NY Times Rides in Waymo Robotaxis in SF | Hacker News Reader

NY Times Rides in Waymo Robotaxis in SF

nytimes.com

https://web.archive.org/web/20230821230643/https://www.nytim...

> My ride was so smooth, the novelty began to wear off, turning a trip to the future into just another journey across town.

This is the only nod in the article to how futuristic and revelatory this innovation. The journalists sound so bored.

I wonder if this is a function of how “around the corner” this tech has felt for so long? Have we somehow become jaded to this innovation before it has even arrived?

Were journalists covering advent of passenger flights dedicating the first half of articles to safety and political concerns before accounting for the experience of a “first in a lifetime” ride?

It took just two moon landings for people to get bored.

I don’t think you need a technology to be fully functional for people to tire of it. It just has to be in the news for enough years.

It's true for most people, but you also have fans who never get bored --and in the case of rockets to the moon would witness every launch, if they could --just as some people love watching planes take off and land.

Reminds me that SpaceX has now landed rocket boosters successfully over 200 times. Landing just a single rocket was huge news a few years ago.

The US is launching things into space about 20 times as frequently compared to 10 years ago [1]. Now, most rocket launches don't make mainstream news—I only keep up with things by subscribing to a niche newsletter [2].

[1] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/yearly-number-of-objects-...

[2] https://orbitalindex.com

Every time I watch a booster landing I get goosebumps. And robo taxis still amaze me.

Yeah, people sensitive to technology (and I guess there's a fair share of those on HN) find these things fascinating. Or things that are even more commonplace, like airplanes - that it's really possible to transport millions of people around the world with this speed and reliability is also fascinating if you think about it. But most people just complain about the lack of legroom and the bad food - and would probably do the same on a flight to the Moon too if those would become commonplace enough...

Welllllll - no one likes being uncomfortable for long periods of time. Even if I went to the moon in economy class I would definitely be thrilled, but would complain about the leg room and the (no) food :-)

It’s in the word: news. It must be new.

I felt this way too after my Waymo ride in Chandler, AZ. The ride to my destination was incredible, my family couldn't stop taking pictures and gushing when the car managed to deftly make turns and obey traffic.

The ride back from our destination we were just looking out the window and occasionally glancing at the car's 3D view.

It's a ride in a car, it's boring, even if it's driven by GPS and Lidar.

It's a kind of Rube Goldberg contraption for getting around town..... The most complex gizmo possible for the most mundane of tasks.

humans in a nutshell

Am I supposed to get excited each time I get in one or something ?

In a city as hilly as sf getting around in an electric car is a real benefit that saves a great deal of effort. I’d rather have core bus lines that run on 2-3 minute headways instead, but I’ll take what I can get.

I wonder... Could we sort of mix this self driving car technology with an app that does something like Uber pool and put it on buses?

I am not thinking going to a different state. I'm just thinking local public transit. If we have enough buses and assuming there is no rain or snow, passengers just punch in where they want to go and one of the buses takes them there? I feel like there is so much valuable data getting wasted because Uber and Lyft are private companies with no interest in improving public transit. However, I think this data from my hypothetical bus pool could be used to alter bus routes or even to come up with maybe potential metro lines?

I don't see why it needs to be on-demand. Why can't it be a Zoox-sized vehicle that simply goes up and down the street and arrives every minute? If there was a tiny bus that came down every street every minute, not only would that amount to almost zero traffic, it would also be the most brilliant transit service ever deployed. You wouldn't need the app, or even route planning. You only need the driving tech.

This applies best to central cities with a grid layout of course, but that describes San Francisco well enough.

I love this idea. The previous idea had a fatal flaw, you need enough buses that people don't have to wait too long. How many buses is that? I have no idea. However, if you're just going up and down a street, it is now a much easier problem.

For a fictional Manhattan, New York, just for a thought experiment if we assume spherical cows for a minute, lets say there are twelve straight avenues with dedicated lanes. Let's assume each avenue is 13.5 miles long. It takes 40.5 minutes to drive this at 20 miles per hour. That's 81 minutes for a full circle. So if you need a car every minute, that's only 81 cars, right? Does that mean you could service this entire fictional city with just 81*12 or 972 cars?

Something feels wrong though. Like it feels this is too inexpensive, too good to be true. Just my gut reaction. Thoughts?

I don't think you are missing anything. People who stop and do the math are likely to be surprised by the incredible cost of the existing private car traffic system that we tolerate. Every reasonable option is dramatically cheaper.

People may quibble with the constants in that model. Even after eliminating competing private passenger traffic, a hop on/hop off local bus is probably not going to average 20 MPH. It would probably be more like 5-10 MPH.

It's a fair point, it is sad that we will continue to move around 1tn+ of automobile for one person just to go up and down hills :(

Moravec's paradox. The things humans do easily end up being the hardest problems for machines.

Besides, you could call a smartphone a complicated rube Goldberg machine for the purpose of reading text when you could just buy a newspaper instead, but we don't because they're meaningfully different things.

It's a perception thing isn't it? Like you could imagine things for (human, machine) being (easy, easy), (easy, hard), (hard, easy) or (hard, hard). The first category will be taken for granted, and with the last category no one will fault the machine for not being able to do it. That leaves just the two middle ones as being remarkable.

Driving is far from mundane. Operating a multi-ton machine at deadly speeds, surrounded by other human-operated speeding machines, engages most of our senses and requires total concentration. It's a miracle that it works as well as it does, and it's still the most dangerous activity humans perform on a daily basis. We take it for granted everytime we step into a vehicle that we'll make it out alive. The only reason this seems mundane is because of how often we do it.

So, yes, bring on the Rube Goldberg contraption, if it means it can remove the human factor from driving, and make this activity much safer.

Getting the taxi ride is the mundane thing.

Driverless cars have never been even remotely as unsafe as early commercial passenger aviation.

The alternative to early aviation was taking 2-20 times longer to reaching your destination, with the vast majority of the risk borne by the passengers. The alternative to self-driving is paying a guy less than minimum wage to take you in the same amount of time. And the risks are mostly on pedestrians and first responders.

I was super thrilled the first time I rode in a waymo.

The second trip seemed humdrum.

