into a modern tall office building, you've noticed that the elevator doesn't have buttons in it anymore, right? The elevator buttons are outside and you say, I'm going to this floor. And the elevator looks and says, okay, we got five people going to the 23rd floor. All of you get an elevator, And this has made the elevator much more efficient so they can now travel more people. It's allowed buildings to become taller because we don't need as many elevators to handle the volume of people. This is just one example of how when
Daniel Pink (39:24)
Yeah.
Right.
Brad Templeton (39:44)
Virtual things like software control how people move. You've suddenly got opportunities for amazing best case scenarios. The buildings are just the start of
Kevin Kelly (39:53)
So again, kind of maybe wrapping up the scenario part, what about flight? What about in the air? How does that fit into this system of transport in the future? Yes, have, this is it,
Brad Templeton (40:07)
Do you have another program? ⁓
Yeah, no, I know. So two answers to that. One is on the ground. I think airports are a nightmare today, and they're a self-inflicted wound. And I think of that. I've designed an airport where, in fact, little pod cars take everyone to all the doors of the plane, not just one. And they all get on in exactly the right order. And there's no terminal building. And there's none of this.
Kevin Kelly (40:31)
Okay,
well I slow down here. I like this. So is there security?
Brad Templeton (40:33)
Yeah.
Unfortunately, yes. Although the FAA, so you do need a building for security. So what happens is you first you show up, you go through security and then you can get into the vehicle that is going specifically to your flight. Of course, if you're changing planes, a vehicle takes you from your flight to your next flight, unless it's a long wait and then you go to the lounge or an airport hotel is where maybe the lounge is for you if it's outside or inside security.
Kevin Kelly (40:37)
But where does that fit into?
Uh-huh.
Okay.
All right, okay.
But
do you do you see unmanned aircraft self or do you see pilots certainly within 25 years they're not gonna go away but maybe longer do you see people passengers riding unmanned commercial airlines?
Brad Templeton (41:17)
Absolutely, because in fact these flights are already being flown almost entirely by computers. The only reason computers are not flying the whole flight is because the pilots know that would that way lies madness and that way lies no jobs. So there's already a lot of talk about trying to get down to one pilot per aircraft. Although there'd be a second remote pilot, which is of course, you know, when we bomb the Taliban, we send a remote pilot to do it. But so yes, and
Daniel Pink (41:23)
Yeah, yeah.
Kevin Kelly (41:27)
Right.
Right. Right.
Brad Templeton (41:46)
all the people trying to build small electric aircraft, which by the way is a huge benefit in terms of emissions and efficiency and cost of operation. I mean, one of the biggest costs of operation, the two biggest costs of operation in aviation today are the fuel and the maintenance. And electric motors don't need that maintenance. And you also can have 10 of them so that even if you lose three of them, you're still flying. ⁓
Kevin Kelly (41:49)
That's when we'll see.
Yeah.
Brad Templeton (42:10)
Jets are not that efficient in that way. So we've tried to get everyone down to a two-engine jet and pray that if one engine fails, the other engine can get us home when we're in the middle of the ocean from Hawaii. But these are the biggest costs in aviation. So everyone is really keen on this for a lot of reasons. The thing that stands in the way is we don't have batteries that are good enough to do this. But.
Kevin Kelly (42:29)
Right. So
you mentioned that for big public transportation, people think that the bigger scale is more efficient, but it's not true. Is that also true about flight airlines where the bigger passenger planes are not as efficient as smaller ones as well?
Brad Templeton (42:44)
Yes.
What airline, what big air, what airplane, I'll it away by saying what big airplane, but what major airliner was canceled by its maker last year, the Airbus A380, which was entirely based on the idea that we make the biggest possible plane, it'll be the most efficient. And the airlines, some bought A380, some did not, but Airbus canceled it because a lot of airlines were saying, look, we just don't want to fly this thing because we have to put so many people on it that we only have one flight a day between the two destinations.
