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> Just because a technology can be useful doesn't mean it will have positive effects on society. You say it in a way that it sounds like automobiles don't have

• lukev 6mo ago
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• throwway120385 6mo ago
  They have a net positive effect for every owner, except that they seem to facilitate and encourage ways of living that require automobile ownership as a condition of adulthood in most places. So I'm not entirely sure they're a vast net positive in every value system. In yours, yes, but not in mine.
  • mwigdahl 6mo ago
    Ironically, AI facilitates self-driving cars, which promise to _reduce_ the need for private automobile ownership.
    • nradov 6mo ago
      There is very little connection between ownership and who does the driving. I still want to own my own cars even if a computer does most of the driving. That way it's always available, and more importantly I can keep my own stuff in it.
      • mwigdahl 6mo ago
        And you should be able to. But people who don't want that or don't have the means to afford it can have the benefits of automobile transport without the capital expense.
        • nradov 6mo ago
          Consumers can already rent or lease automobiles. This is an operating expense, not a capital expense.
      • Gigachad 6mo ago
        Rental cars are expensive because they are covering the risk and increased wear and tear of rental drivers. As well as the downtime of when the car is rented to you but you aren’t driving it. Self driving cars would make this massively cheaper and remove most of the reasons to own a car. It would make about as much sense as owning a train for most people.
        • gosub100 6mo ago
          Yep just like how massively cheaper housing is to rent, right?
          • Gigachad 6mo ago
            I use cars more like I use a hotel. Inconsistently on demand when PT doesn’t cover the route I need. If I bought and sold a house every time I needed somewhere to stay on holiday, renting would be massively cheaper. I’ve already done the math and uber occasionally is cheaper than owning a car. Self driving electric will be even cheaper.
          • littlexsparkee 6mo ago
            how are you going to compare cars with no fixed location premium with housing? also utilization is totally different - cars sit ~95% of the time, housing can be nearly round the clock if you work at home. transportation is more like a utility/commodity whereas there are so many personal factors for where to live.
  • next_xibalba 6mo ago
    Automobiles are one of a key pillar of logistics. Getting things (food, medicine, construction materials, etc. etc.) to and from backbones like rail, harbors, airports etc. So even for those who don't own a vehicle or even want to own a vehicle, automobiles are still a vast net positive. I'm not sure what the alternative would be. Maybe everyone lives in giant 10 million+ population cities that are all connected to each other by rail (and rail connects all airports, harbors, etc.) and then you have to show up at rail station to get your groceries or whatever else?
    • californical 6mo ago
      Personal cars are not the same as using them for logistics. Yes cars/trucks/busses are still useful overall and are an incredible last-mile solution for freight. But on a personal level, it means we all must live far apart and maintain our own individual vehicles, along with the average total costs of $11,500/year PER CAR. [0] I’m not saying they should’ve even been banned for personal use - owning a car and living in a rural suburb should still be an option, but it is very expensive to choose that lifestyle. However the auto companies on the early to mid 1900s had heavy influence on policy, even buying and shutting down their public transit competitors, converting cities into “car cities”. This is where it drove into “negatives outweigh the positives” territory. Everything before that was more positive, but this was a massive negative on society and continues to handicap cities today, making them expensive and even just dangerous to walk around (due to high speed roads and limited sidewalks) [0] https://www.nerdwallet.com/auto-loans/learn/total-cost-owning-car https://www.nerdwallet.com/auto-loans/learn/total-cost-ownin...
      • Marha01 6mo ago
        > Personal cars are not the same as using them for logistics. Yes, they are in fact, the same. You cannot introduce such massively useful technology into the world and then say that it would be used only for logistics and not for personal transportation. Short of a worldwide totalitarian government, such arbitrary restriction would be completely unenforceable. It is possible to shape things with regulation, but only to some degree. With any great technology, you have to take the good with the bad. And the good outweights the bad in any historical technology. AI will be no exception.
  • 1234letshaveatw 6mo ago
    [flagged]
    • Earw0rm 6mo ago
      It's fine if people choose it. It's not fine if that choice denies other people the choice not to. And there seems to be a lot of the latter. For example, when shopping facilities or hospitals are built so as to be, de-facto, only accessible by automobile, that locks people out of the choice to say no thanks.
      • 1234letshaveatw 6mo ago
        I don't follow, are people then not able to choose to live somewhere that has shopping facilities or hospitals that are built so as not to be only accessible by automobile?
