The chess game afoot in the autonomous vehicle battle is attracting some strange bedfellows between Apple, Google, tesla, ford, Mercedes, Uber, Lyft, Volvo, Nvidia, etc.
The end game is outrageously big, generationally big, and it's going to be a treat to watch the Titans lock horns.
This sentiment saddens me. The thought that philosophy - which begins with the examination of our beliefs and personal opinions through the lens of reason - could be considered impossible to talk about with nuance seems deeply wrong to me.
If that's your experience, you've been exposed to some very wrong, or very modern, philosophers. Philosophy is just talking about being, and a conversation about simulated versus 'actual' reality is the best place for it.
Will a hologram do it? I don't know; real-time holography isn't good enough to evaluate it. Would VR/AR, ocular implants, direct brain stimulation, just a giant wraparound screen, whatever? Also don't know.
I do know that given the choice between having a car drive me to work for a half hour vs. being able to conduct business with anyone in the world without leaving my house, I'd much rather have the latter.
With mass-market AR rolling around the same time frame (imho), telepresence that is actually wide-spread and disruptive will be here sooner than later.
VR is going to be a thing. And it will have a big impact on property prices: No need to go to the office. The manager will be able to walk around a virtual office as they like (perhaps in 'mute' mode where you don't see or hear them!). Collaboration will happen across distributed teams as it has never happened before.
Forget living close to work. Live somewhere you like will be the theme of choosing a property over the coming 2 decades. Long 'nice' locations on a hill, next to the sea, etc. Short 'necessary' locations near a commercial center.
Nothing like working in a panopticon [1]!
The missing piece is having it everywhere. Also maybe the issue of group telepresence at the home.
But even with that, it's still issues of culture and politics and power etc - why would venture capitalists want every startup to be remote ? why would big companies ? Is there difference in the cultures between such companies ?
Saving costs for one thing. Office space is expensive, even more so in areas like the Bay Area. Add to that the cost for stressed or even burned-out employees and the macroeconomic costs caused by traffic and you have quite an incentive for using telepresence instead of having people commute to their place of work every day.
The question is when this incentive will outweigh the incentive for keeping people in an office. Today, there's really no good reason for the latter other than office politics and power play.
Meeting face to face from time to time certainly is important but why not mix those two options? Why not make remote work the default case and only have people meet in person when it's really necessary (this would have the additional benefit of doing away with useless meetings)?
That is:
- Is Apple investing in Didi in order to see a straightforward return on investment?
Or
- Is Apple investing in Didi in order to counter Uber's global expansion, so that they can begin to control the ride-share market themselves?
Their motivation for the investment would say a lot about their intent regarding their automotive plans (Project Titan). If they are doing this simply because they have a mountain of spare change sitting around and would like to put it somewhere to see larger gains while rubbing elbows with China's establishment, it might not signal much about their automotive intent. But if they are making the investment to staunch Uber's expansion into Asia (And maybe India, given Didi's investors' related holdings) in order to secure a spot for themselves at the global table to cash in on autonomous auto service, that's a whole different ballgame.
Edit: Formatting
The actions may be identical but the intent is different.