There is a very real danger when using a smartphone today that you might run someone over or crash into another vehicle. Just think about all the time we could be spending on our devices if we weren’t distracted by having to drive a car at the same time?

Let’s face it, a lot of Australians get more pleasure from their devices than they do from being stuck in traffic. So amongst the many arguments in favour of driverless vehicles, the emancipation of commute time could prove to be one of the most compelling.

But what will we do with all these regained minutes? And who will provide the services that we chose to consume?

Occaisionally my editor at CMO.com.au lets me of the leash and I get to write stories that take a longer and and more obtuse view of the world of marketing, such as this one, where I looked into the long term implications of driverless vehicles and what they might mean from a service provision perspective. It threw up a number of interesting concepts, including whether many of us will actually chose to own vehicles in the future, and which companies will be most important to us – the car makers, the mobilty service providers, or those companies that create the services we consume whilst on the road.

The story itself is actually an output from a much larger ongoing study into the impact of automation on the workforce (particulary the impact on regional Australian economies that might stem from the advent of driverless trucks), and has become a key point in my presentations on the Law of Unintended Consequences.