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Think bigger. "Driverless cars" are a technology that moves atoms without the need for people, a lot like how we move bits around today. There are innumerable

• jackvalentine 3y ago
  > we unlock whole new ways of living Please speculate on what some of these ‘whole new ways of living’ might be. I’m struggling to picture it.
  • pests 3y ago
    You're house could be mobile and drive itself to new locations every night while you sleep. You wake up in a new location every morning to a new sunset. I meant this to be sarcastic because we already have this with campers and RV's - but it does sound kind of cool on second thought. Pointless, but cool.
    • uoaei 3y ago
      > Pointless, but cool. Lovely turn of phrase to describe a whole swath of "why shouldn't this make money" startup ideas. If your goal is revenue, maybe don't base your entire marketing strategy on people with disposable income and decent financial literacy, because once an economic lull hits you're going to be stranded with a whole lot of responsibilities and a huge drop in income. I keep thinking back to Jupe[1], and how YC actually put their money behind it, as a synecdoche of the absurd and surreal decade we've had with all that money flying around. Some people got very rich on a wish and a promise -- maybe some think that's laudable, I think it's sociopathic. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37886420 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37886420
  • johndevor 3y ago
    Kids can go to friends' houses when they please... Making suburbia kid friendly.
    • jackvalentine 3y ago
      The world I lived in was kid friendly when I grew up and there weren’t self-driving cars. There were just fewer cars. We can achieve that again with sane urban planning.
  • npunt 3y ago
    Rebuilding the tribe. We have divided ourselves into neat little nuclear family boxes and thrown ourselves together with a bunch of other randos in neat little boxes, with the unstated assumption that the family unit is the end all be all of human lived experience. This has separated us from our physical (atom-based) communities, to many ill effects including our friends and extended family being further away. This makes having and raising families more difficult than it should be, as we work rando jobs in order to hire rando nannies to do the job that a community otherwise would. A lot of this comes down to proximity, and available space for people to group up in spaces larger than apartments or single family homes. We've simply lost a part of our daily lived connection to our close community, and being connected to them via only bits is a poor substitute. When atoms and bits are easy to move around, we have the best of both worlds, pushing the frontier out for having a community experience and having the positive aspects of what we have today.
    • tuatoru 3y ago
      This reads like utterly history-blind fantasy. You need to explain why all the other times and ways we have tried what you propose did not work, and what will be different this time. Start, perhaps, with "The Tyranny of Structurelessness".
      • npunt 3y ago
        Sorry can you be more specific? Humans have lived on and off in community structures throughout history, we evolved as social creatures in these structures. We're proximally further away from these structures in the present time, which has brought up the issues I mentioned. Among other things, a means of allowing proximity to be less of a factor allows us to explore different sized dwellings due to a greater area of possible land within proximity to us, which allow for a broader range of different sized social units, which allows for some relief of those issues as people can choose to live in more ways according to their preference (e.g. community/kibbutz, loose structure of friends nearby, big family nearby, nuclear family, anonymous in city). You can literally break it down to a tradeoff of cubic meters of space for a social unit vs time/effort it takes to get to things you want. If you want a commune of X families and a convenience store within Y mins, more efficient transport makes those numbers, on average, work better for people. Maybe it's 60 minutes out of town for 5 families to get together, but only 15 minutes for 3 families, based on ease of getting shared property at a reasonable cost. Do you see where I'm going with this? If you wanted to go further you could say ease of moving atoms lets you even rethink aspects of dwellings (why we cache food in a fridge, instead of having what we need dropped off to us in a few minutes) and notions of community property (a 'tool/whatever share' program among an opt-in group), and ultimately how we pick what infrastructure serves whom. Lots and lots of implications to unpack when we move atoms around more cheaply, and many of these ideas unlock with small changes. See apps/services that only work economically in cities but not suburbs for a modern example. Not sure how this relates to The Tyranny of Structurelessness, maybe you're assuming I meant something that I didn't?
  • Raidion 3y ago
    I mean, a ton of people spend time driving, freeing that time would be huge efficiencies. Not to mention that it would mean cars can be shared between people, hugely reducing cost of operation and greenhouse emissions. Parking areas are reduced and put farther away from city centers, freeing land. If cars learn to share the road with us, they can also used optimized lanes and traffic patterns, speeding up commutes and reducing accidents. Like it's not any one thing, but a self driving car really changes a lot of things about how cities and transport are designed. Interesting thing is that it's harder to have a self driving car now than it would be in 20 years, because as they get closer and closer, the roads are going to adapt to them.
    • jackvalentine 3y ago
      Nothing you’ve described is a new way of living though.
• verve_rat 3y ago
  So, trains?
  • npunt 3y ago
    Think smaller. Trains are enormous, costly, and extremely inflexible to changes in demand. Have you ever seen a train car small enough to only carry a single person? The existence of 4000lb cars and 200000lb trains is because we lacked the ability to quickly and safely move only the necessary atoms from A to B, so we had to bundle them up with a ton of other atoms until it became practical to implement. We can free ourselves from this constraint.
    • danny_codes 3y ago
      Eh, this is a silly take. Almost all trips are going to a few destinations. Work, Home, Shopping, Schools, etc. A sanely designed city would just build transit to those places. Self-driving cars are solving an unnecessary problem, if that makes sense. US made some truly terrible design decisions, and self-driving is sort-of doubling down on the disaster.
