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A few months ago I saw one driverless car maybe every three days. Now I see roughly 3-5 every day. I get that it’s taken a long time and a lot of hype that has

A few months ago I saw one driverless car maybe every three days. Now I see roughly 3-5 every day. I get that it’s taken a long time and a lot of hype that hasn’t panned out. But once the tech works and it’s just about juicing the scale then things shift rapidly. Even if you think “oh that’s the next generation’s problem” if there is a chance you’re wrong, or if you want to be kind to the next generation: now is the time to start thinking and planning for those problems. I think the most sensible answer would be something like UBI. But I also think the most sensible answer for climate change is a carbon tax. Just because something is sensible doesn’t meant it’s politically viable.

DiscourseFan 1y ago
The major shift for me is now its normal to take Waymos. Yeah, there aren't as fast as Uber if you have to get across town, but for trips less than 10 miles they're my go to now.
- schneems 1y ago
  Ive never taken one. They seem nice though. On the other hand, the Tesla “robotaxi” scares the crap out of me. No lidar and seems to drive more aggressively. The Mark Rober YouTube of a Tesla plowing into a road-runner style fake tunnel is equal parts hilarious and nightmare fuel when you realize that’s what’s next to your kid biking down the street.
  - bscphil 1y ago
    > Mark Rober YouTube of a Tesla plowing into a road-runner style fake tunnel I understand the argument for augmenting your self-driving systems with LIDAR. What I don't really understand is what videos like this tell us. The comparison case for a "road-runner style fake tunnel" isn't LIDAR, it's humans, right? And while I'm sure there are cases where a human driver would spot the fake tunnel and stop in time, that is not at all a reasonable assumption. The question isn't "can a Tesla save your life when someone booby traps a road?", it's "is a Tesla any worse than you at spotting booby trapped roads?", and moreover, "how does a Tesla perform on the 99.999999% of roads that aren't booby trapped?"
    - ekunazanu 1y ago
      > Is a Tesla any worse than you at spotting booby trapped roads That would've been been the case if all laws, opinions and purchasing decisions were made by everyone acting rationally. Even if self driving cars are safer than human drivers, it just takes a few crashes to damage their reputation. It has to be much, much safer than humans for mass adoption. Ideally also safer than the competition, if you're comparing specific companies.
      - DiscourseFan 1y ago
        And Waymo is much safer than human drivers. Its better at chauffeuring than humans, too.
    - tfourb 1y ago
      Tesla‘s insistence on not using Lidar while other companies deem it necessary for save auto-pilot creates the need for Tesla to demonstrate that their approach is equally as save for both drivers and ie pedestrians. They haven’t done that, arguably the data shows the contrary. This generates the impression that Tesla skimps on security and if they skimp in one area, they’ll likely skimp in others. Stuff like the Rober video strengthens these impressions. It’s a public perception issue and Tesla has done nothing (and maybe isn’t able to do anything) to dispel this notion.
    - schneems 1y ago
      > What I don't really understand is what videos like this tell us. A lot of people here might intuitively understand “does not have lidar” means “can be deceived with a visual illusion.” The value of a video like that is to paint a picture for people who don’t intuitively understand it. And for everyone, there’s an emotional reaction seeing it plow through a giant wall that resonates in ways an intellectual understanding might not. Great communication speaks to both our “fast” and “slow” brains. His video did a great job IMHO.
- ziofill 1y ago
  I’m curious, are they now fully autonomous? I remember some time ago they had a remote operator.
  - neom 1y ago
    Good account to follow to track their progress, sufficed to say they're nearing/at the end of the beginning: https://x.com/reed https://x.com/reed // https://x.com/daylenyang/status/1953853807227523178 https://x.com/daylenyang/status/1953853807227523178
  - Animats 1y ago
    Waymo has a control center, but it's customer service, not remote driving. They can look at the sensor data, give hints to the car ("back out, turn around, try another route") and talk to the customer, but can't take direct control and drive remotely. Baidu's system in China really does have remote drivers.[1] Tesla also appears to have remote drivers, in addition to someone in each car with an emergency stop button.[2] [1] https://cyberlaw.stanford.edu/blog/2025/05/comparing-robotaxis-baidus-apollo-and-alphabets-waymo/ https://cyberlaw.stanford.edu/blog/2025/05/comparing-robotax... [2] https://insideevs.com/news/760863/tesla-hiring-humans-to-control-robotaxis/ https://insideevs.com/news/760863/tesla-hiring-humans-to-con...
