Your child will live in your car parking space

When autonomous cars become mainstream what will happen to our parking spaces? Most experts think car ownership will become rare when autonomous cars exist.

How driverless cars will change car ownership forever

So Who’s Really Going to Own Autonomous Cars? There’s Four Scenarios.

Most of our houses have parking for two cars outside them. What will we do with these existing spaces then?

1. Rent the spaces out to autonomous cars. Some will do this but their ability to be used more of the time and to park themselves densely in unpopulated areas means we might have better use for the space.

2. More garden.

3. New houses. My two car spaces take up 25 square meters. Which is twice the size of this tiny house.

Or 25m squared is half the floor space of my actual house. And of this Ikea house.

These houses are cheap and I doubt people will be too bothered by having one replace the parking spaces behind their house.

People having a small house at the end of their garden might be already happening. For example this article Why An Increasing Number Of Americans Want To Build A Granny Flat. Explains why more people are already building houses beside their current one. Both young adult children and aging parents might find these small houses preferable to the alternatives. With young people increasingly living at home at an older age and seeming to have higher debts for worse job prospects a granny flat becomes more attractive.

It is possible autonomous cars will end up meaning people live in bigger houses further out of the city. But as a way to retrofit current housing car space houses will be popular.

But if all these car parking spaces become free. And you share with your neighbour enough space build a house the same size as yours. There will be some people who try and build new housing there.

Will Automation Related Job Losses Increase?

"The consultancy firm PricewaterhouseCooper is predicting that the U.K. will lose 30 percent of its jobs to automation in the next 15 years. Automation is a global issue, and some countries are considering Universal Basic Income as a means of counteracting its associated job loses"

Is this more job losses than the usual trend? As in what is the average rate of job losses over 15 years?

Farming used to be the vast majority of workers 200 years ago. Farming underwent four and a bit halvings of the workforce percentage between 1900 and 2000.

In pure raw numbers there were 11.6 million farmers in 1900. 6 million in 1960. And 3.2 million today. In this time the population went from 76 million to 320.

In raw number terms employment in Agriculture dropped -0.65% a year when population was growing 2.8% a year.

So that's a bit over .65% of farm workers a year leave the sector. Not move from horse powering job to tractor pulling job but leave agriculture. So loss of individual agriculture job has been well over .65% per year for 100 years.

Over the 100 years agriculture was mechanised, refrigerated, nitrogen fertilised, pesticised, green revolutioned, factory farmed and GMOed. A lot happened.

To lose 30% of jobs in 15 years 2.35% of the jobs would have to lost each year.

That projected rate of job losses does seem to be a good bit higher than the loss for agriculture for last 100 years.

The smallest tool we use

What is the smallest individual object most people handle most days?

I think it probably used to be a match. But people do not use them as much anymore.

It could well be coins. The removal of 1 and 2 cent coins have increased the size of the smallest coin we use. The 5 cent weights 3.92g the 1 cent weighed 2.30g. And the increased use of cards and phone payment means coins seem to be on the way out.

It could well be a hairclip, though I am not sure how close they come to the majority of people using them.

.

Pills could well be the answer. It seems reasonable that close to the majority of people in the western world take a pill every day.

Are the tools we use getting larger over time? Smartphones have replaced big tools like walkmen and cameras for many of us. But maybe in some way they have also replaced small tools like coins and matches?