 Thank you so very much. I'd like to welcome you to the lunchtime debate. Everyone here and those listening in on KZSU and we're streaming live on the web, welcome. My name is Jeff Byron and I will be your moderator today, Cars Against Humanity. My job will be to make sure the debaters adhere to our Oxford style of debating format and to ask the piercing questions. Let me ask who's attended a previous debate in the last three or four years. Wonderful. Okay well, those of you that have not been here, we've discovered, we've taken on a number of different issues and it's been one of the highlight of the Silicon Valley Energy Summits because of the topical interests our expert panelists and our informed audience. We've had lively debates about the adoption of electric vehicles, the future of nuclear power, and the benefits and risks of hydraulic fracture of oil and gas recovery. Today's topic will be about a potentially adverse consequence of something that's not in the too distant future. The proposition is resolved, autonomous vehicles are bad for the environment, built, human and natural. But before we get to our debate and find out where you stand on the topic with your votes, let's do a quick warm up and a sample question. So forgive me, I need to just bring up the slides here very quickly. Okay, so we're going to toggle up to the other screen, Andrew, and let me walk you all through this. If you haven't done so already, please take out your smartphones, your tablets, or your computer, and those that are listening in elsewhere can also vote and go to the website slidu.com, or s-l-i-d-o.com. You'll need to enter the event code debate 2018, and I'm not sure if it's case sensitive, so you should be. You're going to see a screen that says Stanford Silicon Valley Energy Summit 2018 debate. It'll look different than the one that's up on the screen, and you'll want to make sure you click on live poll, and you should see a test question there. A test question is a critical question for those of you that are Giants fans. How many of you can see the question? How many of you are already there? All right, go ahead and start voting. Do it now. Make your selection, press send. Now, I'll tell you right up front, you can change your answer before I close the vote. Okay, we're open. Wait, I'm not showing the question. My apologies. Too many buttons for me to press. It should pop up here momentarily. There it is. Now, this is just a test, just making sure that you're able to connect and we're able to work. s-l-i-d-o.com debate 2018. And while you're voting, let's go ahead and check. How many of you were here at last year's debate by chance? Okay, so we're going to, that's it with the hands. We're going to do this all electronically. We're going to try and make sure that we have an accurate count, and that's why we're doing this voting this way. Unfortunately, due to format and time constraints, we won't be taking any questions from the audience during the debate, but we're going to need your vote. So I'm going to close the vote here in just a moment, just so we can get our test sample, and we can see what the results are. All right, so we can see that there's a lot of skeptics in the audience, at least when it comes to the giants. But I'm also glad to see that about 41% of those who voted are the faithful. Of course, there are also the undecided who I suppose are probably Warriors fans. Now, the question would be, is there anything that I could have done that would change your vote if we were to take that vote again right now? There's anything I could say that would change your vote. And that's what these panelists will be trying to do. So I'm going to ask that you keep the screen handy. We're going to be voting on the proposition in a moment, and then again, following the debate, and depending upon how many votes were changed one way or another, that will determine our winning debating team. But before I have your vote, let me do this. I need to see if we can crystallize the debate topic a little bit better. Andrew, if you'll circle back to the slides. Technology often changes everything differently than we might think, and faster than we might imagine. A few weeks ago, Mary Meeker, Piner Perkins, gave her annual Internet Trends presentation. And as you look at this figure from left to right over the past century, for the entry of new technologies such as the electric grid, radio, refrigerators, and more currently social media and smartphone, you can see that the speed of adoption has become increasingly faster. Presented a little bit differently, you can see here that reaching 25% adoption of technologies that are ubiquitous in our everyday lives are taking far less time than they did in the past. But what about transportation? There's a myriad of new companies in this space, autonomous vehicles and electrification and electric vehicles. In addition to the majors such as Google and Waymo and Apple, we know that traditional automakers are also very active. And there are even some new entrants, you're all familiar with Uber and Lyft, but companies you may not have ever heard of before such as Nato, Peloton, Zooks, and Aurora to name a few. When we look at Uber, which is a company that's been less than nine years old, it's serving 633 cities. And their latest valuation was over $70 billion. We look at the gross bookings and the number of drivers we've seen a trebling in the