EDIT: ah, perhaps Carmack knows better and is simply willing to write off $10K for the lulz (from the TFA): I'd like to thank John for suggesting this friendly wager as a fun way to generate STEM publicity.
It has the potential to extract a massive amount of value out of other parts of the chain as well. Aside from software(which in my opinion is just stealing existing value from everyone else) pretty much everything else is minuscule growth. What is the next leap in maintaining growth of the economy? Extract the value out of these blue collar jobs(trucking, taxi driving, other logistics).
Combine this with the rise of simpler designs in EVs + less car ownership you also can bring in mechanics and repair into your value chain and extract that value as well.
I don't see that. Cars are not just transport. They are fashion statements. They are virtue signaling. They are portable storage lockers. I just don't see everyone who owns a car now giving all that up just because the car can drive itself. The traffic/congestion implications of "car on demand" are also staggering, basically doubling the number of trips made as each car delivers itself empty to the next customer. And further reducing the cost of car ownership will only pull more people away from mass transportation/biking/walking.
Flip it around the other way - if you had a L5 car at your fingertips, would you give it up so that you could make a fashion statement, virtue signal, or have a portable storage locker?
Not all car drivers' total cost of car ownership works out less than the Uber fares for the rides they take either....
And as far as “doubling trips”, the car won’t have to drive far to find its next pickup and it may not have to do empty pickups at all with the equivalent of Lyft Line.
If we don’t need parking lots and spaces we can use that real estate for more mass transit.
Also there are numerous other complications that get glossed over. How many L5 cars are going to be available in my area on a popular holiday travel weekend that have a roof rack for kayaks and a 7 pin trailer connector and electric brake controller for my camper? Not to mention giving up the other customizations I enjoy with my current vehicle - removed rear seats for more space/less weight, dash cam, winter tires, etc.
I suspect if self driving comes to fruition it will be a mixture for many people. I can definitely see our 2 car household just owning one car that fits our niche use cases, and then one on-demand cars for daily work trips and filling in the gaps.
Weekend reservations. Just like people do with kayaks today.
> Not to mention giving up the other customizations I enjoy with my current vehicle - removed rear seats for more space/less weight, dash cam, winter tires, etc.
None of this is necessary with robotaxis. You have way more flexibility in terms of space. You won’t need a dashcam. Weight and tires won’t make a difference to the rider.
And you are far too dismissive of the customization/equipment/storage aspect. For just one example, there are vast numbers of parents who have child seats, strollers, diapers, wipes, etc stored in their cars. You can be sure they have no interest in hauling all that stuff around during their shopping or whatever because the robotaxi is off getting another customer.
Environmentalism seems to be "cool af",to the point where not owning a car is virtue signalling.
Yes there will be massive traffic implications. This is probably something that will have to be addressed when it happens. If there are dedicated self driving car lanes, can the cars communicate with each other to help reduce traffic? At the very least pollution will be significantly reduced from today's smog filled cities like LA thanks to the transition to EVs(I don't expect this revolution to occur before the transition to EVs).
Finally, in regards to public transportation: it is already a failure in the US outside a few cities. It is a lost cause in a society that focuses on individualism vs collectivism. In terms of walking/biking, I can see improved access to these services. Can you imagine how a car that never gets tired/drunk will reduce accident and subsequently insurance rates? If the cards are played right, there is an opportunity for a massive transformation of how bicyclists and public walkers are treated in relation to cars.
Sure none of those are as cool as the JohnnyCab but they already exist so require no R&D.
I don't think I'm exaggerating, either. In a city plan like that one, any public transit route is going to, even at optimal configuration, have simultaneously too many stops and too little:
* Too many stops, because the train or bus spends more time stopped than it spends moving, so rides across the city take forever.
* Too few stops, because you still have to walk a mile to actually get where you're going.
Fixing this requires a walkable city, which can be summarized as "don't spend half the land area on parking and stroads."
Lots of people -- including me -- don't believe that it's possible without significant technological advances that look to be extraordinarily expensive. ie open R&D problems.
I will say that if anyone can do this, it will be Waymo/Google. Unlike Tesla, it's not a fraud.
That said, it's notable they're doing this in Arizona. Limited rain, no snow, clear weather all the time.
none of that value accrues to the people who make self-driving cars though (or their investors). It's not like if waymo gets rid of your car for you, they get your parking spot or garage.
It's a huge social benefit but investors are looking for return-on-investment, not making a multibillion loss to improve society.
In this case: the value is captured by the car rental company (which will likely be the car manufacturers themselves). Part of the value comes from the rent that the parking space would have extracted.
>It's a huge social benefit but investors are looking for return-on-investment, not making a multibillion loss to improve society.
Its hard to predict how much value they can gain unless we have more information but I'd imagine if the majority of cars become on demand, then there has to be at least a few billions of dollars in potential value.
In regards to if people will actually take up rental: Since everyone else is moving to a rental model today(streaming services vs owning, cell phone "refresh" contracts, potential apple offering a monthly subscription that always gets you a new phone, car companies offering all included monthly car subscription) by the time this thing rolls out it is plausible that there will be high uptake on a rental model.
This is what is driving the valuation of all these FAANG companies. They are just vacuuming up all the existing value from the rest of the country/world.
I don't know.
ha ha your phrasing is funny. It is more like "sudden unexpected reassignment of ownership of capital".
>and that makes it less likely and not more likely that such an endeavor will be funded (for political reasons).
