Authors: Jeremy Rifkin
Google, which lobbied heavily for the new law, has already racked up 300,000 miles of testing driverless vehicles.
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General Motors, Mercedes, BMW, Audi, Volvo, and Volkswagen are also testing driverless vehicles. The Google vehicle is a refitted Toyota Prius that drives itself using cameras, radar sensors, and a laser range finder and detailed Google maps connected to a GPS navigation system.
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Some car enthusiasts worry about the safety of driverless vehicles. Automotive engineers, however, point out that 90 percent of automobile accidents are caused by human error.
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Unlike human drivers, automated vehicles don’t get distracted, don’t get intoxicated, and don’t fall asleep at the wheel, opening up the prospect of saving the lives of many of the tens of thousands of people each year who die from car accidents in the United States alone.
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According to a J.D. Power and Associates research survey, 30 percent of drivers aged 18 to 37 say they would definitely or possibly buy a driverless vehicle, demonstrating the tremendous potential of this revolutionary change in road transport.
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Traditionalists argue that a majority of drivers will likely opt out, preferring the thrill—not to mention the control—of steering their own vehicle. Maybe the older generation will, but I doubt it for the Internet generation. For millennials, who are already distracted behind the wheel using their smartphones, it’s unlikely that they would be more interested in driving a car than being driven by one. In the Collaborative Age, when time is the scarce commodity and attention is at a premium, freeing oneself from driving an automobile several hours a day is significant extra time to attend to more interesting activities in virtual space.
Sergey Brin, cofounder of Google, looks to a day not too far off when millions of car-share members summon cars electronically. After dropping off the members at their destinations, the driverless vehicles will be automatically dispatched to their next pick up or proceed back to the nearest car-share lot to charge their electric batteries and await the next summons.
In May 2013, Mercedes introduced its new S-Class automobile that can already partially drive itself and even park itself. The automobile, with a price tag of $100,000, can even hold itself in the middle of a lane and keep its distance from the car ahead. Dieter Zetsche, Daimler’s CEO,
says that Mercedes’s newest vehicle “marks the beginning of autonomous driving.”
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Industry analysts estimate that driverless vehicles will be commercially available in eight years or so. Brin is more optimistic, suggesting that a completely driverless automobile is not more than five years away.
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Why would anyone want to “own” and maintain an automobile when they could “access” a driverless vehicle from a car-sharing service at a moment’s notice from their cell phone and have it ferry them effortlessly with GPS guidance to their destination, paying only for the precise time they are using the vehicle?
If ever proof were needed that the capitalist era, wedded to the exchange of property in markets, is ceding ground to the access of services in the Collaborative Commons, the changing relationship to the automobile is prima facie evidence of the great transformation at hand.
Letting Go of Ownership
In 2000, I published a book entitled
The Age of Access.
The book was released on the eve of the dot-com bubble burst. Ten years after the advent of the World Wide Web, the Internet was coming of age. Hundreds of millions of people were connecting and exploring a new virtual world every bit as expansive with opportunities as the discovery of the new world 500 years earlier. There was a manic rush to map the new territory of cyberspace and exploit a virgin domain that was virtually limitless and without boundaries. New social media spaces were coming alive every day, and an entire generation seemed awed by the possibilities of creating entirely new ways to collaborate and share their lives with one another.
Beneath all the surface hyperbole that went along with the colonization of cyberspace, scholars and activists alike were beginning to ask the question of how this new virtual public square—one that is capable of connecting the entire human race for the very first time in history—might change the fundamentals of how society is organized. What consequences would flow from a social space where everyone could reach everyone else, connect, collaborate, and create new ways to interact with one another on a planetary scale—something never before imaginable?
I started thinking about writing the book in 1998. I was teaching at the time in the advanced management program at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania. CEOs from around the world were beginning to sniff around the Internet, attempting to figure out whether it posed a threat, an opportunity, or both to their way of doing business. It was then that I began to ponder some questions. What might happen if millions of Internet users began bypassing the traditional commercial channels of the market? What if they created their own virtual meeting places and began to use the distributed, collaborative nature of the
Internet to create lateral economies of scale and start sharing ideas, information, and even things with one another on a Commons, skipping all the middle men, markups, and margins on the traditional capitalist value chain, and by doing so, bring the marginal cost of producing additional units to near zero? Amazon and eBay had already been around for three or four years and offered a taste of the potential commercial gains in collapsing the cost spread along the value stream to just a few players separating the seller from the buyer.
More importantly, Napster had just formed in 1999 and was taking that possibility to the next level. Napster was a peer-to-peer Internet file-sharing network that allowed millions of people to share music with one another for free on the Commons. Suddenly a new economic model opened up. Within a few years, other Internet file-sharing networks would follow, bringing the music industry to its knees.
Napster changed the rules of the economic game. Many sellers and buyers disappeared, replaced by providers and users. Ownership of CDs gave way to access to music libraries online. Markets succumbed to networked Commons. A vertically integrated industry controlled by a handful of giant recording companies buckled under the collective weight of millions of buyers turned peer-to-peer collaborators.
Could the contagion spread? Might it touch every company and industry represented in my management classes? I asked my corporate executives, but they weren’t sure.
In
The Age of Access
, I acknowledged that
the very thought of leaving markets and the exchange of property
behind—of advancing a conceptual change in the structuring of human relationships away from ownership and toward access—is as inconceivable to many people today as enclosure and privatization of land and labor into property relationships must have been more than a half a millennium ago. [However,] it is likely that for a growing number of enterprises and consumers, the very idea of ownership will seem limited, even old fashioned, 25 years from now.