With the 777 and the A350, which are smaller and got more efficient because of other new techniques like carbon fiber structures, more efficient engines, we can do non-stops. You don't have to like change in Dubai. Like you fly the A380 if you go anywhere on Emirates, but you're going to change in Dubai. You're just absolutely going to change in Dubai. And that's not convenient to change in Dubai if you want to go to London from New York. But airlines found customers would much rather fly on the smaller plane.
Kevin Kelly (43:19)
Mm-hmm.
Brad Templeton (43:38)
Is it more efficient per passenger mile? No, but it doesn't work because the passengers are saying, don't, that's that same thing I mentioned with the bus. And you put 30 people in the bus, they all have different goals. They all wanted to leave at a different time. They all came from a different place to a different place. They didn't want to change lines. And so the bus gets empty because they don't want to put up with that compromise. If you can get rid of the compromise, which was what my little van plan did,
I think you can get the people onto the van. And if you can get rid of it in the sky, you might see more people wanting to fly something like an A380. But for now, it's canceled. It's actually coming back a little bit, but not too
Kevin Kelly (44:15)
Do you think that there'll be more smaller regional airports built to accommodate short flights like that?
Brad Templeton (44:22)
Well, what we're actually, what really interesting about it is vertical takeoff. So there ain't no airport. There's also a number of companies, because vertical takeoff is still running against this one problem, and it's a physics problem, or at least it's a half physics, half engineering problem of how do we get a battery? How do we store electrical energy in the way we need to do the kind of flights we want to do? We don't know how to do that yet. We can make a small regional aircraft with a small number of seats. That's as good as you can get today.
Daniel Pink (44:27)
Yeah.
Brad Templeton (44:51)
You can make hybrid aircraft, have fossil fuel engines or possibly biofuel engines, which can maybe achieve some of our goals that way. If we get some sort of miracle in energy storage, some people hope for hydrogen, but hydrogen has a lot of things that interfere with it being the success here. Although I got to say in flight, hydrogen's advantage is definitely the most energy per kilogram.
The problem is you need 11 kilograms of tank to store one kilogram of hydrogen if it's compressed. So that's no good. It gets rid of that advantage. I have a crazy dream, by the way. No one's ever built this. But I think we should go back to the days of the Hindenburg and we should build a hydrogen airship because it would use hydrogen today. It would use hydrogen as its fuel. Now, now we have the world's first fuel that has negative weight. Right? Imagine.
Kevin Kelly (45:29)
Thank
Yes.
Daniel Pink (45:41)
Hmm.
Brad Templeton (45:43)
We're
all saying, we can't handle the weight of the fuel. No, the more fuel, the lighter we are. So I think there's a pony in there to that old joke about the guy who was digging around the manure saying there's a pony in there. And, know, it's not entirely obvious where it is, but here's my prediction. I'm going to make my bet on this, but my prediction is that someone will make a hydrogen airship. You know, the Hindenburg gas hydrogen was an issue, but it wasn't
Kevin Kelly (45:49)
with it.
Brad Templeton (46:07)
The high apparently it was the materials on the Hindenburg contributed to the disaster as much as the fact that it was hydrogen side. There are people who believe they can make a safe hydrogen airship. There are people, not people, however, who believe they can make a safe airship. The most worst statistic in the world is there has never been an airship which needed to fly on a schedule. Like it couldn't just say I'm not flying today because I don't like how it looks that has survived. have all been destroyed. Every airship.
Kevin Kelly (46:26)
Right. Right, right.
Brad Templeton (46:33)
that had to fly on a schedule one day flew on the wrong day and the weather destroyed it. So that's a little minor problem to solve to get my hydrogen airship. But okay, that's a crazy best case scenario. Fuel with negative weight. Come on, how much better can you get? Fusion power, that would be the only one.
Kevin Kelly (46:44)
Right, Have ⁓ you?
Daniel Pink (46:50)
Should we move onto the tropes? Yeah.
Kevin Kelly (46:52)
Yeah, have one last thing.
