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It will also funnel large amounts of revenue out of every city into s/SF/Bay Area. Currently around 35% of the money spent on Uber/Lyft stays in the local econo

It will also funnel large amounts of revenue out of every city into s/SF/Bay Area. Currently around 35% of the money spent on Uber/Lyft stays in the local economy. Waymo in SF still employs a large number of highly paid engineers who are paid the money which used to move through SF via Uber/Lyft. And those SF engineers spend a decent chunk of it locally on food, art, entertainment, and various other services - so it has (somewhat) less of an effect on the city's overall economy/total employment. Waymo in Miami won't be locally re-spending nearly as much of Miami's money as Uber/Lyft did. Significantly more of it will be removed from Miami with each ride. This might be even more pronounced for cities like Houston, which don't attract tourism from Waymo staff.

seanmcdirmid 9mo ago
> It will also funnel large amounts of revenue out of every city into SF. Why SF? Does Google even still have an engineering office in the city? Alphabet is a publicly traded company with employees all over the USA and the world, even if you said the money would be funneled into Mountain View you'd be incorrect. The money will be funneled into 401Ks would be more accurate, and a lot of snowbirds in Florida are living off of their 401Ks and stock investments (which probably have a lot of Alphabet in them), so it is definitely something for Florida. But I think your point is that gig workers won't be making the money anymore. That's definitely true. That is just like when loom machines took money away from weavers back in the 19th century, or computers took money away from typists/secretaries in the 20th century. We should carefully consider whether or not that is a net good for society.
- spongebobstoes 9mo ago
  are there examples of jobs going obsolete being a net harm to society, over a long time scale? surely it's good to reduce the amount of menial labour being performed in the world
  - seanmcdirmid 9mo ago
    The loss of manufacturing jobs and the movement of jobs in to services has been hard for the US, and is basically where MAGA came from, which I would say is a net harm to society. We wouldn't be arguing about Waymo right now if those Uber drivers had better jobs making things instead of being forced into gig work.
  - fragmede 9mo ago
    Midwives were replaced by the male-dominated medical industry, which initially raised infant mortality, nevermind women losing autonomy over birth. Night soil collectors were replaced by partial sewage systems, which resulted in cholera and typhoid outbreaks. Local butchers were replaced by meat packing plants. The Jungle tells us why this didn't go so well either. In all three of those cases, we rushed to an incomplete solution before it was fully ready. In this case though, no one's banning humans from driving cars anytime soon, so that part of it will go okay.
- ezst 9mo ago
  > That is just like when loom machines took money away from weavers back in the 19th century, or computers took money away from typists/secretaries in the 20th century. We should carefully consider whether or not that is a net good for society. I don't want to sound like a luddite, but each of those contributed to a consolidation of wealth that was largely offset by new jobs and new markets. How exactly do you think this is paying off here? Tech companies get to benefit, we know that, which sounds like a dead end. So it's ok that everyone else loses?
  - GuinansEyebrows 9mo ago
    > I don't want to sound like a luddite it's not a dirty word. being a luddite means caring about your professional and personal communities.
    - fragmede 9mo ago
      It's a loaded word by this point. The luddites smashed stocking frame looms. At first those looms were human powered, and then water powered, and then steam engines came onto the scene. Steam engines where when people got wrecked. Those things were a menace! They'd crush limbs, amputate fingers, give you horrible RSI, fuck up your lungs with all the dirt in the air. The worst part is that children were better for it because they have little fingers which were better at fixing the machines. The late 16th Century didn't have the legal system in place that we have. OHSA, labor law, unions, liability, insurance. Those are all things that didn't exist back then but do now. So these days, saying you're luddite doesn't mean you care about your professional and personal communities, it says you're anti-technology and anti-progress. If you want to say you care about your professional and personal communities, just say that.