visarga 1y ago
> I think the most sensible answer would be something like UBI. Having had the experience of living under communist regime prior to 1989 I have zero trust in the state providing support, while I am totally dependent and have no recourse. Instead I would rather rely on my own two hands like my grandparents did. I see a world where we can build anything we want with our own hands and AI automation. Jobs might become optional.
- magicalist 1y ago
  > I see a world where we can build anything we want with our own hands and AI automation. Jobs might become optional. Unless your two hands are building murderbots, though, it doesn't matter what you're building if you can't grow or buy food. I haven't personally seen how UBI could end up working viably, but I also don't see any other system working without much more massive societal changes than anyone is talking about. Meanwhile, there are many many people that are very invested in maintaining massive differentials between the richest and the poorest that will be working against even the most modest changes.
  - griffzhowl 1y ago
    > I also don't see any other system working without much more massive societal changes than anyone is talking about. The other system is that the mass of people are coerced to work for tokens that buy them the right to food and to live in a house. i.e. the present system but potentially with more menial and arduous labour. Hopefully we can think of something else
- kannanvijayan 1y ago
  I'd argue against the entire perspective of evaluating every policy idea along one-dimensional modernist polemics put forwards as "the least worst solution to all of human economy for all time". Right now the communists in China are beating us at capitalism. I'm starting to find the entire analytical framework of using these ideologies ("communism", "capitalism") to evaluate _anything_ to be highly suspect, and maybe even one of the west's greatest mistakes in the last century. > I see a world where we can build anything we want with our own hands and AI automation. Jobs might become optional. I was a teenager back in the 90s. There was much talk then about the productivity boosts from computers, the internet, automation, and how it would enable people to have so much more free time. Interesting thing is that the productivity gains happened. But the other side of that equation never really materialized. Who knows, maybe it'll be different this time.
marsven_422 1y ago
[dead]
OneMorePerson 1y ago
Isn't it the case that companies are always competing and evolving? Unless we see that there's a ceiling to driverless tech that is immediately obvious. We "made cars work" about 100 years ago, but they have been innovating on that design since then on comfort, efficiency, safety, etc. I doubt the very first version of self driving will have zero ways to improve (although eventually I suppose you would hit a ceiling).
andrei_says_ 1y ago
Not sure how exactly politicians will jump from “minimal wages don’t have to be livable wages” and “people who are able to work should absolutely not have access to free healthcare” and “any tax-supported benefits are actually undeserved entitlements and should be eliminated” to “everyone deserves a universal basic income”.
- ludicrousdispla 1y ago
  Politicians are elected for limited terms, not for life, so they don't need to change their opinion for a change to occur.
  - polotics 1y ago
    Are you sure of this? Don't you think the next US presidential election and very many subsequent ones will be decided by the US Supreme Court?
- mindcrime 1y ago
  Not sure how exactly politicians will jump from ... Well, if one believes that the day will come when their choices will be "make that jump" or "the guillotine", then it doesn't seem completely outlandish. Not saying that day will come, but if it did...
  - SoftTalker 1y ago
    > or "the guillotine" Or even simply being voted out.
- omnimus 1y ago
  I wouldn't underestimate what can happen if 1/3 of your workforce is displaced and put aside with nothing to do. People are usually obedient because they have something in life and they are very busy with work. So they don't have time or headspace to really care about politics. When suddenly big numbers of people start to more care about politics it leads to organizing and all kinds of political changes. What i mean is that it wouldn't be current political class pushing things like UBI. At same time it seems that some of current elites are preparing for this and want to get rid of elections altogether to keep the status quo.
aorloff 1y ago
