Are Trends Electric?

I remember seeing a headline on a magazine cover once that said, “Electric Cars are (Still) Around the Corner.” Of course, that sarcastically got across the idea that electric cars are constantly promised without becoming mainstream. It’s especially meaningful, since I saw that headline in the eighties.

But today that headline is more meaningful because it looks like electric cars finally really are around the corner. So it’s a lesson that just because it seems like some promised revolution is never going to happen, it might still happen one day. So maybe jet packs and space travel are going to happen eventually too.

This walk down Electric Memory Avenue is because I recently saw someone speculate that self-driving cars will become one of those things that will be five-years away for the next forty years. I could certainly believe that: I’ve been skeptical about them, and the over-optimistic predictions in the mainstream media certainly do sound like the predictions of the future that I’ve heard my whole life.

But even skeptics like me have to remember that just like electric cars, it will happen eventually. The irony is that another of those things that have been constantly promised without ever happening is Artificial Intelligence. It was once thought that it was inevitable that computers would be doing all the things humans are capable of in just a few years. But as we learned just how difficult things like language and vision are, the technology wasn’t able to deliver, and the most we ever saw in the real world was the occasional impressive chess computer. I simply got used to hearing an annual prediction that this time next year, we’d be talking to our computers like on Star Trek. Of course, we are now talking to our computers, even if it isn’t quite as smooth as we’d hoped.

What I find interesting is that there is a very different attitude towards self-driving cars. With electric cars, there wasn’t a lot of effort put in by the big companies, and the key innovations ended up coming from outside. Whereas with self-driving technology, there seems to be a rush to avoid being left behind. And that’s the one thing that makes me a little optimistic about the concept: it seems like all these companies are pouring so much time and money into research that they’re going to make it happen out of sheer willpower.

So I wonder why this is different: why didn’t fear of being left behind push car companies to make electric cars work? One reason is because this is less of a car problem and more of a tech problem. The big car companies know that the key innovation could come from some startup no one sees coming, instead of just being a competition of a few corporate behemoths. Also, it used to be that if a car company where caught behind a startup, they could always buy-out the smaller company. But now, between the financial problems of the car industry and the eager investment in technology, it might not be that easy to just buy tech from the innovators.

Also, it’s not just the car companies that want self-driving cars, there’s also the ride-sharing companies. Uber is still losing money, and it’s starting to look like self-driving cars are their only hope. And that’s another thing that isn’t following the previous pattern: Tech companies usually follow one of two trajectories: They lose buckets of money until they get to a scale or structure that makes money (like Amazon) or they discover that their plan was never going to work, however much size and technology they had (like Pets.com).

But Uber’s business plan is clearly in that futile second group, yet investors keep throwing money at it. I’m not sure how this is going to end: Uber has lasted long enough to become an indispensable part of the culture, yet it just can’t survive long-term. It’s like investors love the idea so much that they won’t let anything — not even the rules of economics themselves — prevent it from happening. They’d rather admit that capitalism doesn’t work than have to go back to taxis.

So it’s fitting that Uber’s fate is probably intertwined with self-driving cars: they’re both bad investments that we’re going to make happen, somehow. Part of me admires that tenacity. But mostly, I wish they had gone to the wall for jet packs instead.