I've taken over 100 trips now and it is no more exciting than riding the bus

There's a term for this, or at least it's a known phenomena in the AI industry for a while. It's how AI becomes transparent after wide adoption. I'm still amazed at video filters that transform your face in real time, and that is now a common feature in so many apps that most people might not consider AI.

> It's how AI becomes transparent after wide adoption.

I don't like this framing for video filters.

Go back ten years and nobody thought of that kind of visual effect as AI. Then someone made an AI version, and people talked about that for a bit, then they went back to considering the actual effect.

This is very different from situations where a task is inherently thought of as an AI task when people are anticipating it.

Maybe not the best example, although I still remember filters became huge around the same time the AI versions started emerging. Video transcripts are another example, or even text translation at this point. These are widely used forms of AI but it's not what most people are talking about when they talk about AI.

I think a large part is because those uses are much more sensory than thinky. And for those sorts of uses they're good at using a huge corpus to clean up the details but straightforward algorithmic methods can get into the same ballpark.

We just get use to material objects very easily, like colour TV for example, was amazing I don’t own one and would prefer to read a book or surf the net.

If we had flying cars tomorrow morning it would be a wonderful novelty but we’d get bored with them too.

As I have heard said, humanity’s first major experiment with AI was social media recommendations - we lost.

As an SF resident, I’m not at all excited about riding in them as they seem to drive annoyingly, especially right turns. They are slow and position weirdly for turns.

I have contemplated that if a person from 1995 woke up from a coma and saw one they would freak out and then think they are living in sci fi future.

But nope, the cars are mundane and boring. It’s just as google intended in order to be unthreatening. But it also makes them boring so that was a double edged sword

> I wonder if this is a function of how “around the corner” this tech has felt for so long? Have we somehow become jaded to this innovation before it has even arrived?

The end customer experience is nearly identical to having a quiet driver. A taxi is still a taxi.

Someone having their own self driving car would be a big change. Being able to not own a car because of cheap shared self driving vehicles would be interesting if economical, but does anyone really believe anymore that it will be cheap, given how expensive ride share services are?

> does anyone really believe anymore that it will be cheap, given how expensive ride share services are?

I used to own a car in SF, and I definitely spend way less money every month on Lyft + the occasional weekend Getaround than I did on insurance/gas/repairs/the occasional tow or parking ticket when I had my car (not even counting initial acquisition).

Obviously depends on a lot of factors, but it’s not that clear cut.

If robo-taxis actually manage to reduce the number of people that own cars, it also has other advantages - mainly less need for parking spaces.

A robo-taxi driving 24/7 replaces 24 cars driving 1h/day, 23 of which are parked on average.

This would be a huge improvement in resource efficiency.

Only if there weren't rush hours.

Yes, it was an overreach; we won't get 24x in utilization, but we could pretty easily get a few times. And the cars don't need to then park where people live.

Sure, human movement is unevenly distributed, but a robo-taxi can also be used for deliveries during non rush hours.

There is also probably 1 hour of service per day needed.

You won't get 24x efficiency, but 15x is good enough.

I'd assume so?

The biggest expense has to be the drivers time right?

Maybe--but probably not to the degree that everything else is almost too cheap to meter. I think the IRS rate is something like $0.67 per mile these days which is, while arguably high as a marginal cost, probably a pretty good place to serve as a baseline for self-driving costs (assuming the cost of the vehicle isn't significantly higher).

I mean not really. I would imagine most public transit journeys are less than a few miles in the most part, so at $.67/mi you are going to see public transit become very poor in comparison to a bus or train fare.

>I would imagine most public transit journeys are less than a few miles in the most part

That's because local public transit is mostly not viable unless you have densities that mean most trips are only a few miles and pickups/dropoffs are nearby start and destination points.

If I were to do the 30 minute drive into my nominal office (which is a very typical commute outside of cities), you're looking at a good $25/day commute cost (ignoring any deadheading to get a car to pick me up on either end). People generally ignore the cost of routine driving.

The exciting part to me would be the cost. If about 50% or taxi fares to to the driver, add some more expenses for more capital in the car and other measures you're looking at a totally different price point where it becomes more economical for things like commuting. And there would eventually be other efficiencies when cars are more designed as driverless that could theoretically drive the cost even lower.

Actually, this is the biggest problem and what government needs to be focussing more on.

If the price drops 50% (or more) then you will have a huge surge in demand for cars. This will cause much more congestion than we currently have which will become completely intolerable.

Really we need to see some tax applied to miles driven by all vehicles which pushes this up and suppress demand - maybe it could only apply to robotaxis at first (would probably be much more palatable politically as well). This could then be used to spend on public transit, so you don't see a huge dropoff in ridership of public transit to robotaxis.

The realization a self-driving car is not infinitely exciting is how bubbles pop. This particular bubble was formed mostly by Tesla hyping up the coming of their fleet of millions of robotaxis that will turn every other car immediately obsolete, “like owning a horse”, and Teslas will 100x in price, and Tesla will be the most valuable company in the world. And all that, over a product they still can’t ship (and won’t).

The reality of robotaxis is that they’re happening but gradually, not overnight. There will be problems, also benefits. And it’ll be an OK business. And humans will be kicked out of another job only they could do.

In a way it’s not good news. It’s bad news. Because we think not being able to work this or that means we’ll be given more responsibility at a higher level. But we’re still apes barely qualified to drive a car. How does that magically make us capable of higher jobs? It doesn’t. As robots do more, the expectations of humans are also to do more. And most will fail.

Your Luddite take is profoundly wrong, and has been consistently proven wrong at every single technological turn in history. We have more robots than even today, and yet a labor SHORTAGE.

Eliminating the tedious and dangerous task of driving is an enormous benefit to humanity that will save 30,000+ lives a year in the US alone. We will end the misery caused to millions from injury and tragedy, and the billions of dollars lost. We can rethink our cities and move parking to the periphery. New jobs will emerge to replace long distance trucking and taxi driver (two jobs that didn't really exist just 100 years ago). Humanity will benefit.

You’re not thinking through what you’re talking about, unfortunately that’s typical.

Think about it, how can there be a “SHORTAGE of jobs”, when we have over 8 billion people on this planet? Are we running out of people in general? No. Is everyone employed and happy? No.