Every time someone casually throws out UBI my mind goes to the question "who is paying taxes when some people are on UBI ?" Is there like a transition period where some people don't have to pay taxes and yet don't get UBI, and if so, why hasn't that come yet ? Why aren't the minimum tax thresholds going up if UBI could be right around the corner ?
- woile 1y ago
  There's another question to answer: Who is working?
  - int_19h 1y ago
    The robots.
- juniperus 1y ago
  The taxes will be most burdensome for the wealthiest and most productive of institutions, which is generally why these arrangements collapse economies and nations. UBI is hard to implement because it incentivizes non-productive behavior and disincentivizes productive activity. This creates economic crisis, taxes are basically a smaller scale version of this, UBI is like a more comprehensive wealth redistribution scheme. The creation of a syndicate (in this case, the state) to steal from the productive to give to the non-productive is a return to how humanity functioned before the creation of state-like structures when marauders and bandits used violence to steal from those who created anything. Eventually, the state arose to create arrangements and contracts to prevent theft, but later become the thief itself, leading to economic collapse and the cyclical revolutionary cycle. So, AI may certainly bring about UBI, but the corporations that are being milked by the state to provide wealth to the non-productive will begin to foment revolution along with those who find this arrangement unfair, and the productive activity of those especially productive individuals will be directed toward revolution instead of economic productivity. Companies have made nations many times before, and I'm sure it'll happen again.
  - essnine 1y ago
leshow 1y ago
UBI is not a good solution because you still have to provision everything on the market, so it's a subsidy to private companies that sell the necessities of life on the market. If we're dreaming up solutions to problems, much better would be to remove the essentials from the market and provide them to everyone universally. Non-market housing, healthcare, education all provided to every citizen by virtue of being a human.
- sneak 1y ago
  You can’t provide valuable things for “free” en masse without institutionalizing either slavery or robbery. The value must come from somewhere. The costs of what you propose are enormous. No legislation can change that fact. There ain’t no such thing as a free lunch. Who’s going to pay for it? Someone who is not paying for it today. How do you intend to get them to consent to that? Or do you think that the needs of the many should outweigh the consent of millions of people? The state, the only organization large enough to even consider undertaking such a project, has spending priorities that do not include these things. In the US, for example, we spend the entire net worth of Elon Musk (the “richest man in the world”, though he rightfully points out that Putin owns far more than he does) about every six months on the military alone. Add in Zuckerberg and you can get another 5 months or so. Then there’s the next year to think about. Maybe you can do Buffet and Gates; what about year three? That’s just for the US military, at present day spending levels. What you’re describing is at least an order of magnitude more expensive than that, just in one country that only has 4% of people. To extend it to all human beings, you’re talking about two more orders of magnitude. There aren’t enough billionaires on the entire planet even to pay for one country’s military expenses out of pocket (even if you completely liquidated them), and this proposed plan is 500-1000x more spending than that. You’re talking about 3-5 trillion dollars per year just for the USA - if you extrapolate out linearly, that’d be 60-200 trillion per year for the Earth. Even if you could reduce cost of provision by 90% due to economies of scale ($100/person/month for housing, healthcare, and education combined, rather than $1000 - a big stretch), it is still far, far too big to do under any currently envisioned system of wealth redistribution. Society is big and wealthy private citizens (ie billionaires) aren’t that numerous or rich. There is a reason we all pay for our own food and housing.
tfourb 1y ago
I guess you live in a place with perfect weather year round? I don’t and I haven’t seen a robo taxi my entire life. I do have access to a Tesla though and it’s current self-driving capabilities are not even close to anything I would call „autonomous“ und real world conditions (including weather). Maybe the tech will at some point be good enough. At the current rate of improvement this will still take decades at least. Which is sad because I personally hoped that my kids would never have to get a driver’s License.
- BoorishBears 1y ago
