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Am I the only one finding it hard to be excited for this? It seems like automated taxis: 0. Encourage the use of cars in cities rather than public transit & wa

Am I the only one finding it hard to be excited for this? It seems like automated taxis: 0. Encourage the use of cars in cities rather than public transit & walkability. 1. Centralize wealth by replacing payments to many drivers with payments to one large company. 2. Allow for further surveillance of individuates. It seems likely that Google will eventually create ad inventory by adding screens to the cars and incorporate travel history into peoples marketing profiles.

lr4444lr 3y ago
My wife lost 2 close relatives to accidental vehicular death. She's thrilled.
- zemvpferreira 3y ago
  Hear hear. Anything that replaces humans at the wheel is a fantastic thing in my book. Road traffic injuries kill close to 1.5 million people every year. The sooner we can have robocars and robobikes replace all driving, the better. I don't care how much privacy that erodes in the short term.
  - harambae 3y ago
    >and robobikes Is anyone currently doing this? I’ve seen proof of concepts for racing in motogp or something, but didn’t realized autonomous motorcycles was a thing outside the racetrack.
belligeront 3y ago
I also believe they will increase congestion in cities since when occupants switch from drivers to riders, they are less affected by the costs of road congestion (congested roads may mean riders get to their destinations slower, but because they are no longer driving, people may make extra trips where previously they would say "I don't want to make that trip now because driving during rush hour is too stressful"). But the public will face negative externalities of greater congestion (noise, pollution, slower travel times for busses & walking). Without congestion pricing and right of ways for bikes, walking, and transit, automated taxis seem like a way to double down on a space inefficient mode of travel.
conjecTech 3y ago
I'm a big urbanist (that also worked on AVs for a couple years), haven't owned a car for almost all of my adult life, and view it as a step in the right direction for a few reasons. 1 - I think the impact of parking is actually more insidious and detrimental than roads by themselves. AVs will have high utilization of a much smaller pool of vehicles and remove the need for the huge parking lots we currently have. The land-use issues from parking are perhaps the largest impediment (together with the requirements/zoning) to the density which would allow transit to outcompete private cars. 2 - The centralization of wealth is one thing, but the real economies of fewer, newer vehicles will be a boon for almost everyone. The cost of the automobile operation is about 1/4 of the average uber fare. That is a lot of room for price compression. Perhaps more will be going to a large corporation, but there will be a huge consumer surplus as well. 3 - The reduction in the size of the car fleet will likely reduce the lobbying power of the automobile industry, which may in turn lead to changes to the urban environment(bike lanes, transit expansions) which will likely shift mode share away from cars.
- froidpink 3y ago
  Wouldn't the reduction in cost of rides vs Uber create massive demand for self-driving car rides, increasing congestion?
  - conjecTech 3y ago
    There will definitely be induced demand. Most people don't just choose travel mode based on cost though. Travel time/convenience is the biggest factor, and AVs will probably not improve those significantly. The reality is that walking/biking/transit aren't competitive in terms of convenience in most US cities right now. If taking the train is faster than driving, people will do it. That is the fundamental issue that needs to be fixed to allow other options to be successful, and I view killing people's obsession with parking as the largest step in that direction.
w______roy 3y ago
Especially [1]. So many millions of American jobs are driving. Rideshare drivers, sure, but taxi drivers, couriers, delivery drivers, truckers, etc. The economic incentive to switch to driverless tech will be really strong, more than white collar AI automation, I think. So... what's the plan? That these drivers will all live in a hellscape where robot cars patrol their streets, surveilling them as they struggle against poverty?
kick_in_the_dor 3y ago
I feel like this is such a HackerNews take. Headline: Self-driving cars are actually a thing! "Yeah so here's why that's not very exciting and actually bad."
- ChadNauseam 3y ago
  I can't think of a single technology other than relational databases that Hacker News actually likes. Nothing invented after 2000 certainly. Cell phones give everyone depression, LLMs are just stochastic parrots, crypto is just a scam, Uber is just an expensive unregulated taxi, AirBnb is just an expensive unregulated hotel, self driving cars are just going to lead to centralization of wealth and congestion, every new browser feature is just another way for websites to fingerprint you, discord isn't an improvement over IRC and makes everything ungooglable, also google sucks now, also they kill every product 6 months after launch, fusion is 20 years away just like it was 20 years ago, electron makes everything slow because devs these days are too lazy to write native apps, Github is just Microsoft applying EEE to open source, WSL is just Microsoft applying EEE to Linux. I don't see why everything needs to be so terrible all the time.
  - alephnerd 3y ago
    According to HN, every app in the world could be supported by a single ARM EPYC server with a SQLite backend and some weird WASM magic.
knallfrosch 3y ago
0. Car use isn't actually bad, it not using cars that gobbles up space. Half of the car street space is wasted on cars that aren't in use - known as "parking." 1. Agree. But Taxi drivers are a relict of the past already. You can drive your own car and need no navigation skills. It's called Uber and it sucks hard already. Nothing much of value lost here (most of the economic value is captured by Uber anyway.)
cwoolfe 3y ago
On point #1: These large companies are publicly traded on the stock market and you are welcome to profit alongside them as they grow. I earned more from amazon stock than I've spent on amazon. I earned more from Tesla stock than it costs to buy a new Tesla.