past three years. Now, I'm not advocating for Uber, autonomous vehicles, or more driving, but the trend is pretty clear upward, whatever the reasons have been. Take a look at vehicle growth, population, the number of drivers, the number of vehicles, and what we refer to as VMT or vehicle mild travel. The trend for more mobility seems to be unabated. So here's the dilemma and the reason for the debate for today's debating topic. If we're going to be driving more in the future, what will be the impact on our environment? How about infrastructure? Do we need to make changes to our roads, fueling stations, and parking structures? Will autonomous vehicles be a drag or a boom on our economy? What about the human impact? Will there be fewer jobs for drivers in our transportation sector? Will we have more leisure time and time to work at our destinations, which I'm sure everybody wants, or will we spend more time, albeit not necessarily behind the steering wheel, but sitting in traffic? So I need to go back over to our questions. Okay, I think you're ready to vote. The resolution for today's debate is resolved. Autonomous vehicles are bad for the environment, built, human, and natural. Now, many of you have already formed your opinion. This group will try to change your mind or at least not lose your support. However, you can also be undecided to start with and present and perhaps they'll win over your vote. The winners of the debate are those who change the most votes. So let's go ahead and open up the voting. I'd like to ask if you would go ahead and log in again. Should be easy this time and make your vote on the resolution. So while you're voting, I'm going to introduce our panelists. The protagonists are Agnan Stoyanovsky, an attorney, scholar, who's conducting research at Stanford and previously was at Otto and Uber. And Jeff Greenblatt, the founder of Emerging Technologies, who's also worked at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab and NASA. I think of these gentlemen as the purveyors of gloom and doom. The antagonists are Brian Goncher, the Managing Director of Deloitte's Emerging Growth Company Practice in Silicon Valley. And Michael Ostrovsky, he's the Fred H. Murrell Professor of Economics here at Stanford. I think of these gentlemen as our technological hypocrites. Each of you, thank you so very much for being here today. Let me discuss the format while you continue to vote. It's going to be Oxford-style debate. They'll each get an opening statement for the motion. We'll go first for three minutes, then against the motion. Then there will be a rebuttal for speaker two for the motion and then a rebuttal by speaker two against the motion. I will then pose questions to each side approximately half an hour. And then they'll each have an opportunity for two minutes of off and want to drive under the speed limit, stop whenever somebody jumps into the intersection, and it can cause a great deal of disruption on America's roadways, both in urban situations as well as on the highway. You also mentioned congestion. And while it's possible that congestion can be eliminated to a certain degree if autonomous vehicles are coordinating and are able to use the roadways more efficiently, it also however allows people, as Ogden said, to tolerate longer commutes and to tolerate congestion because they're doing other things and they can use their prime productively. That might be good for individuals, but it's not good for the environment because it means that people are using transportation and energy less efficiently than we are today because they're encouraged to use this now sort of tolerable source of energy consumption in a way that's not overall conservative for the economy. You mentioned road efficiency as well. And again, if the cars are very small and they're coordinated and they're increased their density on the roads, it's possible that road efficiency could increase. But on the other hand, if these vehicles grow larger, both because people want to have space in order to do these other activities that they can now afford to do because their time isn't freed up, then it may be that the roadways will be used less efficiently. Single occupancy vehicles, even if they're getting people quickly and concisely to their destinations, it's still a single occupancy vehicle. It's still far less efficient than using something like a high density bus or train system that can move far more people for the same number of for the same number of jewels. And finally, you mentioned parking. And I think the problem with parking is that, well, if this parking frees up, it may be that we're going to want to repurpose the the parking spaces for other uses. Cities have been choked by cars for decades. And there is a great desire to repurpose them for sidewalk cafes for expanded pedestrian lanes for biking lanes. And I think that there's going to be just as much parking as problems as before. Thank you. Very good. Thank you. And I've lost track. I know we're down to our fourth one, Brian. Rebuttal on the con. That's right. Please. I get my say. Thank you. Three minutes. Thank you, Jeff. So this is really interesting. So, Jeff, on your website Emerging Futures, you have a really cool study about the benefits to society and to the economy and to the environment of self-driving electric shared cars. Is that correct? That is correct. But I, I have, but you're allowing all that