  I've ridden just under 1,000 miles in autonmous (no scare quotes) Waymos, so it's strange to see someone letting Tesla's abject failure inform their opinions on how much progress AVs have made. Tesla that got fired as a customer by Mobileye for abusing their L2 tech is your yardstick? Anyways, Waymo's DC launch is next year, I wonder what the new goalpost will be.
  - thephotonsphere 1y ago
    Tesla uses only cameras, which sounds crazy (reflections, direct sunlight disturbances, fog , smoke, etc. LiDAR, radar assistance feels crucial https://fortune.com/2025/08/15/waymo-srikanth-thirumalai-interview-ai4-conference-las-vegas-lidar-radar-self-driving-safety-tesla/ https://fortune.com/2025/08/15/waymo-srikanth-thirumalai-int...
    - ACCount37 1y ago
      Humans use only cameras. And humans don't even have true 360 coverage on those cameras. The bottleneck for self-driving technology isn't sensors - it's AI. Building a car that collects enough sensory data to enable self-driving is easy. Building a car AI that actually drives well in a diverse range of conditions is hard.
      - BuckRogers 1y ago
        Except a car isn’t a human. That’s the mistake Elon Musk made and the same one you’re making here. Not to mention that humans driving with cameras only is absolutely pathetic. The amount of accidents that occur that are completely avoidable doesn’t exactly inspire confidence that all my car needs to be safe and get me to my destination is a couple cameras.
Joeri 1y ago
UBI could easily become a poverty trap, enough to keep living, not enough to have a shot towards becoming an earner because you’re locked out of opportunities. I think in practice it is likely to turn out like “basic” in The Expanse, with people hoping to win a lottery to get a shot at having a real job and building a decent life for themselves. If no UBI is installed there will be a hard crash while everyone figures out what it is that humans can do usefully, and then a new economic model of full employment gets established. If UBI is installed then this will happen more slowly with less pain, but it is possible for society to get stuck in a permanently worse situation. Ultimately if AI really is about to automate as much as it is promised then what we really need is a model for post-capitalism, for post-scarcity economics, because a model based on scarcity is incapable of adapting to a reality of genuine abundance. So far nobody seems to have any clue of how to do such a thing. UBI as a concept still lives deeply in the Overton window bounded by capitalist scarcity thinking. (Not a call for communism btw, that is a train to nowhere as well because it also assumes scarcity at its root.) What I fear is that we may get a future like The Diamond Age, where we have the technology to get rid of scarcity and have human flourishing, but we impose legal barriers that keep the rich rich and the poor poor. We saw this happen with digital copyright, where the technology exists for abundance, but we’ve imposed permanent worldwide legal scarcity barriers to protect revenue streams to megacorps.
- immibis 1y ago
  That's way better than the present situation where they just die, though. It's at least a start.
bboygravity 1y ago
Carbon tax on a state level to try to fight a global problem makes 0 sense actually. You just shift the emissions from your location to the location that you buy products from. Basically what happened in Germany: more expensive "clean" energy means their own production went down and the world bought more from China instead. The net result is probably higher global emissions overall.
- __MatrixMan__ 1y ago
  This is why an economics based strictly on scarcity cannot get us where we need to go. Markets, not knowing what it's like to be thirsty, will interpret a willingness to poison the well as entrepreneurial spirit to be encouraged. We need a system where being known as somebody who causes more problems than they solve puts you (and the people you've done business with) at an economic disadvantage.
dongping 1y ago
The robotaxi business model is the total opposite of scaling. At my previous employer we were solving the problem "block by block, city by city", , and I can only assume that you are living in the right city/block where they are tackling.
- griffzhowl 1y ago
  That just sounds like scaling slowly, rather than not scaling
mrcincinnatus 1y ago
> I think the most sensible answer would be something like UBI. What corporation will accept to pay dollars for members of society that are essentially "unproductive"? What will happen with the value of UBI in time, in this context, when the strongest lobby will be of the companies that have the means of producing AI? And, more essentially, how are humans able to negotiate for themselves when they lose their abilities to build things? I'm not opposing the technology progress, I'm merely trying to unfold the reality of UBI being a thing, knowing human nature and the impetus for profit.