      - seanmcdirmid 9mo ago
        Their arguments back then are not different at all to those today’s. Luddism was always about protecting jobs, a was against tech (self driving cars or automated looms) that would eliminate those jobs. Smashing a Waymo in SF is not much different from smashing up an automatic loom.
- nerdsniper 9mo ago
  The purely 'luddite' argument is rather obvious. Exploring the effects of that new path of money are somewhat more interesting to me. I believe that the cash flow will be much more concentrated, both by geography and cohort. Even just taking it at face value that "the vast majority of the 35% of the fare that would have gone to the drivers will now go to '401k's" is interesting! Currently most drivers for Lyft/Uber are in the bottom 50%ile of wealth in the USA, and they are currently getting that 35% cut. The bottom 50% of the USA hold nearly no stocks at all. 50% of the S&P500 shares are owned by the wealthiest 1% of the USA. Also, computers and looms were perhaps a bit different - the result of their automation was a product that actually cost less than their equivalent human labor could produce. Waymo currently charges more than Uber and Lyft, but still takes significant market share. I do expect them to be cheaper eventually, but they'll also have an opportunity to establish market monopolies and then raise prices again. Sure, uber and lyft driver supply is obviously elastic, but possibly not quite as elastic in the very long run - it took a lot of capital to raise the current driver base for Uber+Lyft, and I'm not sure that can be repeated, say, five years after people stopped driving for them. Of course people have to get new jobs as the world churns. But all of these other effects are interesting too! And, many, many people never really attain those new jobs. I don't think that's Waymo's "fault" as a moral judgment if the reality is that removing money from these jobs will lead to increase in squalor. It's just a pretty stark example of the rich getting richer.
- fragmede 9mo ago
  > The money will be funneled into 401K Only the money from Alphabet employees who put money into their 401k will end up there. Other parts go to taxes paid by Alphabet and taxes paid by the employees. The vast majority though will go into Alphabet's coffers and be used to pay back investors and make big bets on the future (ideally). Sundar gets a bunch, as does Sergey and Brin. Waymo's taken more than a decade to get this far (and it's not quite there yet). DARPA jump-started this with their Grand Challenge in 2004, so I think the government does deserve a bunch of tax revenue off of this.
  - seanmcdirmid 9mo ago
    Index funds have a lot of alphabet these days, so most 401ks are heavily vested in it. Future productivity increases are paying for our retirements one way prove other, especially since the birth rate is tanking.
whynotmaybe 9mo ago
Not sure about the 35% here. If I spend 100$ on an uber ride, 65$ goes to Uber while only 35$ is local ? I thought it's was the other way around with a margin of 30% for Uber.
- nerdsniper 9mo ago
  I usually ask most of my drivers how much they're getting paid for each ride. Across MCOL and HCOL areas like SF, NYC, HTX, ATX, DMV - I've generally been seeing around 40% going to the driver. For example, this route shows for me at $57 (-$10 discount = $47) but the driver sees $20: https://www.reddit.com/r/uberdrivers/comments/1q5z1dg/f_you_you_piece_of_garbage_company/ https://www.reddit.com/r/uberdrivers/comments/1q5z1dg/f_you_...
treis 9mo ago
I think the pie will grow more than Waymo takes out. Stuff like a plumber realizing they're missing a part. What might be a trip to the supply house can be a self driving delivery instead. Either way, it's not all that much different. Most of the money spent on getting around a city goes elsewhere through vehicle and gas purchases. Adding the cost of self driving to that probably won't move the needle all that much.
- xnx 9mo ago
  > What might be a trip to the supply house can be a self driving delivery instead. I think part replacement is an excellent use case for robotic delivery and even the Wing service if suitable weight and size.
eweise 9mo ago
Isn't that how it always is when new technology disrupts an existing market? We no longer have telephone operators, toll booth agents, gas pump attendants, etc
- nerdsniper 9mo ago
