Comment by kbos87 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by kbos87 | Hacker News Reader

I for one hope driverless cars take a hell of a lot longer than people like Elon Musk expect them to.

First off, I enjoy driving. I identify with the brand of car I just bought. Yes, I have to deal with traffic and competing for parking in my congested city neighborhood... but that's a choice I made because driving and the freedom that comes along with it are, to me, things I value. If you think I'm a small minority, look at all of the car owners in my neighborhood who still choose to own cars despite an Uber being available in 120 seconds, and affordable public transit being a 3 minute walk away. I use both of these services, and I still choose to own a car.

Second - who is to say that autonomous vehicles are the cure for all of our ails? Yes, we'll eliminate some traffic fatalities. We'll also eliminate one of the biggest sources of employment in our society, which I worry will set an entire chunk of the population down a negative path toward bad outcomes like depression, suicide, and drug addiction when they can't sustain the meager existences they already live.

Lastly, I don't like the idea of some self aggrandizing tech entrepreneurs in SV who have decided that they know what the future of the place where I live should look like.

There are some huge positives from driverless cars. You forgot to mention: driverless cars may have a positive impact on the economy (e.g. increasing worker productivity) and on the mental health of the general population (for those whose jobs won't be affected).

There will eventually be a time when cars are truly driverless. None of the passengers will need to be attentive to the car's driving. Once that becomes a reality, many people will have tremendous increases in leisure time during their day. Some people have massive commuting times to get to work.

Families will save money by not having to buy multiple cars. One car could be shared among all the members of a family. If each family member needs to be at different places at different times and all start at the same destination like the family residence, the car could pick up and drop off each person, while still returning to the same start destination. The children could be dropped off at school at an earlier time and you could be picked up later. In the meantime, while you are waiting for the car to return, you could find yourself having extra time to eat breakfast or to finish your coffee by not having to chauffeur anyone else. I find it strange that there will be driverless cars zipping around with no passengers.

I used to drive 50 miles back and forth every day, which ended up being an hour each way. If I can have a car that takes the stress and attention away from having to do the drive, that's 2 hours of my day that I can do whatever I want within the constraints of my car. I can watch a movie. I can read a book. I can get a head start on work. I can socialize with other passengers. I can learn that new programming language that I always wanted to learn. I can learn some other new skill like playing guitar. And, yes, even though driving can be an enjoyable experience, driving can definitely involve stress. Have you ever driven in a metropolitan area like New York City? Driving there can be completely chaotic.

Why does new technology always come with people hoping it fails just because they personally don't want to use it? If you don't want to use driverless cars, then just don't use them! You can still own your human-driven car. Some people still ride horses for fun. Nobody's going to force you to change. Perhaps oneday human drivers will be illegal but that's got to be many decades away at best just because of the lifetime of existing cars that people paid for and want to keep getting value from.

I personally enjoy driving too. It's like a video game but more immersive! However, that's not true for passengers. There are a lot of passengers in the world who get no value from the fun of driving.

"Why does new technology always come with people hoping it fails just because they personally don't want to use it?"

From the parent's parent: "Second - [snip] We'll also eliminate one of the biggest sources of employment in our society."

From [1]: "The trucking industry is the lifeblood of the U.S. economy. [snip] To move 10.5 billion tons of freight annually requires over 3.4 million heavy-duty Class 8 trucks and over _3.5_million_truck_drivers_." (This is the American Trucking Industry's website so they may be biased; I've heard numbers similar to this cited elsewhere)

The parent parent poster can very well decide not to use it (and clear they're going to do just that). Despite that individual's choices the technology can still change the world substantially. It's reasonable to fear the effects of reducing and/or eliminating employment options for millions of people.

----- 1:http://www.trucking.org/News_and_Information_Reports_Industr...

It's a cliche to counter your argument by noting that technological change has always created more jobs than it has destroyed, and usually in ways that people of the era had difficulty imagining, but even if it is different this time, what I fear isn't the loss of millions of jobs, I fear instead that our socioeconomic system won't be able to effectively allocate resources to compensate for those job losses.

Here in the first world we live in times of cartoonishly over the top abundance unparalleled by any other era in history, yet still there are people who don't have enough to cover the basics, and even more who in spite of having plenty believe they don't have enough and are hell-bent on hoarding even more. In evolutionary terms we're not wired for managing abundance, we're wired for managing scarcity, and a failure to adapt to these new circumstances could very well mark our downfall. With or without autonomous vehicles.

>I don't like the idea of some self aggrandizing tech entrepreneurs in SV who have decided that they know what the future of the place where I live should look like.

Does Henry Ford count as a self-aggrandizing tech entrepreneur deciding what the future of the places where people live should look like?

Yes. Very much so. Henry Ford got extremely rich off his business. He then tried to dictate every aspect of his workers lives.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Ford

Well, he loves his car...

All these concerns are trivial compared to the elephant in the room, climate change and CO2 emissions caused by road transport.

To a first approximation, if driverless cars reduce total miles driven by cars, they are good - otherwise they are bad.

I think that's a very fair point, but we should be able to decouple these two things and begin to address CO2 emissions outside the context of driverless cars.

We need to address them in all contexts that significantly affect emissions, including driverless cars.

Humans kill a million people each year with cars.

Driving should be illegal.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com