This morning we went to see three more houses, two in Old Amersham and one in (New) Amersham.
zoop.la/16ggxEG
zoop.la/18d3yQA
zoop.la/18d3tN0
It was good to get out and see a few more homes but none of them grabbed us to the extent we were tempted to go for a second viewing.
On Thursday we’re targeting Marlow or Henley-on-Thames. These are probably out of our price range but it’s worth a look. And it’s a bit of a change from the last two. Both Great Missenden and Amersham are in Buckinghamshire which is still in the old grammar school system. This is good if you have a school age family but if not, it simply adds to the prices of homes here. So looking outside Buckinghamshire has it’s appeal.
Now, for a complete aside. If you haven’t figure it out yet, I am a tech geek. One things I like to do is to future gaze. ie, to develop ideas about where I think technology, and those who are leading the industry, is taking us. When I came out of my mental fugue last year (and perhaps influenced by the steroids I was on) it became more and more clear to me we are heading towards a driverless future, ie. where all cars will be automated. This is not a new idea as a number of companies are publicly working on autonomous vehicles. But where I see this going will be transformational to many areas of society. What I see is more or less the end of private car ownership. The more we let our cars drive for us, the less we’ll be ourselves skilled enough to takeover. Driverless cars will essentially become taxis arriving to pick us up just in time, travelling at very high speeds (computers will be safer) we’ll arrive at our destinations, also just in time, with no need to park. It will work for everyone as traffic and routes will be optimized centrally. There will be enough vehicles in any region to handle peak demand plus a haircut for failures, maintenance, etc. leading to far fewer vehicles being built (very ecological). Intelligent pricing for road journeys may flatten out peak travel too. Vehicles become bubbles of our home/work giving individuals greater work/life balance. Traffic will be centrally managed avoiding jams. Vehicle types will evolve to new needs: travelling offices, small scale sharing, sleeping, who knows. Urban use will transform. Parking, as we currently understand it, will more or less be eliminated providing new opportunities to use saved space (and a need for new jobs for wardens). I suspect road networks will transform and simplify over time freeing up public spending for other purposes. House values will shift as demand for proximity to mass transit reduces and costs of individual short distance travel falls. LIVES WILL BE SAVED. It goes on.
There will a be a lot of resistance to this sort of change. You’d think so at least. But the easiest sort of change to accept are those that creep up on us bit by bit. We now have radar assisted parking / cruise control. Some cars can now even park themselves. All major car companies are aiming for the end of this decade for their autonomous cars. Some navigation solutions are already centrally managed. Journey anticipation is already built into some smartphones. The changes that will take us to that future are already happening and I believe some of the big vision companies are already positioning themselves for this future.
How does this all help us? I’m not all sure. I suspect autonomous cars will only get on the road in a big way in the 20s. It will take a decade before ageing manual only vehicles will come off the roads. So it won’t happen until the 30s. But it will happen. And economics will respond ahead of time, as it always does. The long view on this would suggest that the average house bought near a station today won’t be as sound an investment as an average house away from a station. But we’ve got to live there before the change happens and at the end of the day it will be our kids (and the tax man) who will benefit or lose from this. So it’s not much of a consideration for us but it does trickle along in the back of my mind.
Just to make sure I’m not having pipe dreams I did a bit of googling and I’m not the only one seeing this future :
Here is a small collection of articles I found
http://complaintsincorporated.com/2013/04/06/autonomous-cars-and-the-end-of-ownership-not-if-but-when/
http://www.templetons.com/brad/robocars/
http://www.popsci.com/taxonomy/term/55646/all
http://www.gm.com/vision/design_technology/emerging_technology.html
Looking at these again, I’m now wondering if the forward reaching impact of this transformation is going to take as long as I thought.
Leave a Reply