Still Working On Automating My Blog

There was a news item recently about Dominos experimenting with driverless pizza delivery. That's interesting, as it's yet another of the common things in our society that will be revolutionized with automation. There are so many things like that, where it's obvious once you think about it that self-driving cars will totally change it, but we just haven't thought it through. I mean, automated ice cream trucks.

Science Fiction author John Scalzi pointed out how this ruins Snow Crash, the Sci-Fi classic who's main character is a pizza deliverer. It's yet another case where we didn't think through how technology would work, imagining this futuristic world with a guy driving his own car. No, he'd be unemployed. That is, unless you believe the Dominos president, who said that the company's 100,000 drivers would take on "different roles" within the company. To put that in perspective, GM employs a little over 200,000 people in total. There's no way they need that many people tossing pizza dough. That is, in the unlikely event that it doesn't also get automated. You have to wonder just how many people a company like Dominos will employ in a few years.

But the thing that stuck out to me was how the whole story was presented as some sort of cutting edge research. The TV version I saw made it sound like Dominos was trying to build their own driverless car so that they could deliver pizza with it. Of course, developing their own self-driving technology would make about as much sense as designing your own car specially for pizza delivery. I'm sure you could make a pizza-optimized car, but no one did that, since the cost would be astronomical compared to just buying a general perpose car. Really, Dominos and all other delivery-based businesses will just use mass-produced self-driving cars.

Sure, there's a bit of work before they perfect automated pizza delivery, since you'll have to have the customer access the pizza themselves. But that's not really on the same level of research. Nor is it particularly newsworthy. Really, this is just Ford doing the self-driving research and development they would be doing anyway, but letting Dominos piggy-back by providing a cute task for their prototype to do. And Dominos gets the publicity when it becomes a news story.