  Those all eliminated the work so that no one had to pay for it anymore, which freed up that money to be spent elsewhere in the local economy. Waymo is not cheaper than Lyft/Uber. So it's more of a direct wealth-transfer than the most cursory analogies were.
  - tanseydavid 9mo ago
    Eventually, it will be General Motors, Ford etc. who are getting their revenue streams obliterated by self-driving vehicle.
  - eweise 9mo ago
    If Waymo is not cheaper, I don't see how it replaces Lyft/Uber. I imagine that not having to pay drivers and the deal with the associated liability, will eventually be cheaper so will free up money.
RationPhantoms 9mo ago
You don't think this will also have an effect on improving life in the cities where Waymo is utilized? I understand there is the threat to induced demand with too many waymo's being on the road but this is going to help improve city living and in turn, help increase people wanting to live there.
- asdff 9mo ago
  Did uber?
  - hackmiester 9mo ago
    Drunk driving goes down significantly, for one thing.
    - asdff 9mo ago
      Hard to control for that against the decline in social drinking in general
    - lotsoweiners 9mo ago
      It might but I’ll be still driving home “intoxicated” so long as the vehicle I drove to the drinking establishment can’t drive itself home. This is why I prefer the model for personal self driving vehicles.
      - wiredpancake 9mo ago
        [dead]
      - fragmede 9mo ago
        Tesla FSD will pull over if you fall asleep while driving. Ford's will just plow into the median for you. Their relative stock prices reflect this.
      - tpm 9mo ago
        There is a service/app for this in South Korea (Daeri Unjeon, "proxy driving"); a guy will drive you in your car to your home.
lotsofpulp 9mo ago
So many things wrong with the assumptions and chain of reasoning in this comment. The easiest example is to look at Detroit. Although, perhaps the username is a signal, and I fell for it.
ricksunny 9mo ago
Good illustration of input/output economics; a discipline that mainstream economics tends to elide over for reasons that escape me.
dtran 9mo ago
To the best of my knowledge, Waymo still has humans in the loop as Fleet Response agents that the vehicles can call for remote assistance when they aren't sure what to do. Caveat that the number needed likely isn't on the same order of magnitude as human drivers, but the job is likely higher paying. I could see a scenario where these should be locals for both latency (ChatGPT says SF to Miami RTT latency might be 80-100 ms and I don't believe the humans really teleoperate the vehicles, so that may not be meaningful, but that might be a bigger deal for international expansion) and knowledge of tricky intersections or road quirks in the city. They could also potentially help with labeling quirky city-specific scenarios and other various evals.
- fragmede 9mo ago
  > the job is likely higher paying. I doubt it, it's a call center in the Philippines, where $1 USD goes quite far.
tanseydavid 9mo ago
IMHO you are thinking too much in the near term. I strongly believe that if you extrapolate 5-10 years then at that point the really big revenue stream(s) that self-driving cars will be funneling to themselves will revenue poached from the legacy auto manufacturers and adjacent industries. And I also think this is a good thing.
- spwa4 9mo ago
  With Waymo usually double the price of taxis this, to put it mildly, won't happen. Taxis, obviously, do not compare favorably to just owning a car. It's just not realistic unless you barely do any driving at all.
  - fragmede 9mo ago
    Not for me. Right now, Thursday, ~7pm. The given Waymo ride I'm looking at is going to cost me $30. Uber black is $42, UberX is $20, UberXL is $25. Uber wait & save is $17. Lyft priority is $23, Standard is $19, Wait and save is $17, Extra comfort is $26, Lyft Black is $46. The taxi ride I took from the airport yesterday was $60 with tip but Uber would have been $40. Waymo doesn't go to the airport yet tho.
- xnx 9mo ago
  > adjacent industries Insurance, gas stations, transit systems, car mechanics, parking garages/lots, airlines(?!). The possibilities are really staggering. This could be as big a transition as from horse -> automobile.
fragmede 9mo ago
> It will also funnel large amounts of revenue out of every city into s/SF/Bay Area. I have some bad news for you about Amazon, Facebook (+Instagram), TikTok...
Zanni 9mo ago
If the cost per ride is 35% cheaper than Uber/Lyft, then that money stays in the local economy, just in the hands of the consumer rather than the gig worker. Currently WayMo is more expensive, but I see that changing as they scale. And certainly CyberCab is promising to be much cheaper.