Kind of maybe it's not quite a trope, but have you heard of George Dyson's theories about the age of sail for freight in the oceans? That these high-tech freights, and then you would use software to schedule things and weather patterns to ⁓ overcome the uncertainty of arrival, but that wind power, basically on the oceans for freight, is the way to go.
Do you? Okay, tell us about that. What's the best scenario there?
Brad Templeton (47:17)
yeah, no, think I mean, got a friend who's doing it. is a company called kite sail.
Yeah, he has a company called kite sail. There's a few others there. They're not like doing fully wind powered ships, but they're convincing people with oil or diesel powered ships to basically put up a giant kite. And when the wind is right and pull them and basically save some fuel. So that's just the start of that. You know, if you have cargo that is not.
on a specific schedule, and of course some cargo is, but there's other cargo that is not. They all learn that when the ports fill up and they have to sit and wait for 30 days before they can get a berth. Then that's a no-brainer. mean, it may not do all of it. Maybe we can get the rest of their energy usage off of diesel and onto ammonia or some of these other fuels that people are experimenting with for ships. I mean, I don't know when we'll see that, but that's...
Daniel Pink (47:49)
Mm-hmm.
Brad Templeton (48:04)
That's got a lot of potential and it's one of those things where the physics seems to work. The engineering is not nothing, but as long as the physics can do it and it's really valuable, humans are pretty ingenious about making the engineering work. And they don't always, but it's a good way to, you know, fusion energy is one of the ones where the don't always hasn't happened. And may, some people may say may never happen, but, or is always 10 years away, but.
That's one thing that's good. I'm going to tell you two other little things that we didn't mention, by the way. Self-driving taxis don't park. They just drop you off and go to pick someone else up. Or if they are waiting, they do it very compactly. As I mentioned, 60 % of the land in our cities belongs to cars. And a large fraction of that is parking for them. In my house, I have a garage, which does not contain cars, but it's supposed to, because my cars are in my driveway. And of course, all my workshop shit is in
is in my garage, but we've all got immense amounts of land devoted to cars in all these parking lots. And I think we're in our best case scenario, we're going to be able to take a large fraction of that and say, free land. And my joke is we'll turn car parks into parks. And of course, it's mostly going to be condo towers. I know how it really works. But if it's a few condo towers and a few parks, I'm pretty happy if we can make that happen.
Daniel Pink (49:15)
There'll be
a lot of Paneras in there as well once it's repurposed. Yeah. Yeah.
Brad Templeton (49:17)
There will be Panera Breads. Yes, yes.
And another thing that I like to mention is that everyone says, know, renewable energy is great, but the problem is it comes when it wants to. And we want to use power when we want to. And so this is the thing that's stopping us from being all solar. And that's true. And if we get great storage, you'll probably do a show on these issues at some point. We get great storage. Well, we might solve that problem. But cars are different. Cars can charge when you tell them the power is cheap.
Daniel Pink (49:35)
It's a battery issue again.
Brad Templeton (49:45)
Especially self-driving cars. They can just be sitting there if they don't have anything to do and say, hey, cheap power, you want it? And the car says, yeah. And it drives off to somewhere that it can robotically plug in. It is a robot. So it's actually not that hard for it to do that. And it can take the power when the solar power is on surplus, which is from 12 to 2 every day. Obviously, at rush hour, the cars are going to be working. But during that solar point of the day. So we're going to power all of this, not just from electricity with no emissions, but from no emissions electricity.
And that's another wonderful best case scenario.
Kevin Kelly (50:14)
Great, fantastic. So, Dan, this...
Daniel Pink (50:17)
So
we picked out a few tropes from science fiction, novels, short stories, films, and I'm gonna give you a few of them and you're gonna tell us how plausible it is, all right? On some kind of BS meter that you have, all right? all right. ⁓
Kevin Kelly (50:28)
Your reaction, your reaction.
Yeah.