lr4444lr 3y ago

My wife lost 2 close relatives to accidental vehicular death. She's thrilled.

zemvpferreira 3y ago
Hear hear. Anything that replaces humans at the wheel is a fantastic thing in my book. Road traffic injuries kill close to 1.5 million people every year. The sooner we can have robocars and robobikes replace all driving, the better. I don't care how much privacy that erodes in the short term.
- harambae 3y ago
  >and robobikes Is anyone currently doing this? I’ve seen proof of concepts for racing in motogp or something, but didn’t realized autonomous motorcycles was a thing outside the racetrack.

belligeront 3y ago

I also believe they will increase congestion in cities since when occupants switch from drivers to riders, they are less affected by the costs of road congestion (congested roads may mean riders get to their destinations slower, but because they are no longer driving, people may make extra trips where previously they would say "I don't want to make that trip now because driving during rush hour is too stressful"). But the public will face negative externalities of greater congestion (noise, pollution, slower travel times for busses & walking). Without congestion pricing and right of ways for bikes, walking, and transit, automated taxis seem like a way to double down on a space inefficient mode of travel.

conjecTech 3y ago

I'm a big urbanist (that also worked on AVs for a couple years), haven't owned a car for almost all of my adult life, and view it as a step in the right direction for a few reasons. 1 - I think the impact of parking is actually more insidious and detrimental than roads by themselves. AVs will have high utilization of a much smaller pool of vehicles and remove the need for the huge parking lots we currently have. The land-use issues from parking are perhaps the largest impediment (together with the requirements/zoning) to the density which would allow transit to outcompete private cars. 2 - The centralization of wealth is one thing, but the real economies of fewer, newer vehicles will be a boon for almost everyone. The cost of the automobile operation is about 1/4 of the average uber fare. That is a lot of room for price compression. Perhaps more will be going to a large corporation, but there will be a huge consumer surplus as well. 3 - The reduction in the size of the car fleet will likely reduce the lobbying power of the automobile industry, which may in turn lead to changes to the urban environment(bike lanes, transit expansions) which will likely shift mode share away from cars.

froidpink 3y ago
Wouldn't the reduction in cost of rides vs Uber create massive demand for self-driving car rides, increasing congestion?
- conjecTech 3y ago
  There will definitely be induced demand. Most people don't just choose travel mode based on cost though. Travel time/convenience is the biggest factor, and AVs will probably not improve those significantly. The reality is that walking/biking/transit aren't competitive in terms of convenience in most US cities right now. If taking the train is faster than driving, people will do it. That is the fundamental issue that needs to be fixed to allow other options to be successful, and I view killing people's obsession with parking as the largest step in that direction.

w______roy 3y ago

Especially [1]. So many millions of American jobs are driving. Rideshare drivers, sure, but taxi drivers, couriers, delivery drivers, truckers, etc. The economic incentive to switch to driverless tech will be really strong, more than white collar AI automation, I think. So... what's the plan? That these drivers will all live in a hellscape where robot cars patrol their streets, surveilling them as they struggle against poverty?

kick_in_the_dor 3y ago

I feel like this is such a HackerNews take. Headline: Self-driving cars are actually a thing! "Yeah so here's why that's not very exciting and actually bad."

ChadNauseam 3y ago
I can't think of a single technology other than relational databases that Hacker News actually likes. Nothing invented after 2000 certainly. Cell phones give everyone depression, LLMs are just stochastic parrots, crypto is just a scam, Uber is just an expensive unregulated taxi, AirBnb is just an expensive unregulated hotel, self driving cars are just going to lead to centralization of wealth and congestion, every new browser feature is just another way for websites to fingerprint you, discord isn't an improvement over IRC and makes everything ungooglable, also google sucks now, also they kill every product 6 months after launch, fusion is 20 years away just like it was 20 years ago, electron makes everything slow because devs these days are too lazy to write native apps, Github is just Microsoft applying EEE to open source, WSL is just Microsoft applying EEE to Linux. I don't see why everything needs to be so terrible all the time.
- alephnerd 3y ago
  According to HN, every app in the world could be supported by a single ARM EPYC server with a SQLite backend and some weird WASM magic.

knallfrosch 3y ago

0. Car use isn't actually bad, it not using cars that gobbles up space. Half of the car street space is wasted on cars that aren't in use - known as "parking." 1. Agree. But Taxi drivers are a relict of the past already. You can drive your own car and need no navigation skills. It's called Uber and it sucks hard already. Nothing much of value lost here (most of the economic value is captured by Uber anyway.)

cwoolfe 3y ago

On point #1: These large companies are publicly traded on the stock market and you are welcome to profit alongside them as they grow. I earned more from amazon stock than I've spent on amazon. I earned more from Tesla stock than it costs to buy a new Tesla.