Question
Which industries and jobs will self-driving cars and trucks disrupt in a positive fashion, a negative fashion or just entirely destroy?
Answer
Joshua Engel is right. This goes well beyond disruption.
People generally use the term disruption incorrectly. It is most useful for analysis when used in the strict Clayton Christensen sense rather than for rhetorical drama: a product on the margins that gives up some attributes of a core market to gain some advantages in the marginal market, which then becomes the foot in the door that allows it to displace the incumbent.
Despite the sexiness of the term, "disruption" is not actually a very dramatic or interesting kind of market dynamic. It is primarily a fairly localized refactoring of existing market boundaries around a not-very-revolutionary innovation. In particular, disruption generally does not create vast new markets (there is nothing to say that an innovation cannot both disrupt existing products and create new wealth and demand, but the term disruption is not generally applied to the latter effect).
So saying that self-driving cars will hurt the cabdriver profession is like saying the steam engine affected buggy whip makers. True, but not really an important consequence.
Self-driving cars if they become the dominant kind of automobile will have an impact that goes far beyond disruption to changing the whole way life is organized, just like regular automobiles, air travel and steam engines changed everything.
The biggest impact would not be strict direct disruption of car-related businesses at all, but on completely unrelated markets. For example, railroads helped create concentrated urban dwelling patterns, while cars helped urban centers to sprawl out into suburbia and exurbia where trains could not easily go. Air travel began emptying out the interior of America and concentrating populations on the coasts, leaving the middle as sort of the industrial/logistic geographic "backend" (take a drive from NYC to Buffalo via Albany, Binghampton, Rochester etc. if you don't believe me, or across the vast "square grain states" of flyover country if you don't believe me).
So what about self-driving cars.
I suspect the impact pattern will involve neourbanism, public transport and change in ownership models. Here's what will go down:
I could go on, but a word to the wise is sufficient. Forget things having to do directly with the auto industry and think like an urban planner instead. The car created things like Bed, Bath & Beyond. The driverless car may destroy it. Not disruption, but a whole new pattern of life.
People generally use the term disruption incorrectly. It is most useful for analysis when used in the strict Clayton Christensen sense rather than for rhetorical drama: a product on the margins that gives up some attributes of a core market to gain some advantages in the marginal market, which then becomes the foot in the door that allows it to displace the incumbent.
Despite the sexiness of the term, "disruption" is not actually a very dramatic or interesting kind of market dynamic. It is primarily a fairly localized refactoring of existing market boundaries around a not-very-revolutionary innovation. In particular, disruption generally does not create vast new markets (there is nothing to say that an innovation cannot both disrupt existing products and create new wealth and demand, but the term disruption is not generally applied to the latter effect).
So saying that self-driving cars will hurt the cabdriver profession is like saying the steam engine affected buggy whip makers. True, but not really an important consequence.
Self-driving cars if they become the dominant kind of automobile will have an impact that goes far beyond disruption to changing the whole way life is organized, just like regular automobiles, air travel and steam engines changed everything.
The biggest impact would not be strict direct disruption of car-related businesses at all, but on completely unrelated markets. For example, railroads helped create concentrated urban dwelling patterns, while cars helped urban centers to sprawl out into suburbia and exurbia where trains could not easily go. Air travel began emptying out the interior of America and concentrating populations on the coasts, leaving the middle as sort of the industrial/logistic geographic "backend" (take a drive from NYC to Buffalo via Albany, Binghampton, Rochester etc. if you don't believe me, or across the vast "square grain states" of flyover country if you don't believe me).
So what about self-driving cars.
I suspect the impact pattern will involve neourbanism, public transport and change in ownership models. Here's what will go down:
- The first successful large-scale use of driverless cars will be via a sharing model that will fell almost like a personalized bus service. Think Uber or Zipcar etc. without drivers.
- Urban cores will get smarter and more people will live closer in rather than out in the suburbs. The suburbs will be for stuff that actually needs lots of land.
- Large strip malls with Bed Bath & Beyond type stores will slowly disappear, replaced by a mix of online shopping and a few wholesale type stores. Driverless cars will become sort of like a last-mile shuttle network from public transit routes to "new suburbia" destinations which will be built around experience consumerism rather than product consumerism. So you might take (in San Francisco, circa 2075), the BART or Caltrain out to San Jose, and then a driverless car out to the beach theme park in Santa Cruz. Or to a nice hiking location.
- 80% of driverless car use will be around a few "shuttle routes" that are not standard enough for buses, but not complicated enough to require human driving (there are still tricky navigation cases where humans do better I believe, and I think this will always be the case).
I could go on, but a word to the wise is sufficient. Forget things having to do directly with the auto industry and think like an urban planner instead. The car created things like Bed, Bath & Beyond. The driverless car may destroy it. Not disruption, but a whole new pattern of life.