So we are short of the kind of increasingly mythical people with 20 years experience in some tech that came out yesterday, we’re short of people with IQ 180 and above with five diplomas, people with certain increasingly higher level of requirements. PRECISELY the kind I’m talking about.

Most people do not qualify for those jobs. They never will. They can’t. They’re not seeking those jobs as they don’t understand them (the employers often also don’t), and if they saught them they would not be given to them. Do you understand what I’m talking about?

More and more people will be in the pool that do not qualify. The more “shitty jobs” you take out of the jobs pool we have available for humans, the more “shitty unemployed people” there will be. Eventually there will be billions of “shitty unemployed people”, because what passes as moderately intelligent person today will be just another shitty person 10-20 years from now, who better brush up and get those five diplomas and his IQ to 180 and otherwise how dare they ask for a job?

There is no such situation where dumb people rule over smart machines. If the machines are better then the people become useless. Many aren’t good at much. They’re decent people but just happen to be best at “store clerk”. Those are maybe some of your friends, parents, siblings, children. Your wife. They don’t get math, and find it hard to remember too much. Those people are doomed. And that’s most people.

Your elitist attitude is only further stressed by the incorrect reference to the Luddites. They embraced technology with open arms. Their bosses told them no one will be fired, only promoted, everyone will be rich. Then they got fired. They protested and were subdued with violence and prison time. That’s the story of the Luddites. They didn’t hate machines. But the machines made them useless. So they were gone from the picture.

You think you’re not like them, you’re better. You’re one of the smart ones. But you’re precisely them. Your don’t know your history so you’re doomed to repeat it.

I’m not against machines. I love machines. I make machines. I program machines. I evolve machines. I’m sympathetic to any system in this universe, be it smart, dumb, protein, silicon and metal. But it’s incredibly awkward to me to see people cheer for their own obsoletion. We really have no idea what we’re doing. We’re simply the scorpion riding on the frog’s back and following our nature. We can’t escape our nature.

Your points are:

- People are doomed after driverless system breakthrough

- 5 diploma requirement for a new job

- only rich with benefit from technology

- whoever thinks this is not neat thinks they are smarter than average Joe

How does one even address this?

Those are not my points. I know it’s a long comment bordering on a post transitioning into a rambling, but if you don’t want to spend the time to read it and understand it, at least don’t produce a superficial strawman version of it.

The most important part to understand is that systems operate on a “use it or lose it” principle. This is why no one looks like Arnold while sitting in a chair all day, even if they eat all the protein.

If we stop being useful nothing can stop what we created from chewing us up and spitting us out. And all this while everyone involved may have the best of intentions even.

And most people can’t adapt that fast or at all to this situation. It has happened before, many times and it keeps happening at larger and larger scales, in shorter and shorter periods of time.

The Aztec and Inca didn’t adapt to the European tech and get “jobs”. They went extinct.

The first point you’ve extracted is too narrowly focused. I’m not OP but I believe they were making a general point about increasing automation, not a specific point about driverless cars.

I agree with everything the OP has written. I had a similar revelation myself not long ago. I think that I’m one of the smart ones and that I’ll okay, I’ll thrive even. But what about stupid people? Stupid people deserve to have happy lives too.

Your reasoning seems logical at first glance so I can understand why you would come to your conclusions.

History shows you to be wrong. It doesn't take a high IQ to use a machine to hugely increase your productivity. And in some cases the machine is easier to operate. I'll take a car over a horse any day.

Salaries for low skill jobs in the US are going up. UPS drivers now get paid close to $200k. The labor shortage is not just for highly skilled, high IQ people.

New technology has only ever resulted in people doing more productive work. That might change. No one can predict the future. But based on history we will continue to see quality of life improve thanks to productivity increases, and employment to stay high.

The one change I would like to see is workers organizing to capture more of the profit and productivity changes they help create. UPS drivers did it. More of that means we all share in the wealth of productivity increases.

What quality of life? Most families need three or more jobs to cover basic needs of life like housing, healthcare, food and travel. Salaries are rising. The value of those salaries is dropping.

We are more interconnected and more surrounded by tech. This is not the same as higher quality of life. It means more tech. Which is the subject. Oh I can watch someone pretend to be NPC on the other side of the globe on a pocket box. Quality of life.

I think it’s telling people want a vacation away from tech and “modern life”. Why would they go for lower quality of life as a vacation?

I already mentioned the problem of masssive wealth gaps indirectly. Us workers need to organize to recapture the profit that used to be shared with us. UPS workers just negotiated $170,000 TC. I think that's enough to live a nice life, especially if two people are contributing to a household.

Productivity has increased by a lot. It's up to voters and workers to get their fair share of those gains. The uber wealthy are not going to willingly give it up.

> UPS drivers now get paid close to $200k.

The key being that UPS drivers are unionized.

If your argument is that the increasingly obsolete humans need to band together and take wealth back from the owners of the robots, then I agree.

The problem is that history shows there is no such thing as humans banding together and taking things back. As a group. The group has new “benevolent leaders” emerge, then they take everything and stop being benevolent very quickly, if not instantly. Animal Farm anyone? Animal Farm. Still relevant.

That sounds to me like you're repeating dogma, but even if it's true, that's fine by me. I'd rather my union steward was getting rich (for some low value of 'rich') than my CEO. Only one of them is on my side.

It’s interesting, because this is how your response sounded to me. Is there no dogma about how everyone should group together and take back the means of production? There is a very large, prominent movement about this response to capitalism.

My point is, that theory and practice differ, and when they differ it’s not the practice that is wrong, but the theory.

Every time people banded together to take the means of production, it resulted simply in destruction, instant corruption and a new autocratic regime built around the toughest thugs. The utopia does not occur. So clearly this is not the solution for solving our problems. There are problems. And there are solutions. But you need to search elsewhere.

Your union leader is not necessarily on your side. Even if they are, not for long. The system decides how they act, and power corrupts. Watch the strike in Hollywood. Watch how the previous strike in 2007 caused the present situation in 2023, and watch how the union will end up dissolving itself as more and more people will start leaving it. I’m not happy about this. I think workers need to be able to band together in groups and negotiate in groups (called companies, for example). I’m not convinced it should be one all encompassing mob-like group with no alternatives, but that’s just me.