information today. For the work of the client is going to say tomorrow. I think this is a personal attack. Jim, were there any rules? Thank you. I learned from the master. Clearly he has no other arguments to make. So what I'd say is, thank you, Jeff, for, for, for your answer. What I would say is that there are really three things I'm going to repeat as a consultant for Deloitte. I'm going to repeat the things that I think are really important around safety, traffic and parking. And the argument of vehicle miles traveled is going to be terrible for the environment is just a total wet herring. Is that you do want more economic activity. And this will create more economic activity. I didn't just said that as we built highways and had more cars versus trains in our parents generation or most of you maybe your grandparents generation. As a result, we are going to see a lot more activity in the United States and hopefully in other countries as well. That is a great thing. That's a real positive. I think that everyone would agree that self-driving electric and shared go together. And that's where we see the benefit, the real benefit of all this is that it's going to create an environment in which more vehicle miles traveled does not necessarily mean that you're going to be using coal burning plants to power vehicles in the future or that you're not going to be able to have less congestion versus more congestion on the roads. There are lots of other aspects and Mike is honestly an absolute expert at this at the business school around trying to shape policy a little bit. I'm sure we'll get into that with tolls, credits, other ways to once you have these connected cars to move traffic more efficiently on the roads. So I do think that's going to be a very prime one. What we didn't get into interestingly enough is pollution from cars is not going to be an issue. We didn't talk about batteries, but batteries we just heard are going to become much better. Thank you to the entrepreneur with the sound waves. What's the company name again? Feasible. I call it reliable, but feasible. Okay. Thank you. It's lots of those things that we're going to, there's tons of examples and many of you heard of these already. On your slide you had a silanano who's doing silicon anode batteries that will increase the battery capacity or range by about 20 or so percent. These are enormous leaps as we sit here and as we speak. So the idea that we're not going to see constant improvement in battery life, battery reuse, the long lives of batteries to offset any pollution that may occur from their creation or their disposal. Brian, thank you very much. Oh, I'm below your pass. Oh man, I have so much more to say. Let's go. Okay. So gentlemen, thank you very much for framing the issues, the pros and the cons. What you've identified is most important. Maybe what we need to do a little bit before we get into some of the nitty gritty issues is to define terms a little bit. So where are we on ownership? Where are we on electrification? Where are we on are these things going to be polluting more or less because of these issues? Utilization, I'm sorry, what I meant to say was utilization, ownership, utilization, electrification. Let's just go down the line real quick. Where are we on these and the assumptions that you're making about this future? Yeah. Well, I think there's no good, all empirical proof is against the assumption that autonomy somehow goes hand in hand with electrification and sharing. We've had plenty of networks that are dense enough to provide sharing already. People don't want to share. There's lots of empirical proof to the contrary that people do not like sharing, especially in this country. We like our space. We like our comforts and electrification is just it's a completely different, it's a completely different engineering challenge and it's just been sort of like lumped in there, you know, together with it. And you know, as I said, the energy, the technology itself is super energy intensive. It'll drain your mileage on your lithium ion battery for your electric vehicle. And frankly, having a highly utilized fleet is completely of electric vehicles is completely incompatible with having a shared autonomous fleet because of the fact that the sun shines, especially in a grid where we have a lot of renewables like sunshine and wind, right? Because right now you need to we need to be charging those vehicles between noon and three p.m. The idea that they'll be recharged at night time is a 20th century idea where your face load is nuclear and cold. If you're truly moving to wind, if you're moving to solar, what electric vehicles, if their autonomous need to do is they need to drive to work, drop you off, then drive home empty outside of the urban center, go in the suburb, park themselves and recharge in the middle of the day. So the goals of shared and high utilization are completely incompatible with the goals of electrification and especially a grid where we need to integrate renewables. Okay, thank you. Jeff, do you have anything to add to that electrification or no? I would just say that there's a very small number of vehicles that are electric right now. I don't know the exact statistic, but I think it's under half a million vehicles across the whole U.S. Most of them are here in California. Our electric is true that ownership is increasing, but there's a lot of hesitation for people, even