Laws are written and designed for humans who constantly try to push it to the limit and get away with things. These cars are all over the place and I've been caught stuck on a street in Bernal Heights because it couldn't quite fit and just froze in place. I had to back out of the street because there wasn't any room for me to go around it.
Yes it may be following laws to the letter, but not only was I grumpy about having to carefully back out of a street, there wasn't any way to communicate with the car. It doesn't have any feedback mechanism for me, so it just looks like a confused dead robot in the middle of the street.
I think Waymo and Cruise are both happily working on hard problems in this space with limitless VC funding (or daddy GM money) thrown their way. So I support their efforts, because at the very least, they'll enrich our understanding of self-driving cars even if it were to fail in the marketplace long term.
I'm curious how profitable it will be in practice once the VC money dries up. Paying half a million dollar salaries to employees who need to keep these things up to date adds up. That, on top of hardware costs for precise sensors that will fail fast in harsh weather conditions. On top of normal wear and tear of people in and out of the cars all day for cars that won't need down time.
Lastly, I'll end my thoughts with this... why are we obsessed with the idea of self driving cars anyway?! What human problem does this solve? I am 100% on board with building autonomous cruise-control for my own car, so I'm not against the tech. I just find the taxi angle to be weird. All I see so far in my mind is a product that just takes away an entire class of job opportunities with no actual gain.
We can drive people and goods around without having a human waste his time driving stuff around.
Not wasting money paying people to do stupid stuff is gigantic gain.
The person the tech is replacing will still need to work and earn a wage to afford the goods the system that replaced them is delivering. It's not replacing a relatively high risk job or allowing that driver to scale themselves and improve their efficiency in any way. It's just eliminating their job, because.
As a passenger in a driverless taxi, instead of having someone in the car who might improve the journey slightly by being an interesting person to chat with, I'll likely sit in the car all alone. Worse, I'll probably be shoved ads in my face. So, this new taxi doesn't really add anything new of value to me as a consumer.
I know automated systems have replaced all kinds of jobs, and the closest analogy I can think of is self-check out lines at grocery stores, or ATM machines before that. However, those actually did free up cashiers so they could wander the store and help out in other ways, or restock, or funny enough, help someone self-check out.
Taxis are kind of an island to themselves, and not only will this impact the driver who won't have anything related to jump to, it will hurt the businesses who rely on drivers waiting for the next passenger. Then there's the urban centers these cars are zipping around in. These cars have no employee to generate business tax revenue from, so the cars are consuming infrastructure for no benefit to the cities.
Anyway, thanks for reading my random thoughts. I'm sure things will balance out in the end, but if you work in the industry and have some cool insights, feel free to share.
> As a passenger in a driverless taxi, instead of having someone in the car who might improve the journey slightly by being an interesting person to chat with, I'll likely sit in the car all alone.
This sounds like a feature to me. Include a minibar and it’ll be my own personal limo.
Isn’t the gain that those folks can find another job that’s more useful?
What makes you think that if finding another job that they are capable of doing was so easy they wouldn't have already done so? Because they were waiting for some tech billionaire to throw them on the unemployment line?
No, they wouldn't have already done so, because their current job still exists and it's easier to maintain the status quo.
Major structural employment changes don't happen overnight. This will take decades. AVs will decrease the demand for Uber drivers, but it doesn't mean they will all be out of a job overnight, just that incentives will slowly push workers towards other jobs.
Uber and Lyft kind of did shutdown the taxi cartels across the world in one big grassroots swing.
It took insane levels of lobbying and political power of taxis to keep a hold on some of their biggest cities, and there are now few places where non-uber/lyft style systems are still in place.
If AI taxi's are cheaper and more convenient, there's no way they won't just completely replace human taxi drivers. Cruise and Waymo have huge incentives to undercut whatever Uber would try to do. So I don't share your optimism that it will happen slowly over decades. If this self-driving system is easily repeatable elsewhere, it will likely be fast and swift.
It's easier to maintain the status quo, but there is also job enjoyment.
I am neither a deliverator nor a cab driver, but I do enjoy driving. When the org I work for needs stuff transported, I often volunteer for the task. Driving in silence, or to music, or while listening to podcast; for work, for recreation, or merely to enjoy the drive; it's all good. Of course, I also live in an area close to mountains and while going toward the city nearby is hell due to traffic, going toward the mountains is blissful and beautiful.
Yes it may be following laws to the letter, but not only was I grumpy about having to carefully back out of a street, there wasn't any way to communicate with the car. It doesn't have any feedback mechanism for me, so it just looks like a confused dead robot in the middle of the street.
I think Waymo and Cruise are both happily working on hard problems in this space with limitless VC funding (or daddy GM money) thrown their way. So I support their efforts, because at the very least, they'll enrich our understanding of self-driving cars even if it were to fail in the marketplace long term.
I'm curious how profitable it will be in practice once the VC money dries up. Paying half a million dollar salaries to employees who need to keep these things up to date adds up. That, on top of hardware costs for precise sensors that will fail fast in harsh weather conditions. On top of normal wear and tear of people in and out of the cars all day for cars that won't need down time.
Lastly, I'll end my thoughts with this... why are we obsessed with the idea of self driving cars anyway?! What human problem does this solve? I am 100% on board with building autonomous cruise-control for my own car, so I'm not against the tech. I just find the taxi angle to be weird. All I see so far in my mind is a product that just takes away an entire class of job opportunities with no actual gain.