"SHARING ECONOMY" - THE RIDGEWOOD BLOG.

BY TOM KRISHER
AP AUTO WRITER

DETROIT (AP) — Within five years, a majority of ride-hailing company Lyft’s rides will be in self-driving cars, the company’s co-founder and president predicted on Sunday.

John Zimmer also said that personal car ownership will come to an end because autonomous rides will become a cheaper way to travel than owning an automobile. He made the predictions in an essay on the future of transportation in urban areas.

Technology, auto and ride-hailing companies are moving quickly toward self-driving vehicles. San Francisco-based Lyft is testing autonomous cars on the streets of San Francisco and Phoenix in partnership with General Motors. Its main competitor Uber is starting to carry passengers around Pittsburgh in autonomous cars with a human backup driver.

Zimmer said autonomous cars will start out giving rides at low speeds, around 25 miles per hour, in limited areas with a number of restrictions. The cars also won’t be able to operate in bad weather. “As technology improves, these cars will be able to drive themselves in more and more situations,” Zimmer said.

https://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/U/US_LYFT_AUTONOMOUS_CARS?SITE=AP&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT&CTIME=2016-09-18-18-45-06

Marco Rubio Speech On Innovation At Uber's DC Offices

FIVE YEARS AGO, EVERYBODY WAS EXCITED ABOUT THE IDEA OF USING TECH TO BORROW THINGS LIKE POWER DRILLS. IN PRACTICE, THOUGH, NOT SO MUCH.

BY SARAH KESSLER

“How many of you own a power drill?” Rachel Botsman, the author of the book The Rise Of Collaborative Consumption, asked the audience at TedxSydney in 2010. Predictably, nearly everyone raised his or her hand. “That power drill will be used around 12 to 15 minutes in its entire lifetime,” Botsman continued with mock exasperation. “It’s kind of ridiculous, isn’t it? Because what you need is the hole, not the drill.”

After pausing for a moment as the audience chuckled, she provided the obvious solution.

“Why don’t you rent the drill? Or rent out your own drill to other people and make some money from it?”

Back then, this version of what Botsman called collaborative consumption, or what would become better known as “the sharing economy,” seemed like a warm and fuzzy inevitability. American consumerism had been tamped by one of the worst recessions in history, concerns about the environment were growing, and new online networks provided a connective thread that could help us get by on less by sharing things with our neighbors. “We now live in a global village where we can mimic the ties that used to happen face to face, but on a scale and in a way that has never been possible before,” Botsman explained, and these new systems allowed us “to engage in a humanness that got lost along the way.” We were now, she said, experiencing “a seismic shift from individual getting and spending towards a rediscovery of collective good.”

https://www.fastcompany.com/3050775/the-sharing-economy-is-dead-and-we-killed-it