DiscourseFan 1y ago

The major shift for me is now its normal to take Waymos. Yeah, there aren't as fast as Uber if you have to get across town, but for trips less than 10 miles they're my go to now.

schneems 1y ago
Ive never taken one. They seem nice though. On the other hand, the Tesla “robotaxi” scares the crap out of me. No lidar and seems to drive more aggressively. The Mark Rober YouTube of a Tesla plowing into a road-runner style fake tunnel is equal parts hilarious and nightmare fuel when you realize that’s what’s next to your kid biking down the street.
- bscphil 1y ago
  > Mark Rober YouTube of a Tesla plowing into a road-runner style fake tunnel I understand the argument for augmenting your self-driving systems with LIDAR. What I don't really understand is what videos like this tell us. The comparison case for a "road-runner style fake tunnel" isn't LIDAR, it's humans, right? And while I'm sure there are cases where a human driver would spot the fake tunnel and stop in time, that is not at all a reasonable assumption. The question isn't "can a Tesla save your life when someone booby traps a road?", it's "is a Tesla any worse than you at spotting booby trapped roads?", and moreover, "how does a Tesla perform on the 99.999999% of roads that aren't booby trapped?"
  - ekunazanu 1y ago
    > Is a Tesla any worse than you at spotting booby trapped roads That would've been been the case if all laws, opinions and purchasing decisions were made by everyone acting rationally. Even if self driving cars are safer than human drivers, it just takes a few crashes to damage their reputation. It has to be much, much safer than humans for mass adoption. Ideally also safer than the competition, if you're comparing specific companies.
    - DiscourseFan 1y ago
      And Waymo is much safer than human drivers. Its better at chauffeuring than humans, too.
  - tfourb 1y ago
    Tesla‘s insistence on not using Lidar while other companies deem it necessary for save auto-pilot creates the need for Tesla to demonstrate that their approach is equally as save for both drivers and ie pedestrians. They haven’t done that, arguably the data shows the contrary. This generates the impression that Tesla skimps on security and if they skimp in one area, they’ll likely skimp in others. Stuff like the Rober video strengthens these impressions. It’s a public perception issue and Tesla has done nothing (and maybe isn’t able to do anything) to dispel this notion.
  - schneems 1y ago
    > What I don't really understand is what videos like this tell us. A lot of people here might intuitively understand “does not have lidar” means “can be deceived with a visual illusion.” The value of a video like that is to paint a picture for people who don’t intuitively understand it. And for everyone, there’s an emotional reaction seeing it plow through a giant wall that resonates in ways an intellectual understanding might not. Great communication speaks to both our “fast” and “slow” brains. His video did a great job IMHO.
ziofill 1y ago
I’m curious, are they now fully autonomous? I remember some time ago they had a remote operator.
- neom 1y ago
  Good account to follow to track their progress, sufficed to say they're nearing/at the end of the beginning: https://x.com/reed https://x.com/reed // https://x.com/daylenyang/status/1953853807227523178 https://x.com/daylenyang/status/1953853807227523178
- Animats 1y ago
  Waymo has a control center, but it's customer service, not remote driving. They can look at the sensor data, give hints to the car ("back out, turn around, try another route") and talk to the customer, but can't take direct control and drive remotely. Baidu's system in China really does have remote drivers.[1] Tesla also appears to have remote drivers, in addition to someone in each car with an emergency stop button.[2] [1] https://cyberlaw.stanford.edu/blog/2025/05/comparing-robotaxis-baidus-apollo-and-alphabets-waymo/ https://cyberlaw.stanford.edu/blog/2025/05/comparing-robotax... [2] https://insideevs.com/news/760863/tesla-hiring-humans-to-control-robotaxis/ https://insideevs.com/news/760863/tesla-hiring-humans-to-con...