seanmcdirmid 9mo ago

> It will also funnel large amounts of revenue out of every city into SF. Why SF? Does Google even still have an engineering office in the city? Alphabet is a publicly traded company with employees all over the USA and the world, even if you said the money would be funneled into Mountain View you'd be incorrect. The money will be funneled into 401Ks would be more accurate, and a lot of snowbirds in Florida are living off of their 401Ks and stock investments (which probably have a lot of Alphabet in them), so it is definitely something for Florida. But I think your point is that gig workers won't be making the money anymore. That's definitely true. That is just like when loom machines took money away from weavers back in the 19th century, or computers took money away from typists/secretaries in the 20th century. We should carefully consider whether or not that is a net good for society.

spongebobstoes 9mo ago
are there examples of jobs going obsolete being a net harm to society, over a long time scale? surely it's good to reduce the amount of menial labour being performed in the world
- seanmcdirmid 9mo ago
  The loss of manufacturing jobs and the movement of jobs in to services has been hard for the US, and is basically where MAGA came from, which I would say is a net harm to society. We wouldn't be arguing about Waymo right now if those Uber drivers had better jobs making things instead of being forced into gig work.
- fragmede 9mo ago
  Midwives were replaced by the male-dominated medical industry, which initially raised infant mortality, nevermind women losing autonomy over birth. Night soil collectors were replaced by partial sewage systems, which resulted in cholera and typhoid outbreaks. Local butchers were replaced by meat packing plants. The Jungle tells us why this didn't go so well either. In all three of those cases, we rushed to an incomplete solution before it was fully ready. In this case though, no one's banning humans from driving cars anytime soon, so that part of it will go okay.
ezst 9mo ago
> That is just like when loom machines took money away from weavers back in the 19th century, or computers took money away from typists/secretaries in the 20th century. We should carefully consider whether or not that is a net good for society. I don't want to sound like a luddite, but each of those contributed to a consolidation of wealth that was largely offset by new jobs and new markets. How exactly do you think this is paying off here? Tech companies get to benefit, we know that, which sounds like a dead end. So it's ok that everyone else loses?
- GuinansEyebrows 9mo ago
  > I don't want to sound like a luddite it's not a dirty word. being a luddite means caring about your professional and personal communities.
  - fragmede 9mo ago
    It's a loaded word by this point. The luddites smashed stocking frame looms. At first those looms were human powered, and then water powered, and then steam engines came onto the scene. Steam engines where when people got wrecked. Those things were a menace! They'd crush limbs, amputate fingers, give you horrible RSI, fuck up your lungs with all the dirt in the air. The worst part is that children were better for it because they have little fingers which were better at fixing the machines. The late 16th Century didn't have the legal system in place that we have. OHSA, labor law, unions, liability, insurance. Those are all things that didn't exist back then but do now. So these days, saying you're luddite doesn't mean you care about your professional and personal communities, it says you're anti-technology and anti-progress. If you want to say you care about your professional and personal communities, just say that.
    - seanmcdirmid 9mo ago
      Their arguments back then are not different at all to those today’s. Luddism was always about protecting jobs, a was against tech (self driving cars or automated looms) that would eliminate those jobs. Smashing a Waymo in SF is not much different from smashing up an automatic loom.
nerdsniper 9mo ago
The purely 'luddite' argument is rather obvious. Exploring the effects of that new path of money are somewhat more interesting to me. I believe that the cash flow will be much more concentrated, both by geography and cohort. Even just taking it at face value that "the vast majority of the 35% of the fare that would have gone to the drivers will now go to '401k's" is interesting! Currently most drivers for Lyft/Uber are in the bottom 50%ile of wealth in the USA, and they are currently getting that 35% cut. The bottom 50% of the USA hold nearly no stocks at all. 50% of the S&P500 shares are owned by the wealthiest 1% of the USA. Also, computers and looms were perhaps a bit different - the result of their automation was a product that actually cost less than their equivalent human labor could produce. Waymo currently charges more than Uber and Lyft, but still takes significant market share. I do expect them to be cheaper eventually, but they'll also have an opportunity to establish market monopolies and then raise prices again. Sure, uber and lyft driver supply is obviously elastic, but possibly not quite as elastic in the very long run - it took a lot of capital to raise the current driver base for Uber+Lyft, and I'm not sure that can be repeated, say, five years after people stopped driving for them. Of course people have to get new jobs as the world churns. But all of these other effects are interesting too! And, many, many people never really attain those new jobs. I don't think that's Waymo's "fault" as a moral judgment if the reality is that removing money from these jobs will lead to increase in squalor. It's just a pretty stark example of the rich getting richer.
fragmede 9mo ago
> The money will be funneled into 401K Only the money from Alphabet employees who put money into their 401k will end up there. Other parts go to taxes paid by Alphabet and taxes paid by the employees. The vast majority though will go into Alphabet's coffers and be used to pay back investors and make big bets on the future (ideally). Sundar gets a bunch, as does Sergey and Brin. Waymo's taken more than a decade to get this far (and it's not quite there yet). DARPA jump-started this with their Grand Challenge in 2004, so I think the government does deserve a bunch of tax revenue off of this.
- seanmcdirmid 9mo ago
  Index funds have a lot of alphabet these days, so most 401ks are heavily vested in it. Future productivity increases are paying for our retirements one way prove other, especially since the birth rate is tanking.

whynotmaybe 9mo ago

Not sure about the 35% here. If I spend 100$ on an uber ride, 65$ goes to Uber while only 35$ is local ? I thought it's was the other way around with a margin of 30% for Uber.

nerdsniper 9mo ago
I usually ask most of my drivers how much they're getting paid for each ride. Across MCOL and HCOL areas like SF, NYC, HTX, ATX, DMV - I've generally been seeing around 40% going to the driver. For example, this route shows for me at $57 (-$10 discount = $47) but the driver sees $20: https://www.reddit.com/r/uberdrivers/comments/1q5z1dg/f_you_you_piece_of_garbage_company/ https://www.reddit.com/r/uberdrivers/comments/1q5z1dg/f_you_...

treis 9mo ago

I think the pie will grow more than Waymo takes out. Stuff like a plumber realizing they're missing a part. What might be a trip to the supply house can be a self driving delivery instead. Either way, it's not all that much different. Most of the money spent on getting around a city goes elsewhere through vehicle and gas purchases. Adding the cost of self driving to that probably won't move the needle all that much.

