IT DOESN’T PAY TO BET AGAINST THE FUTURE

I hate sitting in traffic.

I will use any number of back roads and questionable shortcuts to avoid it. Sitting motionless behind another car feels like a criminal waste of time — time I could spend reading, writing, meeting people or doing any number of useful things to improve my life and that of my loved ones.

Of course, I could go analogue and hire a driver. What is the going rate for a driver these days, I wonder?

But my worries may soon be over.

The other week Tesla put its purpose-built Cybercab into limited public service in Austin, Texas. It is a two-seater with no steering wheel, accelerator or brake pedal.

Clutches? Those disappeared from this conversation a long time ago.

You summon the car from your phone, it picks you up, delivers you and goes off looking for its next fare.

Nirvana.

But what really excites me is not the car. It is the productivity.

I know a thing or two about technology improving productivity.

When I started in journalism, we used typewriters — noisy mechanical contraptions where competence was partly measured by how many words you could hammer out per minute.

I would write my story longhand first, then type it. If I wanted to move a paragraph, there was no cut and paste. Sometimes you tore out the page and started again.

Then I got myself a PC.

Suddenly I could type directly onto the screen, edit freely and move paragraphs around. Minutes disappeared from producing every story. Spread that across dozens of stories and hours had been returned to my life.

Because I had no printer, I saved stories onto floppy disks — which were anything but floppy — took them to the office and printed them there.

Then came email. The moment the story was finished, I could send it to my editor.

Then Google arrived and instead of spending hours digging through dusty newspaper files looking for the odd statistic, I could find it in seconds.

Today we have ChatGPT. Apart from helping me organise information faster, I can throw an argument at it and ask it to play devil's advocate before I inflict the argument on you.

And don’t get me started on smartphones.

Believe it or not, there was a time when mobile phones were not only a novelty but were really only good for making voice calls and sending text messages.

That was revolutionary enough...

Then somebody connected the phone to the internet.

Today that little gadget in your pocket is a bank, newspaper, camera, television, map, library, music player, office, marketplace and communications centre.

I can write a column on it, send money, check my investments, hold a meeting, look up an obscure fact, book a hotel or find my way around a city I have never visited.

All from something we still quaintly call a “phone”.

That is what technological progress does. It takes something we understand, adds capabilities we could hardly have imagined and eventually makes us wonder how we ever lived without them.

Every technological leap has essentially done the same thing.

It has given me back time.

That is why autonomous cars excite me.

Elon Musk has long argued that

autonomy could transform a car from a depreciating asset parked for most of the day into a productive asset. At Tesla’s Autonomy Day in 2019 he projected that a robotaxi could generate about $30,000 a year in gross profit under Tesla’s assumptions...

Whether that exact number proves correct is almost beside the point.

A car that can work while you sleep fundamentally changes the economics of car ownership.

And I may not even have to wait for Tesla.

China is coming.

Chinese manufacturers are moving rapidly into autonomous vehicles and robotaxi services and, if their performance in smartphones, solar panels and electric vehicles is any guide, somebody in Shenzhen is probably working out how to give me the same technology at a price I can afford.

That is the beauty of competition.

Tesla asks: can this be done?

China asks: how cheaply can we do it?

Knowing our regulators, however, I suspect a steering-wheel-free Cybercab will not be cruising along Kampala Road anytime soon.

But then again, Uganda Police recently reported that 97 percent of taxis it inspected in Kampala had defects serious enough to qualify as being in Dangerous Mechanical Condition(DMC).

So if our regulatory system can “accommodate” public service vehicles with questionable brakes, tyres, lights, doors and assorted other inconveniences, who is going to ice my perfectly functioning Tesla merely because it insists on driving itself?

I ask only half in jest.

In any case, I probably do not need a full Cybercab.

A conventional Tesla with a steering wheel and sufficiently capable self-driving software would do me very nicely. I could crawl through Kampala’s morning traffic reading, answering emails or working while the machine handled the drudgery.

Full Self-Driving is not yet approved for Uganda, and regulation will inevitably lag the technology.

But that is precisely the point.

Technology keeps moving.

Which brings me to Thomas Malthus and his illustrious company of doomsayers.

Malthus worried that population would grow faster than food production, eventually condemning humanity to recurring famine.

What he could not adequately account for was human ingenuity.

Mechanisation came. Fertilisers came. Better seeds came. Irrigation improved. Refrigeration improved. Logistics improved. Agricultural science improved.

We produced more from the same acre and moved food further at lower cost.

"The recurring mistake of pessimists is to project tomorrow using today’s productivity...

Population will increase — assume crop yields remain unchanged.

Cities will grow — assume transport remains unchanged.

Energy demand will rise — assume energy technology remains unchanged.

Traffic will worsen — assume a human being must continue sitting behind every steering wheel, staring at the bumper in front of him.

That is a dangerous way to forecast the future.

Innovation does not abolish problems. It creates new ones. Jobs disappear, industries are disrupted and regulators scramble to catch up.

But innovation continually expands the number of solutions available to us.

And productivity is the great wealth machine.

If technology allows me to produce in one hour what previously required two days, I have become richer even before my bank balance reflects it.