visarga 1y ago

> I think the most sensible answer would be something like UBI. Having had the experience of living under communist regime prior to 1989 I have zero trust in the state providing support, while I am totally dependent and have no recourse. Instead I would rather rely on my own two hands like my grandparents did. I see a world where we can build anything we want with our own hands and AI automation. Jobs might become optional.

magicalist 1y ago
> I see a world where we can build anything we want with our own hands and AI automation. Jobs might become optional. Unless your two hands are building murderbots, though, it doesn't matter what you're building if you can't grow or buy food. I haven't personally seen how UBI could end up working viably, but I also don't see any other system working without much more massive societal changes than anyone is talking about. Meanwhile, there are many many people that are very invested in maintaining massive differentials between the richest and the poorest that will be working against even the most modest changes.
- griffzhowl 1y ago
  > I also don't see any other system working without much more massive societal changes than anyone is talking about. The other system is that the mass of people are coerced to work for tokens that buy them the right to food and to live in a house. i.e. the present system but potentially with more menial and arduous labour. Hopefully we can think of something else
kannanvijayan 1y ago
I'd argue against the entire perspective of evaluating every policy idea along one-dimensional modernist polemics put forwards as "the least worst solution to all of human economy for all time". Right now the communists in China are beating us at capitalism. I'm starting to find the entire analytical framework of using these ideologies ("communism", "capitalism") to evaluate _anything_ to be highly suspect, and maybe even one of the west's greatest mistakes in the last century. > I see a world where we can build anything we want with our own hands and AI automation. Jobs might become optional. I was a teenager back in the 90s. There was much talk then about the productivity boosts from computers, the internet, automation, and how it would enable people to have so much more free time. Interesting thing is that the productivity gains happened. But the other side of that equation never really materialized. Who knows, maybe it'll be different this time.

marsven_422 1y ago

[dead]

OneMorePerson 1y ago

Isn't it the case that companies are always competing and evolving? Unless we see that there's a ceiling to driverless tech that is immediately obvious. We "made cars work" about 100 years ago, but they have been innovating on that design since then on comfort, efficiency, safety, etc. I doubt the very first version of self driving will have zero ways to improve (although eventually I suppose you would hit a ceiling).

andrei_says_ 1y ago

Not sure how exactly politicians will jump from “minimal wages don’t have to be livable wages” and “people who are able to work should absolutely not have access to free healthcare” and “any tax-supported benefits are actually undeserved entitlements and should be eliminated” to “everyone deserves a universal basic income”.

ludicrousdispla 1y ago
Politicians are elected for limited terms, not for life, so they don't need to change their opinion for a change to occur.
- polotics 1y ago
  Are you sure of this? Don't you think the next US presidential election and very many subsequent ones will be decided by the US Supreme Court?
mindcrime 1y ago
Not sure how exactly politicians will jump from ... Well, if one believes that the day will come when their choices will be "make that jump" or "the guillotine", then it doesn't seem completely outlandish. Not saying that day will come, but if it did...
- SoftTalker 1y ago
  > or "the guillotine" Or even simply being voted out.
omnimus 1y ago
I wouldn't underestimate what can happen if 1/3 of your workforce is displaced and put aside with nothing to do. People are usually obedient because they have something in life and they are very busy with work. So they don't have time or headspace to really care about politics. When suddenly big numbers of people start to more care about politics it leads to organizing and all kinds of political changes. What i mean is that it wouldn't be current political class pushing things like UBI. At same time it seems that some of current elites are preparing for this and want to get rid of elections altogether to keep the status quo.