with these more than 200-mile batteries. People just don't want to buy electric cars. They don't see them as continuing enough. They don't understand them. They're afraid that they won't be able to run their air conditioning if it's hot out. As Ogman said, with the more than five kilowatts, potentially of electricity consumption that comes with a large multi-core processor and GPU system and high bandwidth wireless communication, in order to run this electric autonomous vehicle, you'll probably have your range cut in half, maybe even more. All right, the cons of my technological utopians, where are you on ownership, electrification and utilization? Sure. Let me first talk about ownership and utilization and electrification. On ownership, it's actually not clear what the model is going to be. My prediction is that the models will coexist. People who drive a lot, 15,000 to 20,000 miles a year, might want to actually own a self-driving car. You keep your golf clubs in the trunk or other things, and you utilize the car sufficiently intensely that the additional savings from sharing the car are not that large. People who live in urban areas where parking is expensive, where their total amount of commute is much smaller, will probably not want to own a car, and there you will have fleets that are owned by companies running those fleets, and commuters will just use, will rent the car to get from point A to point B. So that's ownership. On utilization, I think it's very important to realize that there are two very distinct angles to utilization. One is you take the same car, and then you use it more intensely. So right now cars sit unused 95% of the time, and higher utilization may mean that you use them instead of 5% of the time, use them 20% of the time, or 30% of the time. That's actually not necessarily that valuable if cars die from mileage. If the car drives more per date, it will just die faster. A much more valuable type of higher utilization is having more people per car. And I think the real revolution with self-driving cars is going to come from moving away from this model that we have right now, where 90% of the cars on the road contain one person, to much more convenient carpooling options or sort of smaller scale public transportation where you have four, six, eight people per minivan, and that's almost mechanically reduces the cost of transportation by a factor of four, six, or eight, and that's the real upside. And I think I took enough time, so keep on electrification. Well, only Brian's time. Brian, what can you add? So what I'd like to add is I'm really shocked that Jeff and Ogden, who he's from Uber, remember, doesn't really believe that change can happen. He thinks everyone's going to be sitting in their car all by themselves forever. That is not true. So I gave up a car this year just to see what life would be like without having a car, without owning a car. It is fantastic. And what I'd say is that when Uber goes to his self-driving car, which it needs to, wants to, and needs to, and I'm going to bet you a dollar to a donut that Ogden is advising him to do just that, even though he's on the other side of the bait today, is that there is going to be, just like we hitchhiked in the 70s, for those of you old enough to remember that, we will have shared transportation in the future. It's going to be fantastic. Mike and I talked a little bit about this in advance where, you know, buses, trains, they're okay, and I use them frequently, but it wouldn't be better to have a small group of people, some that you may know, some that you may meet along the way, in a beautifully designed electric shared car with the most fantastic entertainment systems you've ever seen in your life. We haven't even talked about that piece of this, is that there's going to be really an unbelievable environment for you to enjoy listening to music, watching movies, talking to each other, getting work done, sleeping, all kinds of possibilities that are going to be seen normal to us in the next decade. The entertainment values of AVs. Let's stay on this subject for just, for the entertainment value of autonomous vehicles. Let's just stay on the subject for just a little bit, because I tell Jeff wants to go back to it. I read recently 90% of American drivers think they're above average. Okay, it doesn't seem to me that most people are going to be giving up that control anytime soon, but let's go back to this notion of the shared vehicle showing up. One of my fellow organizers here gave me the concern that she has. What happens when that autonomous vehicle shows up and the last person that was in it vomited in the backseat? That experience is not going to be exceptional, and we know that this is also why public transportation is not widely accepted. Jeff, where do you want to go with this? Yeah, I'm really glad you brought up that point because I think this really highlights the problem of having a strong reliance on shared vehicle spaces. I can't imagine that these cars are going to be able to maintain the cleanliness levels that we expect and enjoy in our own vehicles, clearly much cleaner than something that you've just essentially pulled out of the pool, especially if you're trying to pay the least amount possible for transportation. I think people are just going to have to suck it up and deal with those unpleasantries, and I think bomb is just going to be the beginning of