xnx 9mo ago
> What might be a trip to the supply house can be a self driving delivery instead. I think part replacement is an excellent use case for robotic delivery and even the Wing service if suitable weight and size.

eweise 9mo ago

Isn't that how it always is when new technology disrupts an existing market? We no longer have telephone operators, toll booth agents, gas pump attendants, etc

nerdsniper 9mo ago
Those all eliminated the work so that no one had to pay for it anymore, which freed up that money to be spent elsewhere in the local economy. Waymo is not cheaper than Lyft/Uber. So it's more of a direct wealth-transfer than the most cursory analogies were.
- tanseydavid 9mo ago
  Eventually, it will be General Motors, Ford etc. who are getting their revenue streams obliterated by self-driving vehicle.
- eweise 9mo ago
  If Waymo is not cheaper, I don't see how it replaces Lyft/Uber. I imagine that not having to pay drivers and the deal with the associated liability, will eventually be cheaper so will free up money.

RationPhantoms 9mo ago

You don't think this will also have an effect on improving life in the cities where Waymo is utilized? I understand there is the threat to induced demand with too many waymo's being on the road but this is going to help improve city living and in turn, help increase people wanting to live there.

asdff 9mo ago
Did uber?
- hackmiester 9mo ago
  Drunk driving goes down significantly, for one thing.
  - asdff 9mo ago
    Hard to control for that against the decline in social drinking in general
  - lotsoweiners 9mo ago
    It might but I’ll be still driving home “intoxicated” so long as the vehicle I drove to the drinking establishment can’t drive itself home. This is why I prefer the model for personal self driving vehicles.
    - wiredpancake 9mo ago
      [dead]
    - fragmede 9mo ago
      Tesla FSD will pull over if you fall asleep while driving. Ford's will just plow into the median for you. Their relative stock prices reflect this.
    - tpm 9mo ago
      There is a service/app for this in South Korea (Daeri Unjeon, "proxy driving"); a guy will drive you in your car to your home.

lotsofpulp 9mo ago

So many things wrong with the assumptions and chain of reasoning in this comment. The easiest example is to look at Detroit. Although, perhaps the username is a signal, and I fell for it.

ricksunny 9mo ago

Good illustration of input/output economics; a discipline that mainstream economics tends to elide over for reasons that escape me.

dtran 9mo ago

To the best of my knowledge, Waymo still has humans in the loop as Fleet Response agents that the vehicles can call for remote assistance when they aren't sure what to do. Caveat that the number needed likely isn't on the same order of magnitude as human drivers, but the job is likely higher paying. I could see a scenario where these should be locals for both latency (ChatGPT says SF to Miami RTT latency might be 80-100 ms and I don't believe the humans really teleoperate the vehicles, so that may not be meaningful, but that might be a bigger deal for international expansion) and knowledge of tricky intersections or road quirks in the city. They could also potentially help with labeling quirky city-specific scenarios and other various evals.

fragmede 9mo ago
> the job is likely higher paying. I doubt it, it's a call center in the Philippines, where $1 USD goes quite far.

tanseydavid 9mo ago

IMHO you are thinking too much in the near term. I strongly believe that if you extrapolate 5-10 years then at that point the really big revenue stream(s) that self-driving cars will be funneling to themselves will revenue poached from the legacy auto manufacturers and adjacent industries. And I also think this is a good thing.

spwa4 9mo ago
With Waymo usually double the price of taxis this, to put it mildly, won't happen. Taxis, obviously, do not compare favorably to just owning a car. It's just not realistic unless you barely do any driving at all.
- fragmede 9mo ago
  Not for me. Right now, Thursday, ~7pm. The given Waymo ride I'm looking at is going to cost me $30. Uber black is $42, UberX is $20, UberXL is $25. Uber wait & save is $17. Lyft priority is $23, Standard is $19, Wait and save is $17, Extra comfort is $26, Lyft Black is $46. The taxi ride I took from the airport yesterday was $60 with tip but Uber would have been $40. Waymo doesn't go to the airport yet tho.
xnx 9mo ago
> adjacent industries Insurance, gas stations, transit systems, car mechanics, parking garages/lots, airlines(?!). The possibilities are really staggering. This could be as big a transition as from horse -> automobile.

fragmede 9mo ago

> It will also funnel large amounts of revenue out of every city into s/SF/Bay Area. I have some bad news for you about Amazon, Facebook (+Instagram), TikTok...

Zanni 9mo ago

If the cost per ride is 35% cheaper than Uber/Lyft, then that money stays in the local economy, just in the hands of the consumer rather than the gig worker. Currently WayMo is more expensive, but I see that changing as they scale. And certainly CyberCab is promising to be much cheaper.