aorloff 1y ago

Every time someone casually throws out UBI my mind goes to the question "who is paying taxes when some people are on UBI ?" Is there like a transition period where some people don't have to pay taxes and yet don't get UBI, and if so, why hasn't that come yet ? Why aren't the minimum tax thresholds going up if UBI could be right around the corner ?

woile 1y ago
There's another question to answer: Who is working?
- int_19h 1y ago
  The robots.
juniperus 1y ago
The taxes will be most burdensome for the wealthiest and most productive of institutions, which is generally why these arrangements collapse economies and nations. UBI is hard to implement because it incentivizes non-productive behavior and disincentivizes productive activity. This creates economic crisis, taxes are basically a smaller scale version of this, UBI is like a more comprehensive wealth redistribution scheme. The creation of a syndicate (in this case, the state) to steal from the productive to give to the non-productive is a return to how humanity functioned before the creation of state-like structures when marauders and bandits used violence to steal from those who created anything. Eventually, the state arose to create arrangements and contracts to prevent theft, but later become the thief itself, leading to economic collapse and the cyclical revolutionary cycle. So, AI may certainly bring about UBI, but the corporations that are being milked by the state to provide wealth to the non-productive will begin to foment revolution along with those who find this arrangement unfair, and the productive activity of those especially productive individuals will be directed toward revolution instead of economic productivity. Companies have made nations many times before, and I'm sure it'll happen again.
- essnine 1y ago

leshow 1y ago

UBI is not a good solution because you still have to provision everything on the market, so it's a subsidy to private companies that sell the necessities of life on the market. If we're dreaming up solutions to problems, much better would be to remove the essentials from the market and provide them to everyone universally. Non-market housing, healthcare, education all provided to every citizen by virtue of being a human.

sneak 1y ago
You can’t provide valuable things for “free” en masse without institutionalizing either slavery or robbery. The value must come from somewhere. The costs of what you propose are enormous. No legislation can change that fact. There ain’t no such thing as a free lunch. Who’s going to pay for it? Someone who is not paying for it today. How do you intend to get them to consent to that? Or do you think that the needs of the many should outweigh the consent of millions of people? The state, the only organization large enough to even consider undertaking such a project, has spending priorities that do not include these things. In the US, for example, we spend the entire net worth of Elon Musk (the “richest man in the world”, though he rightfully points out that Putin owns far more than he does) about every six months on the military alone. Add in Zuckerberg and you can get another 5 months or so. Then there’s the next year to think about. Maybe you can do Buffet and Gates; what about year three? That’s just for the US military, at present day spending levels. What you’re describing is at least an order of magnitude more expensive than that, just in one country that only has 4% of people. To extend it to all human beings, you’re talking about two more orders of magnitude. There aren’t enough billionaires on the entire planet even to pay for one country’s military expenses out of pocket (even if you completely liquidated them), and this proposed plan is 500-1000x more spending than that. You’re talking about 3-5 trillion dollars per year just for the USA - if you extrapolate out linearly, that’d be 60-200 trillion per year for the Earth. Even if you could reduce cost of provision by 90% due to economies of scale ($100/person/month for housing, healthcare, and education combined, rather than $1000 - a big stretch), it is still far, far too big to do under any currently envisioned system of wealth redistribution. Society is big and wealthy private citizens (ie billionaires) aren’t that numerous or rich. There is a reason we all pay for our own food and housing.

tfourb 1y ago

I guess you live in a place with perfect weather year round? I don’t and I haven’t seen a robo taxi my entire life. I do have access to a Tesla though and it’s current self-driving capabilities are not even close to anything I would call „autonomous“ und real world conditions (including weather). Maybe the tech will at some point be good enough. At the current rate of improvement this will still take decades at least. Which is sad because I personally hoped that my kids would never have to get a driver’s License.