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In the ten years that followed the publication of the book, I continued to put the same question to corporate leaders in my Wharton classes. The “not sure” responses fell in number as the growing thirst for access over ownership spread to every quarter of commercial culture.
Global companies are beginning to adjust to the generational shift from ownership to access by deemphasizing the sale of things and refocusing their business practices on managing every aspect of their client’s value chain—what they call being a “solution provider.” They are trying to find relevance in a fast changing economic environment where margins are quickly disappearing.
Today there are few industries unaffected by the shift from ownership to access and
from markets to networked Commons as a younger generation flexes its collaborative muscle in pursuit of a near zero marginal cost society.
Millions of people are sharing not only automobiles and bicycles, but also their homes, clothes, tools, toys, and skills in networked Commons. The sharing economy is arising for a combination of reasons. The global collapse of the Second Industrial Revolution economy in the summer of 2008 was a wake-up call. In America and elsewhere, hundreds of millions of families found themselves awash in “stuff” they barely used and buried in debt to finance it. The sober reality is that when crude oil hit $147 per barrel on world markets, purchasing power tumbled, and the economy tanked, sending millions of employees home with pink slips. There was real worry of another Great Depression—we settled for calling it the Great Recession. Without a paycheck and with few prospects, millions of families looked to their savings and found they had none. What they did find was astronomical debt built up over nearly 20 years of profligate consumption in the biggest buying spree in history. Try this on: total American household debt topped out at $13.9 trillion in 2008.
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Coming out from under that would take decades, and economists were cautioning that, even then, today’s youth would not likely enjoy anywhere near the standard of living of their parents’ and grandparents’ generations.
For the first time, millions of families began to look over all the stuff they didn’t need and hadn’t even fully paid for and asked not just “why me?” but “why?” It was a collective existential question—a soul-searching reevaluation of the nature of modern life. “What was I thinking?” became the unspoken litany of the so-called “consumer society.” Some began to question the value of accumulating more and more possessions that added little or nothing to their sense of happiness and well-being.
At the same time, parents were being bombarded by dire warnings of catastrophic climate change as a result of two centuries of industrial activity that had created untold prosperity—the average upper-middle-class person’s wealth exceeding that of emperors and kings just four centuries earlier—at the expense of Earth’s ecological endowment. Was their wealth saddling their children and grandchildren with an even bigger environmental debt that might never be paid back?
Families began to realize they had been sold a bill of goods, that they had been sucked into a debilitating addiction fed by billions of dollars of corporate advertising that had left them at the doorstep of ruin and despair. It was a collective “ah ha” moment when large numbers of people stopped dead in their tracks and began to reverse course. The way out was to turn the entire economic system on its head—buy less, save more, and share what one has with others. Runaway consumption would be replaced by a shareable economy.
A powerful new economic movement took off overnight, in large part because a younger generation had a tool at its disposal that enabled it to
scale quickly and effectively and share its personal bounty on a global Commons. The distributed, collaborative nature of the Internet allowed millions of people to find the right match-ups to share whatever they could spare with what others could use. The sharing economy was born. This is a different kind of economy—one far more dependent on social capital than market capital. And it’s an economy that lives more on social trust rather than on anonymous market forces.
Rachel Botsman, an Oxford- and Harvard-educated former consultant to GE and IBM who abandoned her career to join the new sharing economy, describes the path that led up to collaborative consumption. She notes that the social Web has passed through three phases—the first enabled programmers to freely share code; Facebook and Twitter allowed people to share their lives; and YouTube and Flickr allowed people to share their creative content. “Now we’re going into the fourth phase,” Botsman says, “where people are saying, ‘I can apply the same technology to share all kinds of assets offline, from the real world.’”
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Let me add an amplifier at this juncture: while the Communications Internet is an enabler, as it merges with the Energy Internet and the Logistics Internet in the years ahead, establishing an integrated and sharable communication, energy, and logistics infrastructure—an Internet of Things—that can operate at near zero marginal cost, it dramatically boosts the potential of the other sharable sectors, including rentals, redistribution networks, cultural exchanges, and exchanges of professional and technical skills. When that happens, collaborative production and exchange will scale up from a niche sector to the dominant paradigm and capitalism will be reactive to the Commons, not the other way around.
Botsman captures the physiology of the new economic paradigm growing up in our midst. She writes:
Every day people are using Collaborative Consumption—traditional sharing, bartering, lending, trading, renting, gifting, and swapping, redefined through technology and peer communities. Collaborative Consumption is enabling people to realize the enormous benefits of access to products and services over ownership, and at the same time save money, space, and time; make new friends; and become active citizens once again. . . . These systems provide significant environmental benefits by increasing use efficiency, reducing waste, encouraging the development of better products, and mopping up the surplus created by over-production and -consumption.
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Sharing Everything
Much of what we own goes unused some of the time. Sharing spare rooms or even couches has become a big-ticket item among enthusiasts. Airbnb and HomeAway are among the many start-ups that are connecting millions
of people who have homes to rent with prospective users. Airbnb, which went online in 2008, boasted 110,000 available rooms listed on its site just three years later and was expanding its available listings by an astounding 1,000 rooms every day.
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To date, 3 million Airbnb guests booked 10 million nights in 33,000 cities, spanning 192 countries.
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In 2012 bookings were growing at a blistering pace of 500 percent a year, an exponential curve that would bring envy, if not terror, to any global hotel chain.
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Airbnb is expected to pass the venerable Hilton and InterContinental hotel chains—the world’s largest hotel operations—in 2014 by filling up more rooms per night across the globe.
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