Ok, well, as long as we're on the subject of the distinction between theory and practice I'm not worried that unionizing Amazon warehouses will bring about a new USSR.

I've worked union jobs and I've worked non-union jobs: the union jobs paid better and came with better benefits than their non-union equivalents. QED.

Unionized Amazon warehouses are the strongest kick in the butt that Amazon needs to automate this entire union out of existence. Once again. See Hollywood. Strike. “No AI” said the signs. Result? Studios amping up AI hiring like crazy.

Humans are into humans. But capitalism isn’t, that much. It doesn’t care about what substrate it’s made of. Its soul is made of money.

Unions make things better for workers in the short term because a business can’t adapt that quick. It’s like a racket. Same like when a lone worker faces few gigantic corporations and they all offer bad jobs. It’s like a racket. But rackets don’t last. Adaptation kicks and the layers shift. And AI is the biggest adaptation ever. It adapts us out of being necessary. Human leverage drops to near zero and with it the union leverage, also.

“Humans are into humans. But capitalism isn’t, that much.”

I wish more people on HN would understand this. Capitalism isn’t your friend. It give you short term wins but in the end, the negative externalities can add up hurt everyone including the vast majority of those who were winning initially.

At first, in all transactions, A and B win at the expense of C. Ancaps only look at A and B being better off. But in the end, almost everyone is a C, and the externalized costs add up for them all.

We need to switch to a more sustainable system before it’s too late. Capitalism’s negative externalities are also destroying the environment and running up an ecological credit card that future generations will have to pay.

“The bill always comes due!” - Mordo (great philosopher)

I wouldn't count your AI chickens yet. Path dependence is real and SAG/WGA are smart to pick this fight today not in 5 years' time. If they play their cards right now, while they have leverage, then they will gain additional legal/contractual leverage for the future.

Slavery and child labor were once common and economically lucrative, today they're very rare in the developed world. It's simply not true that humans can never choose to collectively reject an economically compelling option.

But don’t you know that organizing labor and giving safety nets like universal health insurance to people leads directly to shortages, breadlines, massive government repression and the entire population eating their cats?

Everyone should be aware of the TTV of these activities (“Time to Venezuela”) and refrain from unionizing.

</sarcasm>

Anyway, unionizing will only hasten the R&D investments to replace human labor. We should instead have an automation tax on the corporations and have a UBI. We won’t need unions or minimum wage laws. Even then, though, the UBI will always be less than what the corporations would spend on people. But we have to get that in place before demand human labor drops like a stone, and the governments simply won’t care about mass unrest because they’ll control everyone with surveillance, drones and new laws.

> My point is, that theory and practice differ, and when they differ it’s not the practice that is wrong, but the theory.

Your socio-economic theory is at odds with what happened in the so-called western world over the last three centuries, but to understand why, one would need to step away from over-generalizing just the most dramatic parts of history, and study the boring bits as well.

Would’ve been nice if your comment had any specific argument except a verbose take on “you’re wrong, because reasons”.

It's more like "you're wrong, because your theory does not even correspond to evidence we have around us." The reasons why your doom-laden prognostications did not inevitably come to pass are not, however, reducible to a paragraph or two.

As for being verbose, compare it to the post I was replying to.

Once again you forgot to even hint what evidence you’re talking about.

It’s like you’re eager to win an argument, you want that reward, so you’re posting, but you’re too lazy to actually make an argument. So you kind of keep posting half way and declaring yourself a winner because “everything around” proves you right about… something. It’s kind of funny.

For example, your claim that “Every time people banded together to take the means of production, it resulted simply in destruction, instant corruption and a new autocratic regime built around the toughest thugs” is falsified by the history of Western Europe. If it actually were the case, Western Europe would now resemble North Korea, but instead, the means of production is well-regulated by democratic governments.

I haven't seen any evidence in any of your comments. You try to persuade (which is not evidence), but I haven't been persuaded.

At least it's clear what I'm trying to persuade you about.

As for evidence, frankly like this other guy says "it's all around us" but you need to translate what happens to systems (species, civilizations, ecosystems, nations, companies, industries) in smaller scale, and translate it to a globalized economy. Indeed, by the time we have evidence that our entire species is potentially screwed... we'll no longer have use of the evidence.

It's the same story as climate change. I actually think it's quite poetic both of those are hitting us at the same time. COVID was a bit early and a bit weak, but I'm sure another will come, to make the perfect triple storm.

It is not entirely clear to me exactly what you are trying to persuade us about, though it is quite possible that we share a number of concerns. I am not, however, going to be persuaded of that on the basis of a socioeconomic theory that ignores, and attempts to contradict, the complexity of recent history.

Your theory, which you may find so evident to you that you won't bother saying it out loud, is that unions are bad for capitalism.

The real world during the 1900s, if anything proved the opposite. It's not that all unions by definition always are great, that could be said for anything and should be obvious. It's that treating workers as an integral part of the business, with the obligations that come with rights, wins in the marketplace every time.

All rich countries, at least in the western hemisphere, became rich because of worker's movements, not in spite of them. Other countries have been pushed into the businesses with the slimmest margins where there is no innovation.

The truth is that innovation and worker's rights won. When arguing that an ideological map is right despite real world data, at least make those arguments against the same reality as we live in, so everyone involved will have a chance to understand how the ideal system measures up against their experience.

This is easy to demonstrate as false. The US Revolution and many others that followed put far more power into the hands of the average person. And unionized workers earn more almost everywhere you go. Union leaders probably do take more than they deserve, but not as much as the company owners would if you were negotiating as an individual against their organized management and legal team. So yeah, you do have to pay someone to lead your organization. But going without an organization is kind of nuts when the other side pays for one.

And being efficient enough and providing a service that's valued enough that both the companies doing the shipping and the people receiving the packages are willing to absorb the labor costs. If residential delivery cost a lot more/was less convenient (as it generally used to be), people would be much more inclined to just go into stores.

Yes, we mostly agree. The part I disagree with is humans being obsolete. We don't manually weave cloth anymore. Which is why we can afford far more clothing than folks 100 years ago. The jobs are there. That most of the profit from that work goes to the uber wealthy is the problem.