        • mynameisbilly 6mo ago
          We shouldn't have to completely upend our lives to move to the small handful of major cities that provide the infrastructure to exist comfortably without a car. At least in the US, your options are limited to NYC, Chicago, Boston, and maybe a few others (Seattle/SF). And even then, the hard set default in these major cities is car ownership EXCEPT for NYC.
          • iamnothere 6mo ago
            How is Bumfuck MT, population 250, going to support the infrastructure to live comfortably without a car?
            • omegabravo 6mo ago
              as someone who lives there, they're not. Nor is that what is being suggested, it's critiquing car-centric cities where not having a car is needlessly difficult. Population 250 isn't going to ban cars, but the city may discourage driving and provide ample facilities for those who don't have a car.
• masfuerte 6mo ago
  I've always lived in walkable cities. I don't own a car and with pollution, congestion, accident risk, pavement obstruction, etc. other people's cars unequivocally make my life worse. We can argue about whether this is a good trade off, but the claim that cars make everyone's life better is straightforwardly false.
  • TaupeRanger 6mo ago
    Troll post? No, they do not "unequivocally" make your life worse. "Other people's cars" facilitate thousands of aspects of modern living and society that you apparently take for granted. You can choose to ONLY look at the negative impacts, but the comment as stated is ridiculous. The only way you receive food (except from your backyard inner-city garden?) is through people DRIVING. The way you receive packages is by DRIVING. They city infrastructure you enjoy is maintained through skilled laborers and tradespeople DRIVING.
    • masfuerte 6mo ago
      I said cars not driving. Yes, the supermarket needs trucks to deliver the food. It doesn't need cars.
      • lamasery 6mo ago
        Ambulances: good. Trucks: good. Busses, even: good. Cars? Waaaay less clear they're net-beneficial.
        • TaupeRanger 6mo ago
          Traveling to work in a personal car to get to the job that requires you to drive an ambulance: apparently bad? Likewise driving to your trucking job? Also bad? To the grocery store workers? Also bad? To the operations and support employees that provide your internet, your email, every app you use, the water treatment plant, your local government, the restaurants you order from, your insurance company. Yes...getting to work and allowing society to run at levels of efficiency required to support the population is very clearly beneficial.
• armonster 6mo ago
  Their negative effects are much more vast, subtle, and cultural. You could say many of the broad and widespread mental issues we have in the US is the result of automobiles leading to suburbanization and thus isolation of people. It has created an expensive barrier of entry for existing in society and added a ton of friction to doing anything and everything, especially with people. That's not even getting into the climate effects. The upsides of automobiles generally all exist outside of the 'personal automobile', i.e. logistics. These upsides and downsides don't need to coexist. We could reap the benefits without needing to suffer for it, but here we are.
  • nradov 6mo ago
    The upsides of automobiles, or personal mobility in general, are enormous. I can go wherever I want, whenever I want along with other people and cargo. I don't have to wait for a schedule set by someone else, or worry about union strikes. I love my cars!
    • cgannett 6mo ago
      You can go wherever you want whenever you want... until everyone does this and now you are stalled in traffic with no end in sight.
    • jasonmp85 6mo ago
      [dead]
    • kraquepype 6mo ago
      Those are all enormous benefits to you and you alone. The greatest thing about cars are the things they do for you. In order for someone else to have those benefits, they also need a car. If as a society, if we could feel the same way about public transit, bike lanes, sidewalks, that you do about your own personal vehicle - we'd be better off.
      • nradov 6mo ago
        [flagged]
• MisterTea 6mo ago
  > I don't agree - they have some negative effects The problem is we are numb to it. 40,000+ people are killed in car accidents every year in just the USA. Wars are started over oil and accepted by the people so they can keep paying less at the pump. Microplastics entering the environment each day along with particulate from brakes, and exhaust. Speaking of exhaust: global warming. Even going electric just shifts the problems as we need to dig up lithium, the new oil. We still have to drill for oil for plastics and metal refining, recycling and fabrication.
• alnwlsn 6mo ago
  I think it's most obvious in hindsight, probably it was a long time (some decades) before cars were understood to have much of a negative effect at all. Nobody* thought much about air pollution (even adding lead to the gasoline) or climate effects, or what would happen when cities were built enough that they were then dependent on cars, or what happens when gas or cars gets expensive. All they saw was that trips taking a day could now be done in an hour and produced no manure, and that meant suddenly you could reasonably go to many more places. What's not to like? A model T was cheap, and you didn't even need to worry about insurance or having a driver's license. Surely nobody would drive so carelessly as to crash. *well, not technically nobody, but nobody important.