it. Rebottle? Go for it, Mike. So a couple of points about this. First of all, I wouldn't have such a terrible opinion of the human race in general. Just casually I chatted with my Lyft and Uber drivers and I just asked them, what's your experience with passengers? They said almost uniformly the experiences are either neutral or positive. The one exception is in the evening, when people get from bars, right, but that's precisely when you don't need to share the vehicle. The shared part is essential during commuting hours. When you have a lot of people going from the same point A to the same point D, that's when you want to put multiple people per car. When you're coming from bars, that's precise at the time when there is not that much traffic, so you can have one person per car and if they vomit, you just charge them for cleaning. Is that simple? Well, we call it Uber. How long does it take to get an Uber to wherever you are? Uber in January, so I call Lyfts. When you call Lyft, my favorite company, how long does it take a Lyft driver to ride where you are? Depends on the city. Depends how far out in the suburbs I am. I spend a lot of time in Palo Alto. I spend a lot of time in San Francisco. It can be anywhere from a few minutes to 15, 20 minutes plus. And it seems to take extra when you wait for the airport, right? Every time you need the airport, that's when they take a good 15 minutes. Aside from the airport, all of these experiences may be typical, but I've been using Lyft for a while now and the highest amount of time has been three minutes. The lowest has been under a minute and if that vomit car arrives, next, next, swipe left. Not right. So there's going to be lots of opportunities and really when you think about it is making a joke about my wife's car because she's one of the messiest people on the planet. So she wouldn't be in a Lyft driver, for example, but I have had some great experiences in Lyfts with really pleasant people, nice conversations, clean cars. They're often we mince in water, right? And that's not even in this new environment yet. So I think that we're going to have just an unbelievably pleasant environment for sharing vehicles in during those rush hour times that Mike's describing. And it's going to be just both a economy changing, but a mind changing event in our lifetime. And I'm excited by it. One quick response, then we'll go to another topic. Well, since I was asked, you know, but there was the reason the drivers tell you good stories is because they get downgraded and kicked up in that work if they tell you how they really feel about their passengers. So gentlemen, there's no drivers on autonomous. So there's no drivers. So that's exactly the point, right? Like the idea that you're just going to go car after car after car, that's extremely wasteful. That's exactly the kind of wasteful consumption that's going to hurt the environment is that you're just it's so cheap for you to cycle through these things. And then again, whether the robot is driving or the human is driving is not what's made us hesitant to not share. It's already cheaper for us to carpool. There is a network density that allows us to carpool. We choose not to do it for so many reasons. We pretend to sit in the car. So again, if you want to see what the future of autonomous vehicles looks like, look to the commuted urban center or to the gridlocked urban centers of Bangladesh or India, right? There are a lot of people can afford to have a personal driver, right? And it does all these amazing things for them. It has a great entertainment system inside, right? They could be easy to gridlock by sharing. It could be cheaper for them to do by sharing, but a massive number of the middle class there, and especially the higher class, has a full time 24 seven driver. We place that person with a robot. That's what we end up with here, right? Everybody can afford to sit in their car in gridlock, do nothing, and they're not sharing that vehicle, right? Like I have a robot that drives me around. I'm not sharing it. I'm sitting around here. And so again, shared connected autonomous mobility is exactly what that is, what that spells out scam SCAM. All right, let's, we only have about five or six minutes left. And I'd really like to try and get to a couple more topics, namely congestion, greenhouse gases, and safety. So it's left to be quick lightning round. It seems to me, autonomous vehicles, if they're going to be cheap, it's going to lead to more congestion. If it's going to be widely adopted, it needs to more congestion. If it's good for the environment, it's going to lead for more congestion. One way or another, another don't all roads point to more traffic and congestion. All right, let's hear from one each of you. Michael, go ahead. I'll take this one. So I think a very important element of the whole transportation system is going to the toll road, right? There's just no way around it. And if in Bangladesh, they have toll roads, then the problem would disappear. So right now, it's actually impractical to charge at all for every little segment of a road, right? Because if you think about the way we collect tolls right now, you need this giant infrastructure for every single segment, right? You need the gaze, you need the scanners. Once you have self-driving cars, introducing tolls becomes trivial because the car already knows where it's driving. So charging for all of those