DRIVER LESS CARS

Forget buying an electric-powered Tesla, sharing a Zip car or hiring an Uber - the most disruptive force in getting from A to B on four wheels could be cars that own themselves. Emancipated automobiles sounds like a crazy concept. But the man advocating the idea goes further: he thinks they'll have babies. OK, let's briefly shift into reverse and introduce Mike Hearn. The Zurich-based software developer is both an ex-Google engineer and one of the leading Bitcoin software developers. The virtual currency plays a key role in his scheme, but we'll get to that in a bit. At the heart of his vision is the idea that once driver less cars become commonplace, most people won't want or need to own a vehicle any more. In a world dominated by self-steering taxis, each ride becomes cheaper if the vehicles are autonomous rather than owned and run by major corporations. "The funny thing about a car that owns itself is that we can encode whatever rules we like into its software," explains Mr Hearn. "We can program it to make a little bit of profit, so it's got some money for a rainy day, but not excessive amounts. We can make it the most moral, socially minded capitalist possible." Instead of controlling which car goes where via proprietary software, the cars would communicate with people and the surrounding infrastructure via a new internet-based commerce system, he dubs the Tradenet. "You would be using an app that goes onto Tradenet and says: 'Here I am, this is where I want to go, give me your best offers,'" the developer says. To be clear, these robots-on-wheels would not be self-aware. "We're not assuming any kind of Skynet-style artificial intelligence," Mr Hearn states, referring to the Terminator movies. They would be programmed to seek self-improvement in order to avoid becoming obsolete. This would involve using earnings to hire human programmers to tweak their code.