  • acdha 6mo ago
    If you read the period news, pretty much everything except lead poisoning and climate change was well known by the 1920s. Rich people wanted cars but a ton of places had resistance from everyone else to what they correctly recognized as removing the public spaces they used and shifting externalities to, for example, the people being hit by cars. What’s really interesting is that you can find newspaper columns in the 1920s recognizing what we now call induced demand as even by then it was clear that adding road capacity simply inspired more people to drive.
    • bilegeek 6mo ago
      That's also part of the problem. People back then had other systems to make those critiques (or their job didn't require the travel it does now), and now they don't. If alternatives don't exist, and most US people today have never experienced them, there's no demand for them, and you realistically can't expect that demand to come without a massive, grinding slog. Lack of alternatives + political unwillingness to provide them + lack of political pressure to provide them + the massive effort that would be needed to build a system from scratch that has already been dismantled, and infrastructure is in the way because it wasn't a factor + corruption, democratic decline, etc. = most problems around cars in the USA.
      • 6mo ago
• kraquepype 6mo ago
  [flagged]
  • 1234letshaveatw 6mo ago
    I never want to live in a society that views individualism as toxic
    • nehal3m 6mo ago
      You’re equivocating, your parent specifically named an example of toxic individualism, they did not say or imply that individualism is toxic.
      • 1234letshaveatw 6mo ago
        I guess, if you feel that freedom of movement is insignificant
        • kraquepype 6mo ago
          The thing is, you have LESS freedom of movement in a car dependent society. You lose that freedom of movement if: Your car breaks down Your car gets stolen Your car gets totaled You lose your license You can't afford insurance You get too sick to drive You lose bodily mobility Your mental faculties decline If you can't drive, you have to depend on whatever public options there are around you. Good luck.
        • lamasery 6mo ago
          Exactly, that's why fostering an environment where most people can walk out their front door and get to most of what they need day-to-day pretty fast without having to own a car is so important. Freedom of movement. Increased car ownership & use, and increased design of environments to cater to cars, greatly harms that freedom. Ever checked into a hotel somewhere in city-sprawl, looked at your map to find a local shop to pick up some cable you forgot or a toothbrush or to get some dinner, and realized that despite those things being within half a mile you can't realistically walk to them because there's a highway between you and them, so you're stuck unless you pay someone with a car to drive you? Doesn't feel very free.
• spprashant 6mo ago
  The positive effects were immediate, and measurable. The negative effects are delayed, and hard to quantify without all the advancement in climate research since then. If everyone in 1920 knew a 100 years from now there would be climate crisis to reckon with, perhaps a few things would have changed along the way. Today we have a much better understanding of the world, so we have the means to think down the line of what the negative effects of LLMs and course correct if needed.
  • mynameisbilly 6mo ago
    We did know in the 20s. We knew in the 30s. We knew in the 40s. We absolutely knew in the 50s (oil industry funded their own studies on this). We knew before we decided to direct billions into a federal interstate highway system that bulldozed countless communities of color and killed many cities' downtowns and sense of connectedness. I don't see anything positive about being forced to participate in this car-ownership game where 99% of North American cities are designed around car ownership, and if you don't own a car you're screwed. I don't WANT to own a car, I don't want to direct countless thousands of dollars to a car note, car maintenance, gas, etc. I want the freedom to exist without needing to own an absurdly expensive vehicle to get myself around. There's nothing freeing or positive about that unless all you've ever known and all you can imagine is a world in which cities are designed around cars and not people.
    • thfuran 6mo ago
      It was pretty well established scientifically in 1900 that increasing atmospheric CO2 would result in increasing global temperature, but I don't think it was really in the public awareness for many decades. "Global warming" wasn't coined until the '70s.
  • nradov 6mo ago
    Nah. We have no means of predicting the long-term effects of LLMs. Major new technologies have always caused effects that were completely unpredictable during the early phases. Any claim that a much better understanding of the world allows for thinking through the effects is pure hubris.
• intended 6mo ago
  No - as a society we cannot say that its a “vast net” positive. The externalities that harm the commons are not accounted for. We (or lobbyists) resist having carbon costs included in the prices we pay at the pump. Edit: More transportation is good; I am not throwing the baby out with the bathwater, just that our accounting for costs makes things look better than they are.
• mason_mpls 6mo ago
  one trip to Amsterdam will show you how bad our use of cars has been for us
  • deleted 6mo ago
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• rdiddly 6mo ago
  The benefits accrue to the owners of the vehicles. The negative effects are externalized onto everybody else.
