Alright dear readers – it’s Wednesday, and I have a question for you: how much is your time worth?  More specifically, your commute time.

How much would you pay to have your commute time turned into productive time: more sleep, catching up on more work, or just leisurely pursuit of fun activities before and after starting work?

Your humble blogger has eagerly monitored the progress of self-driving cars, and, recently the DMV has issued regulations for “testing of autonomous vehicles”.  Time being precious, I didn’t go through all the regulations, but the section 227.02(a) has a pretty cool definition of “autonomous mode”: “the status of vehicle operation where technology … performs the dynamic driving task, with or without a natural person actively supervising…”

The DMV is requiring permits and proof of a $5 million insurance policy.  There are a whole bunch of other requirements for autonomous permits, but this is really, really, really cool.

We’re moving closer to having self-driving cars, and the impact on our industry is going to be HUGE.

Have you seen bills for transportation costs for getting injured workers to and from appointments?  Well how much cheaper is it going to be when there is no need to pay for a driver, just an autonomous car to pick up and drop off the injured worker?

How much more productive will everyone be, especially in urban areas, when we can work our files during the drive to work instead of, you know, driving?

How much will the quality of life improve for the disabled, the infirm, the old, the blind when they no longer need to operate a car to get to medical appointments or grocery shopping?

Naturally, your humble blogger is very excited for the potential this progress has for all of us.  Here’s hoping progress continues to move forward.