Brad Templeton (50:33)
⁓ okay. My initials, BS are my initials. My middle initial is NS, so I'm an expert in
Kevin Kelly (50:41)
You
Brad Templeton (50:43)
it.
Daniel Pink (50:44)
Personal jetpacks
Brad Templeton (50:45)
personal jet packs. That needs some kind of new energy source. I mean, they exist, of course, and there's lots of little demos of them, but they fly for a very short amount of time. And that's just because of the limitations of getting enough energy that you can have on your back. Computers to control them, that's totally doable, but we need a better energy source to make them.
Daniel Pink (51:05)
Flying Cars.
Brad Templeton (51:06)
Well, those, I mean, they're out there. I was just actually spent the day yesterday with a friend of mine who's building one. He's actually building a flying car as in, and this party's a little crazy, but it actually both flies and drives. Almost everyone doing what they're calling a flying car is building something that just flies. then a Waymo is waiting for you when you land and you let it do the driving, you know, be a typical answer to that question. And the reason they're all doing that is that...
Weight is everything. Once again, for this energy problem, how do we get the energy and the limited weight budget we have? And so every gram of weight is precious. so wheels are possibly something you don't want to spend weight on. One little prediction I have, at least for the pilot of flying cars, is all the piloting jobs are going to go to 80-pound women.
It was just, you the reverse in the past, men had all the piloting jobs, right? And it took a while before women could break in. Now, is there going to be any men getting jobs piloting these things? Well, unless they're the same men who work as horse jockeys on the weekend. ⁓
Daniel Pink (52:03)
Right, was gonna say,
it's like the modern version of the jockey.
Kevin Kelly (52:08)
Thank you, yeah.
Brad Templeton (52:08)
Yeah,
because if the pilot, you know, I would never get a job as one of those pilots. In fact, I'm not sure I'll get a job as a passenger. But you know, if the pilot weighs 50 pounds less than the other pilot, well, then you can have 50 more pounds of luggage or 50 more pounds of people. And boy, is that a nice thing. So good luck to all you ladies out there. Go get your pilot's licenses. You'll get the job for about 10 years and then the computers will do all the flying and you'll be out of work and you'll have to give them the bread lines with the other.
Daniel Pink (52:31)
Okay, so next moving on,
where are you on hover boards or hover bikes?
Brad Templeton (52:35)
Hoverboards, no, that would be good for a movie. mean, again, that's just this whole getting the energy in a small enough package. If someone builds the Mr. Fusion from the same movie, then great. Then you can definitely, you can have your hoverboard, you can have your hover bike. I mean, there are things that are called hover bikes that they have a lot of fans. don't fly for very long. They don't fly very far. So...
Those will exist, but they won't exist for any trip of any duration.
Kevin Kelly (52:59)
I went to the fu-
Daniel Pink (53:00)
underground
vacuum networks.
Brad Templeton (53:03)
Well, already said early on in the show that I think that the small tunnels that Elon is trying to build, by the way, and I must have a weird relationship. I don't talk to him anymore. I haven't talked to him in years. I was the first person to pitch him on doing self-driving back 15 years ago, back when he just had the roadster. And he does reflect a lot of what I say, and I don't know if it's because I said it to him or it's because he had the same thought or other people said it, but same thing in Boring Company.
Daniel Pink (53:05)
Yeah.
Brad Templeton (53:28)
Small vehicles are more efficient. this is what make people say, oh, this is boring. many stupid cars are so small they can only put a car in them? I think that's actually great. Oh, and the other big thing is what are called offline stations, which is to say in regular transportation and tunnels, the train blocks the line when it stops. That's why you can only have one train every five minutes, because if another train came along, it'd be a bit of an issue. So having the stations be off to the side so that the other things can wear by, that's great.
I think we'll get, now when you talk about a vacuum in the tunnel, you could put those underground. If tunneling underground is easy, that would be worthwhile because the biggest problem with a vacuum tunnel, well I shouldn't say this, there's a lot of big problems with a vacuum tunnel, but one of the biggest problems with a vacuum tunnel, just the same as a high-speed train track actually, is it's gotta be really, really straight. It's really hard to acquire the land to put in any high-speed vehicle because you can't make a sharp turn, it kind of kills your passengers.