BoorishBears 1y ago
I've ridden just under 1,000 miles in autonmous (no scare quotes) Waymos, so it's strange to see someone letting Tesla's abject failure inform their opinions on how much progress AVs have made. Tesla that got fired as a customer by Mobileye for abusing their L2 tech is your yardstick? Anyways, Waymo's DC launch is next year, I wonder what the new goalpost will be.
- thephotonsphere 1y ago
  Tesla uses only cameras, which sounds crazy (reflections, direct sunlight disturbances, fog , smoke, etc. LiDAR, radar assistance feels crucial https://fortune.com/2025/08/15/waymo-srikanth-thirumalai-interview-ai4-conference-las-vegas-lidar-radar-self-driving-safety-tesla/ https://fortune.com/2025/08/15/waymo-srikanth-thirumalai-int...
  - ACCount37 1y ago
    Humans use only cameras. And humans don't even have true 360 coverage on those cameras. The bottleneck for self-driving technology isn't sensors - it's AI. Building a car that collects enough sensory data to enable self-driving is easy. Building a car AI that actually drives well in a diverse range of conditions is hard.
    - BuckRogers 1y ago
      Except a car isn’t a human. That’s the mistake Elon Musk made and the same one you’re making here. Not to mention that humans driving with cameras only is absolutely pathetic. The amount of accidents that occur that are completely avoidable doesn’t exactly inspire confidence that all my car needs to be safe and get me to my destination is a couple cameras.

Joeri 1y ago

UBI could easily become a poverty trap, enough to keep living, not enough to have a shot towards becoming an earner because you’re locked out of opportunities. I think in practice it is likely to turn out like “basic” in The Expanse, with people hoping to win a lottery to get a shot at having a real job and building a decent life for themselves. If no UBI is installed there will be a hard crash while everyone figures out what it is that humans can do usefully, and then a new economic model of full employment gets established. If UBI is installed then this will happen more slowly with less pain, but it is possible for society to get stuck in a permanently worse situation. Ultimately if AI really is about to automate as much as it is promised then what we really need is a model for post-capitalism, for post-scarcity economics, because a model based on scarcity is incapable of adapting to a reality of genuine abundance. So far nobody seems to have any clue of how to do such a thing. UBI as a concept still lives deeply in the Overton window bounded by capitalist scarcity thinking. (Not a call for communism btw, that is a train to nowhere as well because it also assumes scarcity at its root.) What I fear is that we may get a future like The Diamond Age, where we have the technology to get rid of scarcity and have human flourishing, but we impose legal barriers that keep the rich rich and the poor poor. We saw this happen with digital copyright, where the technology exists for abundance, but we’ve imposed permanent worldwide legal scarcity barriers to protect revenue streams to megacorps.

immibis 1y ago
That's way better than the present situation where they just die, though. It's at least a start.

bboygravity 1y ago

Carbon tax on a state level to try to fight a global problem makes 0 sense actually. You just shift the emissions from your location to the location that you buy products from. Basically what happened in Germany: more expensive "clean" energy means their own production went down and the world bought more from China instead. The net result is probably higher global emissions overall.

__MatrixMan__ 1y ago
This is why an economics based strictly on scarcity cannot get us where we need to go. Markets, not knowing what it's like to be thirsty, will interpret a willingness to poison the well as entrepreneurial spirit to be encouraged. We need a system where being known as somebody who causes more problems than they solve puts you (and the people you've done business with) at an economic disadvantage.

dongping 1y ago

The robotaxi business model is the total opposite of scaling. At my previous employer we were solving the problem "block by block, city by city", , and I can only assume that you are living in the right city/block where they are tackling.

griffzhowl 1y ago
That just sounds like scaling slowly, rather than not scaling

mrcincinnatus 1y ago

> I think the most sensible answer would be something like UBI. What corporation will accept to pay dollars for members of society that are essentially "unproductive"? What will happen with the value of UBI in time, in this context, when the strongest lobby will be of the companies that have the means of producing AI? And, more essentially, how are humans able to negotiate for themselves when they lose their abilities to build things? I'm not opposing the technology progress, I'm merely trying to unfold the reality of UBI being a thing, knowing human nature and the impetus for profit.