The actual key being that they get paid somewhere around half that. Other industries don't calculate the overtime potential or benefits in the total compensation figure but of course this gets clicks and misinformation spreads like wildfire.

I was using this article for my source [1] which says:

"By the end of the new contract, full-time UPS delivery drivers will make an average of $49 per hour, which works out to nearly $102,000 per year, assuming a 40-hour workweek, 52 weeks a year. Those employees are guaranteed an eight-hour workday, a UPS spokesperson told CBS MoneyWatch.

Drivers also receive $50,000 in benefits that include health, welfare and pension contributions, the spokesperson said."

I think a base salary of $100k is a decent living for non-skilled labor. And the pension contributions, whatever they are, are reasonable to include. I'm also noting that the end of the new contract is in 5 years, so maybe it won't be as good of a living as I'm thinking, depending on inflation.

In any case the important point is that UPS cut earnings forecasts because of this which means that workers did capture more of the profits that would have gone to owners. I consider it a win. Could it have been a bigger win? If most other workers were organized, I think so. With so many workers negotiating as individuals in the US, companies still have the upper hand as a whole. Workers continue to underestimate their value to the economy both in terms of labor and as consumers. The rich need labor, the rich need consumers. We should be getting a bigger piece of the huge profit pie that productivity increases result in.

[1] https://www.cbsnews.com/news/ups-drivers-170000-pay-benefits...

>which works out to nearly $102,000 per year, assuming a 40-hour workweek, 52 weeks a year. Those employees are guaranteed an eight-hour workday

Exactly the point I was making. They’re making $100K which is decidedly not almost $200K. This isn’t to say that it isn’t good, but every well paying job includes pension or 401k matching, paid time off, health insurance, sometimes education reimbursement, etc. It’s (intentionally, on the part of “journalists”) misleading to quote $170K when that is not how compensations are compared in the US. Rounding up a fudged number to $200K is even more misleading. Quoting a number including 5 years of merit increases and inflation is even more misleading. The numbers are good and impressive on their own, there is no need for this fudgery except to drive clicks.

I would rather use TC because health plans and pensions vary from company to company. So the number I'd go with is around $150,000.

Right of you to call out the rounding up though. The article was exaggerating with $170k, and to remember that number I had mentally noted almost $200k. I looked for the article later to refresh my memory. You're right that any discussion on this deserves more accuracy than I started with.

The important thing to me is for us workers to recognize how to get a fairer share of the increased productivity. Unions have delivered throughout history.

Past results are not an indicator of future performance. There is no economic law that guarantees human labor will always be in demand. 70 years ago one man could sustain an entire household on one paycheck, his work was valued and the company man worked decades until he got a pension. Today, both sexes work long hours just to afford a tiny apartment, they have to switch jobs every couple years and even started doing the gig economy on the side to get by. Until robots replace them.

Sure, some humans will be more productive, but then we’ll need less of them. And with AI, it’s easier to just have the AI learn the new “irreplaceable” skills much faster than retraining millions of humans.

Horses and oxen were very useful throughout history, until the car and tractor was invited. Today the number of horses and oxen is at an all-time low. No amount of unionizing by horses would change that.

> Past results are not an indicator of future performance.

Sure, but we can't predict the future, so it's the best model we have.

> Today, both sexes work long hours just to afford a tiny apartment, they have to switch jobs every couple years and even started doing the gig economy on the side to get by.

What you've missed is that productivity (as measured by GDP) has gone way up. Someone captured those profits. Which is why we see such massive wealth gaps.

> Sure, some humans will be more productive, but then we’ll need less of them.

This has never happened before. I could be wrong and maybe it will happen, but the most technologically advanced country in the world has companies competing for workers and salaries going up. This is in the face of massive automation.

> And with AI, it’s easier to just have the AI learn the new “irreplaceable” skills much faster than retraining millions of humans.

> No amount of unionizing by horses would change that.

If horses were the ones buying your products and creating your wealth, then they would actually have a pretty big say. What us workers fail to understand is just how essential we are to the economy. We need to organize and demand our fair share of the productivity gains.

> What you've missed is that productivity (as measured by GDP) has gone way up. Someone captured those profits. Which is why we see such massive wealth gaps.

Exactly! That is what happens under capitalism. Which is why we need safety nets in place that can grow and be funded by taxes on automation. The safety nets should redistribute money equally to all citizens. We can also fund them by other pigovian taxes, like those on fossil fuels at the point of extraction — Alaska does exactly this with its Permanent Fund.

> This has never happened before

AI that can replace humans at most tasks within a couple years of R&D hasn’t happened before.

But when it came to machine labor, the farms were all automated and the factories were all automated. We know what happens. It’s not like humans got the windfall — because the only way regular get money in capitalism is through wages.

> If horses were the consumer

The ones unionizing are the labor producers, so not a valid analogy

> AI that can replace humans at most tasks within a couple years of R&D hasn’t happened before.

We've seen absolutely massive automation in manufacturing, and as you noted even in farming. And no massive unemployment as a result. I just won't believe that AI will do anything more than hugely increase productivity until I see the unemployment. People have predicted massive unemployment with every new technology advance. They were wrong every time.

> The ones unionizing are the labor producers, so not a valid analogy.

They are also the consumers. How are the wealthy supposed to get that way or even stay that way with no consumers?

No massive unemployment? The Great Depression lasted quite a while! And we only got out of it by after a decade of building up the next job sector of things for people to work in (see three sector model in economics)

Compare pictures of farms before and after automation and count the number of farmhands. Before automation, 20% of American jobs were farm-related!

Read Grapes of Wrath and other books by John Steinbeck… you won’t say there was no unemployment after that.

The Great Depression was largely caused by loss of farm jobs. As the farmhands migrated to the cities it took a decade to build up the manufacturing centers to give them all jobs. In the meantime, one third of the banks failed and the money supply they issued. The Fed didn’t bail them out and we got a depression.

Oh, and the hugely increased productivity led farmers to be engaged in a race to the bottom, trying to make up for falling prices with ever-larger harvests. The land became depleted and this led to the Dust Bowl as it simply blew away in dust storms.

Capitalism does this around the world. TODAY, one third of arable farmland has undergone desertification, likely due to similar economic factors.

