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The takeaway isn't the demographics of the audience, it's that we should probably focus less on personal transportation in the form of cars, focus more on mass

The takeaway isn't the demographics of the audience, it's that we should probably focus less on personal transportation in the form of cars, focus more on mass public transport infrastructure, and encouraging people to work remotely whenever possible. There's precious little point in RTO to sit at a computer in a different room and still take Microsoft Teams meetings instead of going to the boardroom. It just represents wasted energy. We need to use less energy, not more. Perhaps self-driving cars are a waste of brainpower in the long-term? If people don't actually want to drive in 2024, perhaps don't get a car, take public transport, hire a chauffeur, and/or work remotely. Self-driving largely seems like a half-baked solution in search of a problem. Self-driving should really be a lot like self-hosting—do it yourself. That's just my two penneth though, and I can come up with exceptions, edge cases et cetera all day long too. There's no binary right or wrong with it, and there's trade-offs to everything. Was only thinking earlier that if we should be using less juice, why are we adding AI gimmicks to consumer gadgets? I'd like to think the new hotness with the average Joe will end up being saving energy to spend less money, and having products that last longer. Sure, that's not what the HN demographics want to be reading, our current economic model doesn't exactly go hand-in-hand with this idea. There's a lot of very big questions ahead of us in the next fifty years. Perhaps UBI makes more sense instead of bad technology, forced obsolescence, gimmicks, wasted energy et al if it's helping the race and planet.

mytailorisrich 3y ago
This is all mostly orthogonal with the feasibility or even desirability of fully self-driving vehicles. For commercial vehicles (taxis, buses, delivery, trucking, etc) they are a real solution to cost and productivity, which could potentially have ripple effects on private car ownership, parking space, etc. For private vehicles they can free the driver who can then do something else like you would in a taxi or public transport. For instance, if cars drive themselves then the operating costs of a private car and a taxi are the same so we could imagine that taxi fares would drop. Now if indeed people work from home more and don't need to drive everyday then perhaps not owning a car but insyead to summon a self-driving taxi when needed would make sense.

mytailorisrich 3y ago

This is all mostly orthogonal with the feasibility or even desirability of fully self-driving vehicles. For commercial vehicles (taxis, buses, delivery, trucking, etc) they are a real solution to cost and productivity, which could potentially have ripple effects on private car ownership, parking space, etc. For private vehicles they can free the driver who can then do something else like you would in a taxi or public transport. For instance, if cars drive themselves then the operating costs of a private car and a taxi are the same so we could imagine that taxi fares would drop. Now if indeed people work from home more and don't need to drive everyday then perhaps not owning a car but insyead to summon a self-driving taxi when needed would make sense.