little segments becomes very easy. Now, you may worry about things like inequality that only the rich people are able to drive. And that's not going to be a major issue precisely because of sharing, right? So if it costs you $10 to go from A to B, and you share it with five other people, you only pay one sixth of that amount. And if you're really worried about things like inequality, you can just distribute commuting credits to the population. And then, you know, people can pay more for additional consumption, just like what we already do with electricity, where people pay lower rates for moderate amounts of consumption, but then they start paying much higher prices. You can do exactly the same thing with roads. Let's hear from Jeff. No, let's just hear from one each so we can get to these other topics. Jeff, more congestion. Michael, Michael, this is just going to increase the wealth inequality in this country and around the world. Because what essentially you're going to, what you've set up for is this is the way that people can save a lot of money if they don't have it. And they're going to be stuck in these crowded smelly cars that have to drop off for other people before they get their ride. And at the same time, it's encouraging them to use transportation more than they otherwise would. Meanwhile, somebody who can afford to have a nice cushy car for themselves with leather seats and an entertainment system and a workout track is going to be driving around this huge car, gasoline powered, I'm sure. And it's just going to add to our congestion and our CO2 emissions. All right, let's try safety. Cars are becoming safer and safer every year. I would assume that we would all agree autonomous vehicles will be safer, although I don't think the public yet is there. Can we agree? Will they be safer? Only in the end state. Want to explain? So maybe Point B will ultimately be safer once everything's autonomous and connected and there's these smart roads of tomorrow. But the point is autonomous vehicles will be deployed on the dumb roads in the dumb infrastructure of today. And when we start deploying these vehicles, even at scale, we're going to have a bunch of autonomous vehicles in a still and overwhelmingly human-centric driving environment and we're all wrong. We're not all better than average drivers. And so we're going to have a real issue there. And so and even if fatalities might be decreased, I think there's a real potential for sort of fender benders and another, you know, other sort of minor accidents, even if they're not high speed and fatal to actually increase. And so now then we have to ask the question, well, is that on balance better? Maybe because less people are dying, but there's going to be a lot more gridlock, right? We're going to end up in a situation where we have tons more minor accidents and maybe a few more severe and we have to ask ourselves, is that something we're willing to accept, right? And I don't know who in this room would volunteer to be the first person to get themselves inside a tiny efficient electric vehicle that's autonomous on a freeway that's driven by a bunch of those of us in SUVs, you know, distracted by our phones zipping all around. Well, we can find out other than Brian. Anybody willing to do that? Not too many. Brian, do you want to respond on this on the issue of safety? No. So following Jim, I'm going to answer a question you didn't ask. Okay. Really, I can't believe the other side would deny this technology, this ability for autonomous shared electric vehicles to senior citizens. How many senior citizens would raise your hand? Do you really believe this world's going to be worse off if you get an autonomous car? Really? This is really incredible. Well, there's one because he's a, he's a Luddite. But aside from that, at least you didn't accuse the pros of being Luddites. No, aside, not at all. Aside from that is that there are disabled, there are the blind, there are a whole spectrum of people in our society that's going to have a much more improved life from this revolutionary change. And so I can't believe that the other side would deny them that opportunity. They're going to clog our roadways. All right. One last question. Thank you, Mr. John. Then we're going to need to close. I think the audience would be interested in greenhouse gases. Make your best argument as to why AVs, autonomous vehicles are either good or bad for greenhouse gas reduction. I mean, so clearly all the arguments that we played out shows that they're going to be much larger amounts of greenhouse gases emitted from this autonomous vehicle network. They're going to be larger. They're not necessarily going to be driven on electricity. That electricity isn't going to be 100% green, by the way, either. And we're going to have a huge rebound effect, which is going to increase the total number of vehicle miles traveled by several fold. Absolutely. So vehicle miles traveled, that seems to be something they're putting their whole argument on today. And we view that as a positive, right? That means more economic activity, more people doing what they need to do, more goods being transported around. It just depends on how it happens. And we believe that technology, I mean, the iPhone, I mean, give me a break. The iPhone is fantastic. No one's going to give up the iPhone, and yet it's causing more deaths on our highway. That means that we're going