• archagon 6mo ago
  I'd say commercial automobiles probably have a net positive effect. (Though their impact on pollution and climate change can't be discounted.) But daily life in walkable and public transitable European cities is so, so much nicer and healthier than in most American cities. I'd trade ubiquitous personal automobiles for that in a heartbeat.
  • asdff 6mo ago
    There's still plenty of cars in europe. Biggest advantage of europe is even the major cities are only so large in footprint, like even berlin is barely over a dozen miles across. Major US cities could be 40-60 miles across. Greater LA maybe over 100 miles across depending on how you measure, all contiguous development. The northeast corridor is nearly contiguous urban/suburban development over a ~450 mile snake from washington dc to boston. Makes a little 10 mile rail line in berlin capture a much greater share of potential trips within the berlin urban area than a 10 mile rail line pretty much anywhere in the US. LA has a light rail line that is over 50 miles long.
• Miraste 6mo ago
  It's not at all clear whether automobiles were a net positive. They are more or less solely responsible for climate change (even emissions not directly from motor vehicles wouldn't be possible without them), which may prove to be the worst mistake in the history of technology.
• tikhonj 6mo ago
  A large part of the effect that cars have come from massive subsidies and policy choices that push for cars over alternative options. The comparison shouldn't be "cars vs literally nothing" but rather "car-dominated infrastructure vs the same investments in alternatives". (Not to say that it's an either-or; the optimal equilibrium might still involve some mix of car investments, just far less than we have now.)
• seer 6mo ago
  I think the right term for highways or most other car roads is “car sewer” - you need very specialised equipment to navigate them, they are deadly, smelly, loud and unpleasant. One of the worst environments humanity has produced. Yes they ship people around somewhat fast. Slower than possible with other methods, and the cost is incredible - economic (much more expensive per passenger than almost any alternative), political (they inherently divide people, dehumanise and make people never really share a public space), health - they reduce lifespan by both lowering living quality as well as directly killing a staggering amount of humans per year). And we have learned how to build better places for humans that do not need these coffins on wheels - if you visit any European capital, and most Asian ones - you will see environments built for humans, not cars - soo much nicer. So cars as a technology have definitely not been beneficial to humanity overall, but it has been somewhat useful to some. I think strongtowns were very good advocates of what places in America could like if you look beyond cars. I personally like the “not just bikes” channel though.
• estimator7292 6mo ago
  What benefit do cars provide that public transit doesn't? How are thousands of individual cars better than light rail? Cars aren't a positive in society. Transportation is the benefit, and cars are the worst possible way to transport people. A functioning public transit system is better in every possible way apart from egotistical arguments like "I don't like seeing poor people on the bus".
  • gosub100 6mo ago
    I don't like urine puddles on the bus or train seats. How egotistical of me being repulsed by human waste.
    • ButlerianJihad 6mo ago
      I've used public transit for the better part of 50 years, including inner-city buses and light rail trains in several cities. And I've literally never, ever seen nor felt nor smelled an actual "puddle of urine" on a seat. Yeah, sometimes the seats were kinda iffy or damp; perhaps someone spilled a drink there. There were often people eating, or even drinking a beer on board a bus. So I often see pistachio shells or a discarded bottle/can behind a seat. But human waste is unheard-of. But any actual urine "spills" would've gotten cleaned up right quick. They simply don't tolerate that stuff. Look at any bus operator and they are tough as nails if someone tries shenanigans. In fact, the craziest times I've had were in ride shares and taxis. I was all dressed up for a funeral one morning, summoned a taxi, and the driver who tried to pick me up was obviously drunk. Another time, I had a medical transport that was summoned, sat at some gas station for 15+ minutes, and when he arrived at my place and I got in the back seat, it was wet and had clearly been through a hasty cleanup, and I could smell urine permeating the vehicle, and it was absolutely nuts, but I said nothing, because it probably wasn't the driver's fault. Probably.
• Gigachad 6mo ago
  They have some positive effect in some situations but the overall effect has destroyed cities and made people fat and isolated. Kind of like how fat and salt are good for you until you over consume. The world has massively overconsumed cars.
• globular-toast 6mo ago
  Not for everyone. If everyone tried to use a personal car at the same time it wouldn't work. It's also worth bearing in mind that when people talk about "the automobile", what they're really talking about is the roads. Automobiles are useless without roads, and there's only so much space. A lot of this comes down to having too much of a good thing. We are really bad at detecting when we've gone past the point of too much, and we're even worse at undoing it once we have.