Daniel Pink (54:15)
Mmm. Yeah, that's a good point.
Brad Templeton (54:22)
and never kill a passenger. It's a very important rule. So tunnels are a solution sometimes to, you don't have to get the land. If you really made tunneling cheap, it would make both high speed rail and those more practical. Now, as far as the vacuum part's concerned, there's only, think, one company left, HT Technologies, which is in Toulouse, which is trying to make Hyperloop. Elon Musk first proposed it, but not that he was gonna do it. The thing he proposed, no one wanted to do that. They're doing it.
another thing. But generally, if you can make the engineering work, and that's a big if, sure. mean, because you go faster than airplanes because air resistance is the big is the whole energy cost of flying an airplane. So getting rid of that energy cost from drag is a big deal. And it's one of the few things that would make a lot of sense to you know, for going a long distance, rather than in your sleeper car, for example, to us.
Daniel Pink (55:09)
Yeah. What about supersonic jets?
Brad Templeton (55:11)
Again, I don't think those are science fiction. mean, obviously they existed. I never flew on one, my dad did.
Daniel Pink (55:16)
Yeah,
they had a sort of one brief shiny moment and are they going to come back?
Brad Templeton (55:21)
Yeah, well, they couldn't pull off their economics. So I'm sure you know, there's a company called boom, which claims it's going to do that. It has taken orders. That doesn't mean they've delivered from a few airlines. they believe they've solved the problem of the shockwave, that makes all the boom. That's kind of ironic that their name is boom since their, their goal has been to get rid of the boom. but you know, hell I fly across the ocean too much and you know, that cancels everything I do by owning an electric car, by the way, but don't tell anyone.
So but you know who doesn't want that to go fast
Daniel Pink (55:50)
Okay, final one, easy one. Teleportation.
Brad Templeton (55:53)
⁓ I, ⁓ I beam me up Scotty. mean, it's, ⁓ which by the way, captain Kirk never.
Kevin Kelly (55:54)
Thank
Thank
Daniel Pink (56:00)
No, teleportation booths. A teleportation
booth, a teleportation booth as ubiquitous as Starbucks.
Brad Templeton (56:07)
So that's a Larry Niven science fiction, not a Star Trek science fiction. Captain Kirk, by the way, never said the phrase, beam me up Scotty. The closest he got was, beam me up Mr. Scott. Someone searched, because someone is really nerdy. But I would say, ⁓ no. mean, there's certainly no sign of those. Every so often, someone will write a physics article claiming, I've figured a way it might be possible, but.
Then you get into the, by the way, this, I'm gonna say you need another show for this, because I have given talks on this. I lectured on Stanford at this. It's, would you get in the Star Trek Transporter? Because what it does is it scans you, vaporizes you, and creates a new Captain Kirk on the planet who then goes and has sex with the alien women, who gets then vaporized and goes back to the Enterprise and remembers having sex with the alien women. But is he the same Captain Kirk? Well, this is the philosophical.
Kevin Kelly (56:51)
Right,
Brad Templeton (56:55)
question. And there's
Kevin Kelly (56:55)
right, right.
Brad Templeton (56:56)
a whole group of people who say yes, that is this the continuation of life of Captain Kirk. And the other can say, I don't know, I'm dead. I'm glad that my copy is having a great time. ⁓ And you'll never resolve that debate in a short discussion. So whether you want to get into the transporter is a bigger question than whether you
Kevin Kelly (57:07)
Yeah.
Yeah.
So there's a couple of other tropes. I went to the 1964 World's Fair and there was the future and there was endless moving sidewalks. Will we ever see them again?