This is wayyy more pressing than global warming: https://amp.theguardian.com/environment/2017/sep/12/third-of...

> How are the wealthy supposed to get that way and stay that way with no consumers?

The wealthy can get that way without needing to pay much to human PRODUCERS. That’s the point.

If the only way an average person can get money and be a consumer is to sell their labor, then they will get less purchasing power over time. Yes things might get cheaper due to technology, but not everything (eg rent) and also the money supply could be inflated so prices could also rise due to that. The government COULD be giving all that money to people as a UBI but it usually exacerbates inequality by propping up stock markets etc.

Also, if wealthy people control all the resources and infrastructure then they can easily extract rents from all kinds of ecosystems. But even if the people on the ground barely have any money, the wealthy can just pay corporations for their own needs (eg robots doing their work). The owners of the corporations are wealthy and they cover the cost of robots.

We already see this in rising inequality … the wealthy didn’t need the poor to consume their products. Many of them could just have the middle class and wealthy consume them. (Look up Plutocracy.)

Having said that… if the automation could be made accessible to all, then everyone would be increasingly a consumer of products made by robots. Tax the robots, and give the money to the people unconditionally, so they can consume more.

> The Great Depression lasted quite a while!

It wasn't caused by a big advance in technology. [1]

"There is no consensus among economists and historians regarding the exact causes of the Great Depression. However, many scholars agree that at least the following four factors played a role."

1. The stock market crash of 1929. 2. Banking panics and monetary contraction. 3. The gold standard. 4. Decreased international lending and tariffs.

Nowhere are technological advances mentioned. You can probably find an article that mentions it, but productivity increases as a cause are considered heterodox theory.

> If the only way an average person can get money and be a consumer is to sell their labor, then they will get less purchasing power over time.

Not if they are as organized and lawyer up like the folks they are negotiating with. And the numbers say you are wrong. Purchasing power has stayed about the same over the past 40 years. [2] The real problem is that workers increasingly negotiate as individuals against an organized management team who has the goal of extracting more profit for the owners, and less profit for the workers. Organized workers have far more negotiating power, but workers fail to join in and use this advantage. Who is to blame for that other than us workers ourselves?

If workers had become more unionized over the past 40 years, they would have captured more of the profits and wealth gaps would be smaller. We can see exactly this with UPS announcing lower earnings for owners in the coming years due to unions winning higher salaries.

> The wealthy can get that way without needing to pay much to human PRODUCERS. That’s the point.

How? Where exactly is the money going to come from if the producers don't have any money to spend? From where does this money magically appear and who is buying the products that the wealthy are selling?

[1] https://www.britannica.com/story/causes-of-the-great-depress...

[2] https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2018/08/07/for-most-...

It may be heterodox (like Einstein’s theory of relativity vs the luminiferous aether theories) but I think the facts are there. I follow more the thinking of Joe Stiglitz and the Three Sector Model of economics to arrive at that conclusion:

https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2012/01/stiglitz-depression-...

> 70 years ago one man could sustain an entire household on one paycheck

There are just as many "one salary sustains an entire household" jobs today as there ever were in the past. More in fact. The factory job that provides enough for the whole family was only ever a reality for a tiny, tiny portion of humanity. The vast majority of people, even the vast majority of americans did not have access to those jobs. Even the "glory days" of american manufacturing were filled with abject poverty.

> Horses and oxen were very useful throughout history, until the car and tractor was invited. Today the number of horses and oxen is at an all-time low. No amount of unionizing by horses would change that

This ignores that horses have zero political power. No one is working to make their lives better.

Average family income in 1950 was $3,300, according to estimates issued today by Roy V. Peel, Director, Bureau of the Census, Department of Commerce.

The average income across all occupations in the USA today is $61,900. The average household incomes averaged to $87,864

According to recent data, the average price for a home in 1950 was just $12,000, while the average price for a home today is upwards of $540,000.

It turns out that a typical “household” back then had one breadwinner make the vast majority of the money. Today the households are often single-parent, or both parents working

So I don’t think that only a factory job could provide for a whole family back then. But my point is that whatever the corporation was (law firm, or whateve) they weren’t going to lay people off because the automation and AI wasn’t there. Now there increasingly is. The number of people who hold a job for 20-30 years at the same company is much smaller than back then.

I guess the main factor is the diminishing returns of a glut of products (crops in the farm example, or AI-generate content now) which devalues that specific industry’s products and makes everyone in a race to the bottom, so humans are priced out of a job. If you do this across enough industries (and many today are electronic or manufacturing) that means humans are no longer cost-effective to employ for any except a diminishing number of positions. What will we do with the growing unemployed class?

Its not just tech, there is a shortage in the trades and skilled labor

> Is everyone employed and happy? No

Relatively speaking, it’s the best it has ever been in the history of humanity.

Of course it’s hard to measure happiness and we’ll never be perfect but we have greater safety, lower violence, more food, more work, etc etc.

I wonder if people had succeeded in stopping the tractor because it displaced workers.

Of course it displaced workers. Workers who now do more valuable work. Or even less work altogether.

100 years ago, retirement was very rare. Now people retire and live 10-30 years without work.

Robots and automation will help this trend, not hurt it.

Of course as a programmer I’ve been making myself obsolete for decades and just moving onto cooler problems. Only stupid programmers worry about “job safety” and creating brittle software that requires them to be around forever.

I don't disagree that we live in a relatively good time right now, but I do wonder if this is the best it has ever been in the history of humanity.

We have more pollution (air, water, noise, light), more cancer, more heart disease, more obesity, more addiction, more suicide, much worse environmental impact, and so on (though these are the worst that I can think of off the top of my head).

Your points about safety, violence, money, etc, are all good, and there are many other really positive things about the present, for sure, but it is not clear to me that we are absolutely better off than at any time in the past.

There were some bad times, and there is too much nostalgia by well-off people for past times when they were well-off while most others were not.

I think that things are in general pretty good right now. Modern medicine alone makes me prefer to live now than wish I were some scruffy medieval peasant. We should recognize that we have paid a huge price for how we live now, and that price might not have been worth it. I don't know how we judge one way or the other.

Anyway. I wish I could see the stars. I wish there was still real wilderness. I wish that PFAS weren't almost literally everywhere. I wish farmers selected for flavor rather than size or density. Etc.

