Well we might as well get used to the idea, we will soon be taking transportation which is not driven by a human. It is hard to imagine being comfortable in any conveyance without a driver or pilot, but here we are on the verge of this happening. I suppose it will be much easier to accept for people who are born into this. They wouldn’t know what it is like to put your life into the hands of another human and they won’t care, because they will have been brought up trusting the machine. I guess the question will be how far can we trust these devices? Will they take over every vehicle or will some still be controlled by humans? Remember the passenger plane which had to ditch in the Hudson River in New York. The pilot made a miraculous landing on water and one wonders if a machine could have taken into account everything which was going on and accomplished the same perfect landing?

I have seen predictions stating there will be no more pilots in military aircraft in the future. While this seems possible to me, it also seems possible that new jamming techniques could be developed to interfere with the computers onboard of the planes and render them useless, knocking the planes out of the sky. This could be a reason to keep some pilots around. One never knows what advances could interfere with delicate equipment. Let me give you an example. When one of our advanced planes came out it was said it was undetectable by radar. It sounded great, but the remark was not truthful. It seemed the Australians had developed a new radar device would could detect stealth planes which heretofore were practically undetectable. The military does not like to admit they spent hundreds of billions on the development and deployment of a plane and then admit it is not as stealthy as they told us it was.

We are already using some trucks in the military which have no human drivers, it is said to be safer when they take to the roads in places like Iraq where IEDs are sometimes placed on the road. An IED is an improvised explosive device. If the truck is destroyed at least no human life is lost, but is this the real reason for this automation or does it have to do more with giving out lucrative contracts to companies to create and install these devices? If these devices are any indication, we might see a future without any human soldiers involved in close up actions. They might all be sitting thousands of miles away controlling drones, robot machines, tanks, planes and who knows what else? They might even be controlling ships. It is not such a farfetched dream to think about a completely robotic aircraft carrier carrying a thousand drones or one even carrying fighter planes and bombers which are manned by robotic devices. Notice I am not saying robots, because what we think of a robot is something which is a device which has a rough equivalent to the human body in layout and that would not be necessary.

When I think of a computer controlling the driving of a transportation device I think of trains as being the best candidates. I say this because steering is not necessary, it is just a matter of accelerating, slowing down and stopping, along with making sure the tracks are clear and undamaged. Sensors and cameras seem more than able to watch the tracks and check for problems, check signals. The route with all its dips and curves can be programmed into the computer where appropriate speed would be applied for that stretch of the road. It would be a little different for computers controlling city buses. They have to constantly make sure everyone is safely on the bus before restarting and also all the doors are closed. The next thing which has to be done is make sure there is enough room on the road to pull the bus out and continue it on its route. Again signals must be watched while anything getting too near the bus, including people should also be watched for and appropriate action taken. It seems to me a computer driving a city bus would have one of the more challenging tasks and yet self-driving taxis have been introduced into Singapore and so far so good.

It is said there are 8.7 million jobs in the U.S. which have to do with trucking. Not all are drivers, but many are. There are thousands of commercial airline pilots in the US and the total amount of pilots in the US for 2015 was almost 600,000 and there were about 114,000 railroad engineers in the U.S. If automation takes over, these jobs will be gone and rest assured this is what is going to happen. It is happening in every industry.

When we think of ships we have to think of the biggest transportation devices we have. If we are talking about pleasure ships some are actually cities. Can you imagine pre-programmed ships plying the oceans of the world without anyone steering them? They will probably always have some crew with someone in charge, but I am not so sure there will be a captain as such. It might be a manager since this person will have no say over the speed or direction the ship will be going. As far as warships go I think we might see autonomous ships covered in sensors and cameras with each equipped for their particular mission. Submarines will no longer need crews since computers will take over all of their duties. We are already seeing ships with much smaller complements of crew as computers take over more of the duties of the crewmen.

We are coming to a time when we will have no more dealings with humans when we purchase anything from rides to food and everything in between. The only people we will see are the others like us using these services. This is one of the reasons I have said we are nearing the point where we all need a guaranteed income, because there will be hardly any jobs in the future, automation will have eliminated most of them.