Roadkill

Driverless Cars. Everywhere you look. Programmed and prepared to take you wherever you need to go.

Tony Seba, a RethinkX think tank cofounder and Stanford instructor, and James Arbib, a tech investor and philanthropist, published a report predicting that in 15 years only 20% of Americans will own a car. The main reason? Lots of autonomous cars will be roaming around ferrying us to and fro at less cost and with more ease than owning and driving your own car.

They predict there will be 44 million passenger cars in 2030 compared to 247 million in 2020. Oil consumption will drop precipitously. Parking lots will become open space. City streets will become pleasant places to walk or bicycle.

And by 2030, total transportation savings of $1 trillion will flow into households to use for other purposes.

Are you ready for this future? Is your company?

The early signs of this future are all around us. .Uber and Lyft have begun to eat into car ownership as many find their services more convenient and less expensive than owning a car. Numerous companies are well into their development and testing of driverless cars.

And yet, how many of you have really thought about and prepared for what this means for your business? For your life?

What it means is that some of our major global manufacturing industries will be a fraction of their current size. It means the already-shrinking opportunities for many kinds of employment will be further diminished both by jobs that no longer exist and by the continuing explosion of technology and robotics.

What will all the truck drivers, delivery drivers, bus drivers, taxi drivers, Uber and Lyft drivers do? What will all the people building the vehicles and roads and providing the services to maintain them do? What will all the people who own these businesses do?

And what new industries and employment opportunities will all this lead to?

So far all I’ve talked about is one industry: transportation and its support system. Throw in similar transformations coming to industries across the board and the world will be a place we hardly recognize.

Are you prepared?

Some of you reading this are thinking that no one is ignoring these changes. They’re all around us already. No one really thinks it can’t happen to them. Let me disabuse you of this view. Many are still plodding along thinking they’ve got time before they have to start worrying. Or they’re making half-hearted attempts to do something…as long as it’s not too much effort at not too high a cost. Or they figure they’ll be retired or have sold their business so who cares.

Silly them.

The future is already bearing down on them. On you. On all of us. Wake up and plan for the future. What will you do to adjust? What opportunities will appear that you can address? What resources do you need to take advantage of what is coming?

The future will belong to those always working to predict and prepare for coming changes. To those willing and able to adjust rapidly. To those who realize that minor changes and hopes that things won’t change very fast lead to failure.

Get moving now. Or end up a deer in the headlights, frozen in place as a driverless truck runs over you.