Now, the 1990s! That was the best time in human history. ;)

Not interested in commenting on the rest but do we have more cancer or are we better at detecting cancer?

No both the absolute and rate of of cancers has increased. Even if you ignore environmental factors older people get more cancer and we have more older people today. Age adjusted cancer rates for some kinds of cancers have dropped because fewer people smoke etc, but it’s not universal across all cancers.

We do also detect more cancers early, but that also makes cancer treatment look better. Aka 5 year survival rates look better when you start the clock sooner.

You touch upon it in your comment and giving it zero weight for some reason: you can’t develop most types of cancer if you die at 30 (extreme example).

Because it’s irrelevant when the global age adjusted cancer rates are increasing overall.

An increasing number of people under 30 are developing cancer. America is only 4% of global population, if you want a better picture look at China and India which have both skyrocketed pollution levels recently.

Also we live longer so it’s more likely to detect and die from cancer.

Even over 100 years ago is true incidence of cancer higher? Not to mention why we would think we have more cancer now than 1000 years ago. Or perhaps we have more cancer but that’s because people aren’t dying of other things first, so it doesn’t matter we have more cancer.

This is the kind of counterproductive examples I find people arguing about. Of course there are more vehicle accidents now, but that’s because there’s more people driving, not that cars are more dangerous.

Cars have absolutely gotten more dangerous as they’ve increased in size — for anyone outside of one.

Yet vehicle mortality rate has decreased [0] and pedestrian mortality rate is a bit trickier as over the past 40 years it dropped and then climbed back to where it was in absolute numbers [1]. So it’s definitely less dangerous based on the rate of drivers, passengers and pedestrians who die each year.

Please share any better metrics you like for showing increase in danger.

[0] https://www.iihs.org/topics/fatality-statistics/detail/yearl...

[1] https://www.axios.com/2023/06/23/pedestrian-deaths-cars-suvs...

I think you have your rose-colored glasses on when looking at the past.

Air pollution: down since the 1990s. [1][2][3]

Water pollution: down since the 1990s. [4][5]

Noise/light pollution: definitely up since the 1990s, agreed there.

Cancer: US deaths are way down since the 1990s, though it's cheating a bit since that was the top of the smoking-related spike in lung cancer. Still, other cancer deaths are way down since then too. [6][7] (Edit: worldwide this looks worse and things have increased lately, see: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/number-of-people-with-can...)

Heart disease: can't find long term stats on this quickly, but cardiovascular mortality is way down. [8]

Obesity, addiction, and suicide: certainly up.

"Much worse environmental impact," I think the decline in air and water pollution makes this debatable.

Climate change is a bit of a weird one, because it's definitely getting worse, but at the same time, the worst-case scenarios (greenhouse gas emissions continue unabated into the indefinite future) is becoming less likely. [9] So the derivative is bad, but the second derivative is good.

[1] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/death-rates-from-air-poll...

[2] https://www.slowboring.com/p/wildfires-have-partially-revers...

[3] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/death-rates-from-air-poll...

[4] https://www.slowboring.com/p/the-good-news-on-americas-clean...

[5] https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/water-and-sanitation?ta...

[6] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/cancer-death-rates-in-the...

[7] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/cancer-death-rates?tab=ch...

[8] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5268076/

[9] https://www.slowboring.com/p/people-need-to-hear-the-good-ne...

> Cancer: US deaths are way down since the 1990s, though it's cheating a bit since that was the top of the smoking-related spike in lung cancer. Still, other cancer deaths are way down since then too. [6][7] (Edit: worldwide this looks worse and things have increased lately, see: <a href="https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/number-of-people-with-can...)

> Heart disease: can't find long term stats on this quickly, but cardiovascular mortality is way down. [8]

And these two are linked. If most people get their cancer in their 70s, but they're dying of heart attacks in their 50s, anything that stops people dying of heart attacks is going to increase the number of people getting cancer.

I don't have any quibble with your stats. Thanks for supplying them.

I was kidding about the 1990s. :)

Have you seen the maps that show where PFAS are? (Nearly everywhere.) Micro and macro plastics? (Pretty much everywhere.) Pollution (air and water) is absolutely up from pre-industrial levels.

Look, I am really not saying that now is worse than any time in the past. I think things are pretty good right now, except for a few real tragic issues and localities. All I am saying is that I am not 100% sure that now is undeniably better than at any time in the past of human history.

I think your stats make a pretty compelling case that the story is a bit mixed at the moment, especially depending on how someone might define what the best time to be alive would entail.

(Really, the 90s thing was just a joke.)

Do we have a labor shortage, or do we have a shortage at the wages companies are prepared to pay? There's a largely unexamined assumption built into capitalism that there exists a market clearing wage where humans will be incentivized to provide labor and owners will reap a profit. But what if that assumption is breaking down? My most "valuable" skill is writing software, but it may soon be the case that ChatGPT 9 can do that much better and cheaper than me.

What happens when we have nothing profitable to offer capitalism?

>Do we have a labor shortage, or do we have a shortage at the wages companies are prepared to pay?

There are a ton of services that I'd be happy to have people perform for me, but there's some upper limit to what I'm willing/able to pay. This applies directly or through some (capitalist) intermediary. If it's going to cost me $1,000 for you to cut my lawn, I'll either do it myself or just let it grow.

Exactly. So what happens when the amount they're willing to pay is much lower than what it costs to live? If the robo lawnmowers will cut grass (and the occasional hand or foot) for $1/hour, what happens to the people who work as landscapers? Maybe you could argue they'll shift higher up the value chain, designing gardens or planting flowers and we'll all have prettier gardens... but I'm not sure the story of the last 50 years has been a race to the top.

The profits have raced to the top, but the net wealth generated has also been massive.

This is hopeful because a few gradual policy changes over the decades could keep the wealth creation part and help with the distribution part.

You can’t distribute what’s not there.

That’s indeed one of many ways people are driven out a job market that seemingly is hungry for jobs.

Posting unrealistic job offers can be a way to cover legal requirements or excuse yourself for automating everything. Or it can be business owners legitimately searching the space if humans can provide better value than machines, and increasingly finding that… no.

I wonder what would happen if people kept posting jobs for human calculators up to 2023.