to have to fix that, and we're going to fix that with autonomous drivers. Okay. This has been excellent, gentlemen. Let me ask you, is anyone willing to conceive some ground to the other side? Why should we? All right. I'm glad to see that none of you took the bait on that one. So now we're going to go on to closing remarks, remarks, two minutes each, beginning with the first proponent, and alternating back and forth to all four panels. So we'll go in the same order. Sure. Okay. Two minutes. All right. So again, this is not going to be a concession. But yeah, we could imagine a scenario where there are all sorts of assumptions like the previously politically infeasible in this country, road toll charging, or congestion charging, or making people forced to adopt electric vehicles, or all these other assumptions that we're making that there's no empirical support from history, we could end up in some rosy end state. But even if we do, there's no such thing as a free lunch. So all these wonderful benefits that could come, and I do believe autonomous vehicles have some legitimate problems. I've been an advocate for the industry, but they're not free. They come at a price, and the price we're going to have to pay is on the environmental side. It's going to come, as far as massively more use of electricity, or gasoline, probably more gasoline, it's going to come. Well, regardless of electricity, because of all the server farms in the back end, it's going to come as far as gridlock, it's going to come as far as congestion, it's going to come as far as sort of confusion between sort of who has the rights of way, people trying to drive around robots and vice versa. There's just going to be a really painful, really long transition period here. So even if we end up in a wonderful end state, we're not going to get a free lunch we never have. And if we try to convince ourselves that technology is going to allow us to get a free lunch and somehow save the environment while also becoming lazier and more consuming and all the rest of it. That's why it's never quite panned out. That's why technology never quite has been our savior, and that's why we always have to increase demand for a lot of luxury. So that's all I have. Thank you. Very good. Mike? All right. So I think it's actually a useful distinction to think about the transition period and the end state. And if you think about transitioning from horses to cars, I'm sure it was messy. But eventually we did transition to the state where horses are just used for recreation and cars are used everywhere. So that's what I want to think about. And I do want to think about the world where pretty much all the cars are self-driving. And I want to emphasize once more that safety is just an enormous, enormous and obvious benefit. And as a side remark, once cars are absolutely safe, they can actually be made much smaller and lighter because right now a huge part of the car is all the safety features of how to protect you when the car gets into an accident. If the car never gets into an accident, you don't need those features. They can be very light, much more efficient. If you intelligently use tolls, which are now much easier to charge, and intelligent car pooling, you can also eliminate traffic congestion, which would be another enormous benefit. And again, this is much easier to do with autonomous vehicles. Another point that came up on the late, but it's very, very important is accessibility. You have disabled people, you have elderly people, you have children. Suddenly all of them will be able to commute, whereas now they cannot. Another important point is parking. Again, huge parts of our surrounding areas, suburban areas, even urban areas, are devoted to parking. People spend a lot of time looking for parking. That issue is going to disappear, and we will be able to reuse those spaces much more productively. And putting all of this together, once you have a transportation system where you don't have congestion, you may commute with a bunch of other people, but getting from A to B always takes you the same amount of time, and it's a short amount of time. That's going to make the cities and suburbs much more connected, leading to a lot of extra economic activity, and a lot of wonderful things for both producers and consumers of various services. Thank you. So closing remarks from the probe, Jeff. Yes. Well, first of all, the idea that we're going to eventually get to this rosy end state where nobody has accidents and everybody's using these highly utilized vehicles, and everyone can afford to pay for transit, and yet it's as cheap and it's as low carbon emitting as possible is a complete fantasy. How are we going to be able to climb that hill? The transition is really just going to be a barrier that I don't think we're ever going to be able to climb over. You mentioned being able to expand transportation to allow other segments of society to commute. I think that that's great in some regards, but putting my children in a car all by themselves and letting them go off with a robot to God knows where they might change their location in the middle, that sounds like a really dangerous proposition. You know, we didn't mention this earlier, but the idea of having people tolerate much larger commutes could have a really negative secondary effect in basically being able to spread the housing crisis to the outlying suburbs and making it