write a summary

Read the passage given titled Roadblocks to the Future, written by Iyad Rahwan, and write a summary in one paragraph of 100-150 words.

It is easy to get caught up in the fetishized vision we often seem to share of the future: A clean, sparkly place where sleekly clad people glide in and out of silent, pod-like cars that cruise the city like tireless cabbies crossed with faithful robot dogs. But while a few are living the preview of that life now, and more will in the near- and medium-term future, fully autonomous self-driving cars are much further away than most people think, at least for private ownership. (Paragraph 1) Looking around today, Tesla Motors is the most valuable carmaker in the world, and it is not because it is wildly profitable, or even profitable at all. It is because investors are betting on the future, and they think the future will be electric and autonomous. They're not alone. Although it took a while for the industry to take the upstart company seriously, other carmakers like Honda, Nissan, Toyota, Ford, and Volkswagen all have self-driving programs in the works, too. (Paragraph 2) But right now, the question of who will end up a winner in the self-driving car race isn't about the companies that will bring it into being. It's about the rest of usthose who'll have to live with the results. Right now, some form of self-driving is available on a lot of carsbut only new cars, and even then, the best features are reserved for the most expensive models, with self-driving features often costing thousands of dollars on top of the price of an already expensive new car. (Paragraph 3) The high cost of entry to the self-driving world is what's limiting the distribution at present. But as the technology matures and supporting sensor and computing technologies gain more widespread use in other industries, the infrastructure necessary to bring down costs for Level 1 and Level 2 self-driving (similar to Tesla's current Autopilot implementation) is already coming online, promising to put the cost of such systems within the reach of more buyers. (Paragraph 4) However, more buyers does not mean all buyers. There's already a "digital divide" in countries like America; a digital divide is a phrase that describes the disparate distribution of the future in the present: According to Pew, nearly one-third of American adults with household incomes of less than $30,000 per year don't own a smartphone, and only a little more than half of them own a desktop or laptop computer. Contrast those figures with 97 percent smartphone ownership and 94 percent desktop or laptop ownership among households with $100,000 or more in annual income. As the technology we use to work, live, and move about in our daily lives becomes more and more expensive, that divide only gets broader. Self-driving (or semi-self-driving) cars are among the most expensive of consumer technologies. (Paragraph 5) Before we get to personal, fully self-driving (Level 5) vehicles, we'll have fleets of automated taxis, or trundling lines of self-driving shuttles on campuses and at sporting events, or you might even ride a self-driving bus from your company's remote parking lot into work. But in doing so, we could see hundreds of thousands of those who drive for a living lose their jobsand that's before

we look at the freight and delivery industry. (Do note the Bureau of Labor Statistics forecast in the linked data highlighting a "much faster than average" 20 percent rate of growth for the taxi-driving, ride-hailing, and chauffeur fields through 2028the BLS clearly doesn't think self-driving cars will be hitting the streets in any significant form before the decade is out.) (Paragraph 6) Moreover, a big part of the problem with cars, and the enjoyment of cars, is not that real people drive them, it's that they're everywhere. Roads, highways, freeways, interstates, parking lots, parking garages, parking decks, driveways, home garageseverywhere. In the glibly titled " Crowdsourced Quantification and Visualization of Urban Mobility Space Inequality ," by Michael Szell, a mobility and sustainable transport researcher currently at ITU Copenhagen, published in the journal Urban Planning, the "spatial inefficiency" of cars is made clear: even in an extremely car- centric city like Los Angeles, considerably more space is allocated to car use than is actually used, as a percentage of the share of the mode of transport, when compared to other modes like rail or bicycle. (Paragraph 7) As a result, transportation in car-centric cities is less efficientand traffic is worsethan it could be if we relinquished some of the car's dominance in our city planning to make more space for rail, bicycle, and even pedestrian traffic. Instead, our cities have been defined or redefined by the car in their layouts, their suburbs, and their traffic corridors. What the car made possible became the unwritten law of the land, and we've now sunk so much into the automotive infrastructure that we can't see any alternative. By the way we've built and remodeled our cities, we've made driving a miserable experience, so we're looking to hand the misery off to a machine. (Paragraph 8) For those lucky enough to be able to do so, life will surely improveimagine all the free time!but for the rest of us, as more space gets cordoned off for the use of self-driving cars, life may actually get worse, and not just because we have to watch the future happening all around us, forever just out of reach. (Paragraph 9)