Brad Templeton (57:26)
Yeah, that's a Heinlein, if you're getting your science fiction references, that was very popular in Robert Heinlein in that period. Well, you see, you're old. I didn't go to the World's Fair until 1967. And I can't remember. We had this weird little roller coaster thing that was sort of like to move you around there. There have been many attempts in Toronto, which is where I'm from, the airport had, it's now finally shut it down, a series of moving sidewalks. One that was really fast, it actually sped up after you got off.
because people can't get on and off one that's moving at a speed that's really useful. And so you have to find some way. so in Heinlein, they had like lanes and you would go to the slow one, the fast one, you would go to the... ⁓ I don't think so. And one of the reasons I don't think this will be built is not because it's impossible, but because it's a lot of infrastructure. So I am a high priest of small and distributed over big centralized infrastructure. And when I talked to you today about self-driving cars,
Kevin Kelly (57:59)
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, right, right.
Brad Templeton (58:19)
I didn't mention that belief, but it's central to what I'm talking about.
Daniel Pink (58:22)
Because you're not
talking about rebuilding the roads in any fashion for this. You're talking about basically you, you, you, take your, infrastructure as you find it.
Kevin Kelly (58:29)
Yeah.
Brad Templeton (58:30)
Drive on the road you're given is both a rule for how you have to develop it and it's also a wonderful solution because it means the infrastructure is virtual and you don't have to build it. And I'm sure you've seen as it's Stuart who talks about pace layers. Yeah, so Stuart, if it goes to what Stuart says, up to your brand says about pace layers and all these different levels of in society and technology and how quickly they change and innovate. anything that's at the software level.
the virtual level, innovates at orders of magnitude faster than anything that's at the infrastructure level. And so even if it looks like the infrastructure, like the subway train, even if it looks like, well, that's clearly a better solution, you know, it's more efficient, it's bigger and all these other things. you know, people believe bigger is more efficient because in theory it is. But even though it looks that way, if it's going to compete with the cell phone, it's going to lose because my cell phone is one year old.
It was designed six months before it came out and the software on it was written yesterday. While the car, for example, even the car is on average 11 years old, was designed seven years before it came out and the software was finalized three years before it came out. And no matter what you do, unless there's some hard physics stopping you, the centralized infrastructure will lose. I'm not gonna say a hundred percent, but I'm gonna say it's a very strong way to bet. And so if you think...
Well, moving sidewalks are a solution versus small little pods that just come to you immediately. I once wrote about something I called the neighborhood elevator. And it was the idea that, you know, in a lot of neighborhoods in cities, you've got this one street that everyone likes. And in the real estate ads, it always says steps from 24th street, because that's a more expensive house because yeah, people like to get out of their house and take a short walk and they can go in a cool place. And there's restaurants and there's friends and all this stuff. Of course, that's great.
But there's all these houses that are in three quarters of a mile from the busy, from the high street. And it's not steps, but imagine you pushed a button on your wall and by the time you got out the door, was a little pod there and you stepped into it and you were down at that high street in about two minutes, kind of like taking the elevator in a tall building in Manhattan, which is also on such a street. And then you wandered up and down the street and you had coffee with all your friends and you've got what you wanted. It's great. And then you got to the other end of the street.
Kevin Kelly (1:00:36)
Right.
Brad Templeton (1:00:43)
You didn't have to walk back. You just push that button on your phone and bang, you were back in your house. Suddenly your house, three quarters of a mile, is as valuable as the one that's steps from, almost as valuable. Which is, by the way, very interesting because as I've said, transportation defines cities. You know the joke that every realtor tells. It's not funny anymore because they tell it so much that there's three things that are valuable in real estate, right? And Kevin is mouthing it. They'll both be, they all begin with L, location, location, location.
Well, if you change transportation, you change the meaning of distance and location. And so therefore, everything about those things, what's valued the real estate, where we live, why we live there, how we live, where we work, they're all subject to change. Now, not all of these changes will be best case scenario, but quite a few will.
Kevin Kelly (1:01:28)
So we're at the point where we'd like to hear what you're really certain about in the next 25 years that you would be willing to make a hundred dollar bet on that would either something that would happen or something that would not happen. Something that you feel pretty sure in your bones is lined up to either happen or not happen in 25 years.
