Getting from here to there Joseph Coughlin
As spring gives way to summer and the country emerges from the coronavirus pandemic, with nearly two-thirds of adults having received at least one dose of a COVID-19 vaccine, Americans are eager for safe interactions beyond the confines of their households. To those who study how we live as we grow older, this drive for in-person connection offers a hint to a longstanding question: Can elder loneliness be solved with screens and virtual reality headsets alone? The answer is no. Video calls are a good social stopgap, but sooner or later most people need the real thing.
The pandemic has led to huge changes in the way people live and work. The emergence of self-driving vehicles technology could also mean a similar shift in the way they travel by car or bus, experts at a University of Maine forum said last week.
The emergence of self-driving vehicles could get a boost from lessons learned during the pandemic, according to a panel discussion held by UMaine s Virtual Environments and Multimodal Interaction Laboratory, or VEMI Lab.
Digital technology has already allowed people to choose new homes and types of work during the pandemic, said Jonathan Rubin, director of Maine’s Margaret Chase Smith Policy Center. To the extent that autonomous vehicles save time a major cost to getting around it’s reasonable to think they ll have the same impact on those choices.
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