even affordable for somebody to live three hours away from the bay area because they can just do half of their day's work in the car the whole way. And so that just further drives the income inequality. We also didn't touch on the fact that if there are no people driving these cars in a few years time, the millions of drivers who currently benefit from ride sharing services around the world are going to be out of work. There's probably nothing else. They're not going to become programmers, you know, or mechanics maybe, but there's going to be a huge displacement of labor which is going to again sort of drive an income inequality gap that will grow. And finally, I guess I'll mention you'd mentioned connection to people, Michael, and how this technology is somehow going to get people more connected. I think people are going to be more isolated. Everybody's going to be sitting in their own autonomous vehicle. The only connection to the outside world is going to be through texting or through other online medium. You won't be able to ask the driver for any advice about where might be a good restaurant or be able to talk to other people because nobody's going to be sharing. And it's just going to be a very sad isolated future that I don't want to live in. At least there won't be vomit in the car. Thank you. Our purveyors of doom and gloom. Thank you all very much for your opposing comments. Brian goes last. How did I forget? I don't know. I don't know. I guess you thought that the other side didn't really need to have the pile on to their losing arguments. So look, for those of you that have ridden Caltrain recently up to the city, it is maxed. I mean, you can't even squeeze in the damn doors. So to say that people aren't going to share, even in that really not that pleasant environment, is crazy. They are. So I do think that things have changed. And for someone from Uber to not realize that change can happen pretty quickly is astounding for me. So that's now that you're advising Lyft, maybe you'll improve your point of view. And this idea, thank you for putting your foot right in the bear trap of it's going to kill jobs is that that is such a ridiculous argument that I probably shouldn't spend that much time on it, but Mike sent me a note saying, look, the truckers, we don't have enough truckers. So we really need to figure out a way to move goods with fewer drivers in this country. And so that is going to be an essential part of our economy going forward, regardless of what people do or don't do at 2 a.m. from the bar getting home in a self driving car. That is essential. And then for those of you that have a little bit of sense of history is they said when the automated teller machines came out that all of a sudden tellers, all the tellers would be out of jobs tomorrow. What happened? We have more tellers than we had before. We just have, well, can't say great service, but we have better service from the inside of a bank than we did before. And for those of you don't really want to talk to a teller, we have the automated machines. We have automated machines. We use them all the time. It's going to happen again. I can see the rest of my time. Now, gentlemen, thank you very much. Question is now, have they changed any minds? Who won the vote? Let's find out. Please take out your devices again and vote. Please read all the options to make sure you vote correctly. However, if you make a mistake, you can revote, resend your vote. Only one vote will be counted per person. And while the votes are being tallied, I have just a few logistical instructions for the next set of panels. They will begin at 1.10 p.m. If you're my mistake, there's too many buttons for me to press up here. Thank you very much. I'm so sorry. The next panel begins at 1.10. If you're moving to another room, I'd ask that you please clean up after yourself and remember to take your belongings. If you're not moving, you have a few minutes before the next panel begins in this room. Keep voting. I'm going to be closing the comments in a few moments. However, I'm going to go off script here for just a moment. On behalf of the organizing committee, the staff of the Precourt Energy Efficiency Center and the many volunteers that are here today, I'd like to add that I'm really grateful for an individual who makes this event so informative and so successful every year. The man behind the conference for the last 15, 16, 18, I forget how many years. The arbiter of all topics and speakers that are proposed by the organizing committee. The man who knows every one of the great speakers at Stanford who will say yes to his request to be here and the creator and organizer for today's lunch and debate. Please join me in thanking Dr. Jim Sweeney for this wonderful event. All right. Now panelists, you've done an excellent job. Win or lose. What do you say, audience? Please join me in thanking them for all their efforts, expertise, energy, and for being here today. All right. Now the results. I'm going to close the, close the voting. Okay. And display the results. It appears that most of you have held steadfast in your original opinions. However, some of you have changed your mind. And of course, this only shows up in percentages. But it looks as though the majority of changes were to the agree side from disagree or undecided. So I'm confused. Who's that? All right. It looks like the pros have won it. Thank you all very much.