Brad Templeton (1:01:49)
So
I told you when we were discussing this by email before and you're asking me to think of a question, I think of a bet, that I hate to do that because I think only idiots name dates when predicting the future. And I used to have a joke I would do whenever someone said, when will I get my self-driving car? I would answer, I'd say June 21st, 2031 at 4.32 PM Eastern to make it clear that naming a date is silly. And of course, for all the teams that are building them,
Kevin Kelly (1:02:08)
Mm-hmm.
Brad Templeton (1:02:13)
They should never say we're going to have them this day. We should say we're going to have them when we're convinced they're safe. The bar is not how long it takes. It's when we've achieved this central goal that we have to achieve. But here's a bet I'll make, which is that for people born today, we're going to see a significant drop in the number of them who get driver's licenses. Not all of them. Some will still get them. But we'll see a significant drop.
⁓ because of the robo cars that are available. As I say, this won't happen in the country. It'll be ⁓ urban people in the major cities. And I think most of the major cities will have self-driving car service by the time these people born today are 16, which would be 2041.
Kevin Kelly (1:02:45)
would be. ⁓
So would you agree to like
a 50 % reduction in the number of licenses granted to people under 20?
Brad Templeton (1:02:59)
Well, that would be an easy one in some sense because it was 19 % who don't get a license in 1995 and it has already dropped to 13%.
Kevin Kelly (1:03:09)
Well, I
Daniel Pink (1:03:09)
Wow.
Kevin Kelly (1:03:09)
know, but I'm saying a 50 % reduction from today.
Brad Templeton (1:03:12)
Yeah, that's a pretty big one. So that's now a bet. That's not a sure bet. But I think that the number who don't get a license doubling, I think that's a pretty sure
Daniel Pink (1:03:20)
Number of don't get a license doubling. You're willing to bet a hundred bucks on that. And what's the timeframe? 25 years, yeah.
Kevin Kelly (1:03:22)
Okay, years.
Brad Templeton (1:03:22)
Yeah, that's my bet, yeah.
This is, yeah,
35 years for sure. said people born today, so that's 2041. 16 years, because you get a driver's license at 16. I could say people conceived today and I can add nine months to it. ⁓
Daniel Pink (1:03:38)
What about
car ownership, which today is about 92 % of US households?
Brad Templeton (1:03:43)
Yeah, again, so those are the kind of numbers I think are unwise to predict or bet. I mean, I feel pretty strongly that it's likely that will happen, but I wouldn't rank it as a sure thing bet. Another one I wouldn't rank as a sure thing bet is, know, Waymo will beat Tesla. Tesla has taken a long shot bet on seeing they can do this with just cameras, just the hardware that's in their existing cars. And most people actually think that will work some year, but no one will name the year.
Kevin Kelly (1:03:53)
Okay.
Brad Templeton (1:04:07)
Only Elon will name the year. He's named it every year for the last eight years. He's been wrong every time he named it. So everyone should learn, even Mr. Musk, that you don't name that year. But nonetheless, I think that the approach that Waymo and other companies like it are taking is the wiser approach. But that's definitely a bet. It's not a sure
Kevin Kelly (1:04:24)
Okay, so we're at the last part. ⁓ Dan, do you want to wind us up?
Daniel Pink (1:04:28)
Sure thing, yeah. So we want to end on, what the heck did I call this thing?
Kevin Kelly (1:04:33)
for the road.
Daniel Pink (1:04:35)
Three for the road, yeah, so three for the road. So appropriate metaphor here for transportation. So number one, what is... ⁓
Brad Templeton (1:04:41)
we use trans-facial
metaphors everywhere in language. You learn this once you start talking about it. But let's hit the brakes on what you've just said.
Daniel Pink (1:04:48)
Well, I'll grab the wheel and ask this question. Give us one thing to read, watch, or listen to to help us understand this new world more fully.
