If you have a job structuring and selling, marketing and monitoring/managing car insurance contracts, you should stop reading this now... because, Intel has developed the first set of algorithmic standards for self-driving vehicles that aim to ensure that any accident involving a self-driving vehicle cannot be blamed on the software that operates that vehicle.
How? Read some scant details here: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-10-18/intel-proposes-system-to-make-self-driving-cars-blameless.
What does this mean? If successful, regulating algorithmic standards, most likely more advanced than the one developed by Intel, will mean that self-driving vehicles collision will be by system definition blamed only on human drivers, bicyclists and pedestrians. Which will, de facto, perfectly standardise all insurance contracts covering vehicles other than those operated by people. The result will be rapid collapse in demand for car insurance as we know it.
Instead of writing singular (albeit standardised) contracts to cover individual drivers (or vehicles driven by them), using actuarial risk models that attempt to identify risk profiles of these drivers, insurance industry will be simply writing a single contract to cover software running millions of vehicles, plus a standard contract to cover the vehicle (hardware). There will be no room left for profit margins or for service / contract differentiation or for pricing variation or for bundling of offers. In other words, there will be no need for all the numerous marketing, sales, investigative, enforcement, actuarial etc jobs currently populating the insurance industry. Car insurance sector will simply shrink to a duopoly (or proximate) providing cash management service to autonomous vehicles owners.
There will be lots of armchair-surfing for currently employable insurance industry specialists in the near future...
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