      • npunt 3y ago
        Where I think we agree is that cars mostly suck for cities, and cars that get self-driving tech tacked onto them doesn't solve most of the fundamental issues with cars as we know them today. I think the question here is what is a practical roadmap to building better cities with the ones we've got? An extreme distillation of my pov is: roads&rubber wheels > rails&metal wheels. I believe roads&rubber are just far better for A-B transport by so many measures, but most importantly that it is an extremely flexible connective tissue because it can be incrementally and cheaply added to or changed. We can make the big, slow, expensive changes to add rail, and that may (mostly) work (for some), but it is extremely unlikely to happen at scale because it essentially means upending how car-centric cities are designed using top-down process or fiat. Meanwhile cities are living breathing things pulled in many directions by many forces. The question is whether those forces can be harnessed to bring cities toward what we want them to be. I think roads&rubber do that better, because they allow bottom-up, rapid incremental change that shares costs with citizens (by way of vehicles) and does not require anywhere near the level of commitment or consensus that rail does. I think it's reasonable to assume that if self-driving tech starts showing up in 10 years, that in 30 years we'll begin to see several changes that push us towards our goals for cities: * There will be cities that require only self-driving cars in city limits, which will begin the alteration of the rules of traffic flow, since rules can be reprogrammed instantly * product (car ownership) will give way to utility as all tech does over time * There will be roads that will be converted to mixed use (parklets, mini-parks, bike lanes, walking) and be limited to only smaller micromobility-like vehicles. An early version of this is SF's 'slow cities' streets in each neighborhood that have been cut off to (most) cars. * Max size requirements & road size changes will start to be palatable, with roads being recaptured, property lines & zoning shifting, etc. * longer commutes/travel would use (larger) vehicle types that specialize in long distance comfort whereas short commutes would use (smaller) vehicles that have higher throughput in high density areas. And more. This is the kind of payoff we'd start getting by investing in self-driving tech today. And these are things that can be done in a lazy and politically simple way, making changes only as they make sense in the moment, not on long planning schedules and anticipations of ridership and population proximity in 25 years. I doubt that in the same ~30 year span that you could get most cities to install more than a few light rail corridors, and they'd probably not have sufficient throughput and frequent enough stops. We'd have to get like 5-10x better/faster at big infrastructure projects including politically challenging things like eminent domain to get comparable results. LA metro is a good example: remember the metro construction scene at the end of the movie Speed? That was 30 years ago, and in that time metro has eased maybe ~5% of total traffic and you still absolutely need a car to get around LA. How do we get the other 95%? The ideal answer in my mind is neither cars nor rail, but a system that operates a lot like rail but flexibly sized and individualized, and using the basic roads&rubber approach of cars.
• appplication 3y ago
  I think you’re absolutely right. But while we’re daydreaming about the future, I think it’s more likely we’re going to irreversibly fuck the planet well before we realize beautiful technological utopia. And if fucking the planet doesn’t kill (all of) is, it’s going to leave us irreversibly broken. Inequality will reach staggering levels. Further advances will not be for the benefit of all, but the enrichment of the few. The technologically enabled cities of 100 years from now are not beautifully interconnected reorganized and optimized. They will be literal fortified pockets of safety - gated neighborhoods with autonomous access control. Those living here spend most days completely within the walls. These pockets are surrounded and vastly outnumbered by slums. Ones whose inhabitants have neither inter-generational wealth nor the means to accumulate even a fraction of what it would take to rise beyond their lot. The labor market has long ago dried up with the onset of more efficient and profitable automation. The inhabitants here are the first to bear the brunt of climate-induced emergencies. Hundreds of thousands regularly die at once as bouts of famine, disease, and natural disasters strike with increasing frequency. These people subside exclusively on the regular allotment of their sovereign governance. And not all of the governments of the world are quite so motivated to maintain a standard of living. Much of Asia and Eastern Europe has largely unified under or become a puppet state to a single authoritarian state. The European Union has condensed westward and hardened, closing off borders in an attempt to maintain sovereignty amid influx of climate refugees. The United States is an aggressive corporate republic, under which the only legislation to pass in decades is related to military spending, border security, and population monitoring in the name of antiterrorism. Policy is now largely decided in the courts, which corporations have found is the shortest path to pushing their agenda, and also the most reliably fruitful, given enough lawyers and money. Parts of the Middle East are permanently uninhabitable, and the bits of the Amazon that have not been clear cut are now beginning to succumb to changing climate forces. Sea level has risen considerably, and pacific island and Caribbean nations have been all but wiped out, as their governments realized it no longer made sense to rebuild year after year. Those living in the slums have access to sophisticated VR/AR technology at affordable rates, even compare to their minimal dole and the informal barter/trade economy that has redeveloped. They create as much content as they consume, in an effort to find some foothold they can capitalize on and create wages. We vastly underestimate the effectiveness of warfare. Highly mobile drones will be able of surgically eliminate threats in seconds. Direct conflict is rare and pointless. Nation states will focus their efforts on undermining infrastructure of their enemies, or isolating entirely. Information warfare will no longer exist to a meaningful degree because the nations themselves will have near unrestricted control over the information their populace consumes. The military and police will have blurred or fully merged in most governments. Revolts will be put down with ease and erased from public memory. Education is perhaps perplexingly accessible, to a point. AI tutors work one on one with students, who now are considered anyone under the age of 25. The entrenched elite have access to private cutting edge versions of the same, and if you know the right people you may be able to send your children to a Luddite school, where children learn from physical books and corporeal teachers.
• ponderings 3y ago
  After all cars are driver-less comes tanks, artillery and "suicide" vehicles. What have drivers done anyway to deserve all this attention? Why try to automate something that involves killing people on-error? It seems any other occupation would be an easier more sensible more realistic target.