Yes the powers that be are finally starting to slowly turn against the software people. You see Europe getting tired of them losing every last bit of the little value chain they have left. Meanwhile in the US, elites are getting tired of software empowering people other than themselves and are starting to make moves to try and put the genie back in the bottle. We saw all these tech CEOs being brought up in congress but all that it showed is that they still don't fully get how they have been robbed yet, just that they know that they have been robbed. If they manage to stop the software industry (a big doubt) yes I can see them putting a stop to self driving tech(although China seems determined to steam ahead no matter what). If they do manage to stop self driving that means they have also managed to kill a lot of the software industry as well and with that one of the last few paths to a solid comfortable middle/upper middle class life in this world.
>Unlike say nuclear fusion (safe and practically unlimited energy at an order of magnitude previously unseen is worth the spend and most countries would bite I think), is self-driving worth hundreds of billions in expenditure?
Now you are pulling an exact number out of thin air. Will it really be hundreds of billions in cost? When you talk about "hundreds of billions" you are talking about a noticeable chunk of the US's GDP and the complete GDP of most countries.
Since when has software or even advanced AI research ever cost that much to develop? Don't get me wrong: I believe it will be in the billions or even tens of billions over many years, but this is a cost that that can be absorbed by the companies/government entities that are pursuing this and even tens of billions can be justified by the potential gains.
Correct me If I am wrong but getting to the point where humans are completely unnecessary is still a research problem. We need more research and more breakthroughs which costs a lot of money and is non-linear (you are not guaranteed results). It could very easily take 100B to get to a point where a car can ferry people anywhere they want with zero human assistance (no service personnel to guide out of traps etc).
>Since when has software or even advanced AI research ever cost that much to develop?
Since now? If software is eating the world, you should expect software research to also eat up a lot of money. As the low hanging fruit is picked, further gains are going to cost a lot more.
No actual sharing: At rush hour, I and most of the people around me will need a car to get to/from work. Therefore the rental fleet will have to be large enough to meet this peak demand, and effectively there will have to be a car in the fleet allocated to me (to get me to and from work). So (amortized over time) I will have to compensate the company for the cost of the car, plus the cost of bringing it to me every day, plus overhead, plus profit.
Reduced convenience: A car may not be available immediately when I need/want it. I have to either risk not having a car for some important event or plan in advance and book what I need. The car I'm allocated on any given day may be too small to meet my needs. I have to wait for the car to arrive, can't store my stuff in it, have to take time to install/uninstall car seats, get charged a fee if I leave my empty soda can in it.
IMO, for a regular car user (i.e. someone who currently uses a car for multiple trips per day) moving to an on-demand model will be at least as expensive as and less convenient than owning a car. There might be exceptions in very dense urban environments where parking is very expensive, but those places usually have a good public transit alternative.
I think most people will carpool to work in self driving vans. It'll be so much cheaper than having your own car.
the key part of the bet is the "in major cities". you may have complications on some road without much data, but major cities will be tested to the inch multiple times by then.
of course waymo has huge sensors but 8 years to shrink those doesn't seem impossible.
> Waymo has a staff of fleet operators that oversees the cars and provides guidance—such as confirming that the car has chosen a safe route through a construction zone (Waymo says that its remote operators never drive the cars directly).
As someone who doesn't live in a city with Waymo, do they have backup drivers?
If they do, hopefully they are paying attention and not watching Hulu.
- Heavy snow falling at night on an unplowed, narrow road with ill-defined shoulders. The falling snow ruins visibility, and the smooth, white, unplowed surface of the road makes it super hard to identify where the pavement actually ends.
- In traffic on a busy highway in snow. Berms of slush make sudden movements very dangerous, and there is lots of unpredictable behavior from other cars nearby. Often there are cars/trucks nearby getting stuck, sliding off the road or spinning out. Going slowly enough for conditions might mean others start passing you dangerously. Other times taking a more aggressive approach is required if cars around are going too slowly and don't have the momentum to avoid getting stuck on hills.
In either of those cases I'd likely decide just to not make a trip at all if I knew in advance what it would be like, but sometimes you get caught or otherwise simply have to push through. I guess that's an interesting question: at what point does the car tell you it's too dangerous to go or keep going? Hopefully not while on a back road in the middle of nowhere at the beginning of a two day blizzard.
I ask because I think that there are useful points short of "never makes a mistake."
The alternative to self-driving cars isn't perfection. It is humans, humans who not only vary in their peak performance, but in their context-specific performance. A car that drove better than me when I'm tired is a good thing for everyone.
There's lot of talk about liability, but it seems both wrong and incomplete.
One incompleteness comes up with an "accident" happens that a less-than-perfect self-driving system would have avoided. The legal system might not be willing to penalize in that situation now, but the upcoming Breathalyzer mandate is moving us that direction.
One wrong focuses on "will the author of the self-driving system be held liable?" I think that the liability will go to the driver/owner, as today. If it's better than me and my insurance company is willing to insure me, then why wouldn't my insurance company be willing to insure my use of a self-driving system?
Looking at a busy street makes me almost certain, that true self driving cars will be too expensive to develop.
However, if we accept random deaths caused by autonomous vehicles, there is a chance.
But everyone wants guarantees that cannot be given.
Yeah, but you're going to be making exponentially more money in the markets you have already entered. Investors will be able to do the math rather than envision dreams. If the math adds up, they will be willing to deploy a truly staggering amount of capital to secure the growth.
Also, we are presuming that this will always be a one-sided affair, and that self-driving cars will always have to adapt to roads and not vice versa. I'm almost certain that once self driving cars become a thing somewhere, they will be so desired by everyone else that people will become willing to clean up messy infrastructure elsewhere that would otherwise preclude their deployment.
I feel this is what should be happening, but our economy and our culture prefer Lone Ranger style innovation.
And, as experienced in similar issues with uptime guarantees, the costs are quite different.
But so is the technology used! You don’t just scale-up a single MySQL server for all of Twitter.