Sooner Than We Thought: Self-Driving Taxi Trial Begins In Singapore

Technology tends to be ahead of policy. The technology to build self-driving cars has been around for a while, but self-driving cars have not been put to use in any part of the world. Many experts even believe that self-driving cars may not become common in our lifetime. But there are reasons to think that this is sooner than we think.

Fifteen years ago, not many believed that the number of mobile phones will exceed the population in many parts of the world. But, now what we see is a digital revolution, worldwide. This is not because this was entirely unpredictable, but because human beings are somewhat predisposed to underestimate how quickly luxuries can penetrate to the masses.  

nuTonomy, a startup in Singapore tested a free driverless taxi-hailing service. Even though driverless cars have been tested on roads for many years, such cars were never put to public use. The testing was done on One-North in Singapore, a business district that has many technology firms. There are primarily two reasons why self-driving cars have not been really tried. i) Voters and policy makers tend to be suspicious of modern technology, and ii) Roads and highways are not yet evolved enough to handle self-driving cars.

The Singapore government is trying to do something about this. Once nuTonomy achieves some milestones, the Singapore government will allow them to drive in other parts of the city. Singapore is the first country to try this out because it has a fairly libertarian government which adopts good practices from the rest of the world. Moreover, a single party has ruled Singapore for many decades, even though it is a democracy. So, rulers have more leverage, and can adopt sensible policies without worrying too much about the consequences. This is why some great economists predicted long ago that Singapore will be the first country to do this.  

Other countries do not really lack the technology to do this. Governments in other countries are just not willing to make the same choices. The US companies like Google and Uber were at the forefront of the race to develop self-driving cars. But, it was not the US government that allowed such experimentation. Greeks and Romans developed the basic concept behind railways, but only the modern capitalistic society in England could bring that into existence.

The prevailing regulatory framework does not allow self-driving vehicles because many believe that man-made self-driving vehicles do not have the ability to make the same kind of judgments that human beings make. This is the biggest roadblock before the popularisation of self-driving cars. But the same argument can be made about almost everything that is automated. Automated processes are, however usually safer and more accurate. Automation has not raised the likelihood of accidents and deaths in other spheres of life. So, there is no good reason to think that self-driving cars are an exception.

It will take time for attitudes to change, but it seems that this will be sooner than we think. As it is harder to stop technological advancement than in the past, it is quite possible that other modern capitalistic countries will follow Singapore.