Kevin Kelly (1:04:51)
You
Brad Templeton (1:05:01)
Okay. Well, I can't recommend a book because I'm afraid any book by the time it comes out is already dated. so I guess I rather self-aggrandizingly will just point you to my own websites, robocars.com and the blog ideas.forbrad.com and the YouTube channel. They're all pointed to from there. ⁓ And if I want to recommend someone else, think Tim Lee, who has understanding AI, writes good stuff.
Daniel Pink (1:05:18)
Okay, fantastic. ⁓ Next.
Kevin Kelly (1:05:24)
Understanding
AI, is that a sub stack? What is that? Okay,
Brad Templeton (1:05:26)
Yeah, it's a sub stack and he's even
doing a conference now. And, ⁓ I mean, it's about all AI, but he does a fair bit of time on this particular part of AI, the driving, because that's the first part that's really hitting in people's changing, changing people's lives. I just came from an AI conference yesterday and it's, ⁓ it's always the base. So who's actually really using this and what are they really doing? ⁓ and there are people who are, but driving is, is one of those, as I said, all those big numbers, it's, it's, it's the way that AI is going to first.
come in and make some big changes. Don't worry, the other AI is going to make big changes. Pretty soon you'll probably have half a dozen programs on
Kevin Kelly (1:05:58)
Okay.
Daniel Pink (1:06:00)
So second question, what is, so just think about just a regular person out there, a non-expert out there. What is one thing that he or she can do? What action he or she can take to either understand this change or realize this change?
Brad Templeton (1:06:11)
Yeah.
Kevin Kelly (1:06:14)
Yeah.
Brad Templeton (1:06:15)
we're picky. We don't like being killed by robots. We were much happier being killed by drugs, who are killing tons of us. And, so here's a technology and you could maybe liken it to a medicine. It's going to save lives, but it's also going to cause crashes. It's also going to harm people.
the companies who are building it won't release it if it doesn't give the results. If they think that our car is too dangerous, it's going to just be hitting people all the time. We're not even going to come out. So the only thing that's on the table is.
a car which drives more safely than people do, but not perfectly, because perfectly isn't on the table and won't be ever probably.
some people come to the conclusion that, know, no, it's too bad. If these things run over one person and save a million, it's no good. Can't do it. Cause we've got to save that one person. It's never right to let that happen.
Other people come to the conclusion and say, well, we know we got to tolerate a little bit while these things are learning because then later they're going to scale up and they're really going to reduce risk on the roads. And in theory, the job of regulators is not to stop individual crashes. It's to make the roads safer overall.
Should we be simply focused on nothing but safety, so if there's anything unsafe, we must not do this? Or should we try and look at overall safety?
So that's our challenge, right? We have to understand this, understand the morality of it, understand our own morality, and understand our politics, and hopefully come up with the right answer, which is not necessarily my answer. Maybe you have a different view of the right answer. But that is one thing that you can do.
Kevin Kelly (1:07:44)
That is a fabulous way to wrap up, Brad, thank you. I found your scenarios very exhilarating. I'm really, really looking forward to it. No, I really, don't find it, didn't, unfortunately I didn't find it ridiculous at all. ⁓ But I think they're very, very reasonable and plausible to me and I really look forward to that future.
Brad Templeton (1:07:59)
sorry, I can give you the ridiculous ones next.
Kevin Kelly (1:08:09)
So thank you for taking time to spell it out in great detail. And I love the moral urgency at the end. I agree with that. And I hope people who are listening will, in their mind, work through those different plausible pathways of where they come down into the morality question, which I think is very real. So thank you.
Brad Templeton (1:08:27)
Yeah,
I appreciate that. hopefully, I mean, I know this podcast is just starting up. So hopefully you'll have great success with it.
Kevin Kelly (1:08:34)
Yeah, well, thank you again. Thank you, Dan. Bye bye.
Daniel Pink (1:08:35)
Thank you, Brett.
Brad Templeton (1:08:37)
Thanks, Dan. Bye bye.