Yes, there are more driverless Waymos in S.F(sfchronicle.com) |
Yes, there are more driverless Waymos in S.F(sfchronicle.com) |
...have rideshare drivers guilt-tripped you about working?
Or is this just some kind of reflexive response?
If the addition of a human per se produces guilt, I want to gentle suggest that work on boundaries is in order, and that no amount of automation is likely to fix the underlying problem.
It's OK to meet your wants and needs (such as getting some work done - a want I think nearly all of us share, many of us somewhat compulsively) in the presence of other people. No shame in it.
> Some experiences made him feel slighted, such as when riders discussed personal problems and company secrets on speakerphone, as if there was no one else present.
https://archive.is/2023.04.17-151927/https://www.wsj.com/amp... (WSJ article)
This visual makes it clear how much better it is at driving than humans. There aren't blind spots, it stops at stop signs, it doesn't dangerously speed around corners.
Human drivers create a lot of dangers for pedestrians and cyclists in the city.
A computer is going to be way better than any human at doing the same for a large number of objects simultaneously.
Sounds like a relatively small increase in actual cars over the last year despite a significant increase in use of those cars.
The super expensive base vehicles don't help either. They need lidar hats for the Kia Forte or whatever
https://techcrunch.com/2024/07/23/alphabet-to-invest-another...
If the former, I think a viable model could be to eventually start selling the hardware (along with ongoing software updates, cloud services, maintenance, etc.). Let individuals across the world buy self-driving cars and run them as small businesses through whatever rideshare services they want in whatever locations they want. If there's a way, people will make the economics work. Over time, autonomous vehicle operators could eventually price human drivers out of the market on Uber and Lyft.
I see the current phrase of centrally managing all this as essentially a public beta test. Once the tech is proven and the regulatory environment is mature, the situation will change drastically. The Waymo app/network would no longer be needed at that point, unless it happened to become a big enough cash cow to be worth keeping around.
This job competes directly with San Franciscans who pay taxes and commuting drivers who spend money on food and gas.
When we wipe them out and replace it with a tax-dodging multinational corporation what happens to our local economy?
If money draining out of the economy is a major concern, there could just be a tax on AI rideshares (which given the political environment seems quite likely)
tldr:
* 903,000 vehicle miles traveled during commercial driverless ride-hailing in May (57% increase from April).
* Waymo increased from 250 taxis last August to 300 in May.
So there's almost no new taxis, the increase comes from an increased utilization of the fleet.
Sure, there are a lot of engineers to pay, but the same applies to Uber and Lyft.
the absence of other humans is immaterial with regard to privacy.
> the absence of other humans is immaterial with regard to privacy.
I think my attitude with Uber v. Waymo as very similar to AirBnB v. hotel chains. My trust in AirBnB hosts to not install hidden cameras is much lower than hotel chains.
I'm also skeptical that the "let others use your car when you're not" ever becomes a major model.
Is capital so scarce that this is needed for services to operate? And is decentralized maintenance/cleaning really going to be more economical than centralized operations that benefit from economies of scale?
There are at least 3 people in my building that do it. I also know a handful of cabis that all live in the city.
I don't know how the numbers work out, but if the parent commenter is correct that hardware costs are going to be a bottleneck, it seems reasonable to me that essentially crowdfunding a global deployment would be a way to address that. It could accelerate the rollout and provide economies of scale more quickly than Waymo alone footing the bill, and wouldn't preclude them from still additionally investing their own capital.
Aside from that, it seems like there would be some demand for ownership of autonomous vehicles from people who either don't want to rent them out or only want to do so part-time, and selling the vehicles directly to tap into that would help further increase the scale of both production and robotaxiing.
During this period, it seems like a huge risk for a robotaxi company to play it "fast and loose" with car quality or maintenance. You'd want to maintain exceptional standards on anything safety-critical, and that means you don't want to be seen as outsourcing critical hardware purchases and maintenance to random sole-proprietor businesses. (Maybe somewhere down the line this will change, when the tech is so advanced and accepted that anyone can offer it.)
Obviously I might be wrong. Maybe capital is going to become so tight that it'll be hard for the Waymos of the world to scale up quickly? But at least for the first, say, 7 years of major expansion it feels like safety and quality are going to dominate the conversation.