“Must work without sleep, perform all calculations up to at least 9 digits, make no mistakes and provide instant answers. Management occasionally may curse and be violent towards the calculator, when the numbers are bad for business (must keep quiet and take it). Salary: $12 (per year)”.

"A shortage, in economic terms, is a condition where the quantity demanded is greater than the quantity supplied at the market price"

-- https://www.investopedia.com/terms/s/shortage.asp

We have a labor shortage. Economists don't assume that markets will clear. There are many reasons why they often don't.

Given that wages are about as high as they have ever been in our lifetimes, and unemployment is about as low as it has ever been in our lifetimes, it is an odd time to go Luddite.

Why keep stressing about wages being high? Do you people not understand basic inflation? At any point in time wages will always be highest they’ve ever been. In many places in the US, three years ago $100 bought you a week’s worth of food. Now it buys you a day’s worth. Maybe two.

Even in poor countries food has 3x in prices in two years.

Jobs are high because everyone has to work, wife, husband, even children in some cases, and many people take two jobs. While more and more don’t ever register at the bureau so they fall off the system. That’s your utopia?

The poster you're replying to means that inflation-adjusted wages are roughly at an all time high, which is true:

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/COMPRNFB

Aside from the distortion from the pandemic unemployment wave, people make more now than ever before. All of this data is publicly accessible.

No, food has not inflated 3.5x, and food is also a pretty small portion of Americans' spending.

How was it a Luddite take? Luddites argued that robots undercut quality by offering a price that couldn't be competed with, but ultimately with an inferior product. The person you're replying to is suggesting humans are unskilled apes incapable of competing with robots on both price & quality

importantly "Luddites" stood up for themselves as humans doing skilled work for income

> We can rethink our cities and move parking to the periphery

Just moving parking to the periphery won't make American cities better or more walkable.

> Eliminating the tedious and dangerous task of driving is an enormous benefit to humanity that will save 30,000+ lives a year in the US alone

If you're assuming that self-driving cars will be perfect and segregated, conditions will always be perfect (e.g. no pedestrians or bikes slipping), etc. etc. etc. Why would you?

> Eliminating the tedious and dangerous task of driving is an enormous benefit to humanity

The vast majority of driving can be replaced by already existing, proven and drastically more efficient tech - public transit.

It also won't cure cancer or make me toast in the morning, but being able to move parking has big meaningful advantages that are likely to be leveraged!

If you think you can convince the 3rd largest country by landmass in the world to just swap over to trains and buses - great.

In the meantime, let's approach other solutions too. Self driving cars are here, are actively used in areas without trains, and seem like they solve some real problems and maybe create a few new ones.

> > We can rethink our cities and move parking to the periphery

> Just moving parking to the periphery won't make American cities better or more walkable.

It certainly can make cities better. Removing street parking allows streets to be narrower, giving us room for larger sidewalks, bikepaths, outdoor seating in restaurants.

> > Eliminating the tedious and dangerous task of driving is an enormous benefit to humanity that will save 30,000+ lives a year in the US alone

> If you're assuming that self-driving cars will be perfect and segregated, conditions will always be perfect (e.g. no pedestrians or bikes slipping), etc. etc. etc. Why would you?

Humans definitely aren't perfect, that's why there are so many collisions, deaths and injuries. Many of those occur in "ideal" conditions due to distracted driving. In exceptional conditions (where people, bikes, animals run into the road), humans have a pretty poor response too. You'd have to run the numbers (like insurance companies) to determine when they are generally better than humans.

There's also no reason you couldn't delegate parts of the road system as autonomous only, we already have areas that are pickup/dropoff or taxi only. Just expand them.

> > Eliminating the tedious and dangerous task of driving is an enormous benefit to humanity

> The vast majority of driving can be replaced by already existing, proven and drastically more efficient tech - public transit.

Why not both? Put in your destination in an app and if there are enough people on the way, an autonomous bus can pick you up. If not, an autonomous car does.

There's a phrase you should probably learn. Don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good.

the vast majority of collisions are human error. it doesn't need to reduce 100% to be useful

I've noted this here before, it's worth repeating:

We will continue to accept our current 42,000 human-driven-car-related deaths/per year (2022) in the U.S. rather than 420 self-driving-car-related deaths annually for many years.

Autonomy is a fierce thing that humans can't bear to part with.

>The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has released its latest projections for traffic fatalities in 2022, estimating that 42,795 people died in motor vehicle traffic crashes. This represents a small decrease of about 0.3% as compared to 42,939 fatalities reported for 2021.

https://www.nhtsa.gov/press-releases/traffic-crash-death-est.... Apr 20, 2023

> a labor SHORTAGE

this is moronic. If anyone reading this has had the experience of being abused for low-skill work, wages stolen, unfair terms with no insurance or benefits, or in a new twist, a contractor who was unexpectedly terminated with no warning.. please add your insights

the actual history of labor is that Slave Labor, Peasants and Indentured Workers, are the biggest part of large scale industry since the Pyramids. Actual people use and abuse "workers" to the fullest extent possible..

This "shortage" language in the USA has an agenda, and is flatly manipulative IMHO

>We can rethink our cities and move parking to the periphery.

I seriously doubt that technology will fix what is ultimately a political problem.

Somebody will benefit, but I’m unsure it will be fair to say humanity will benefit

We have a shortage of fulfilling jobs too, and a shortage of jobs that pay enough to ever afford a home.

Ever wonder why people are bored enough to make up Qanon conspiracies, believe them, and start an insurrection over total nonsense? Too many people with nothing to do and nothing to live for.

They said all these things about the Segway, too.

I think it's been ten years since I've seen anyone except a cop using a Segway. (And I'm not sure how my local PD is still using them [as of yesterday], since I thought they were discontinued.)

The job shift should go toward reducing waste and environmental impacts of our technological trash that we produce en mass due to global consumerism...

We should have every petroleum company on the planet employing people to recover and capture their waste(s) in all formats.

Honestly - we need to kill the capitalist oil industry - its a global need that should simply be communized not capitalized. (just like nuclear energy)

There will always be a labor shortage in a way, but that doesn't translate to wages.

In 1990, my dad started earning 4x minimum wage. He was a recent immigrant that barely spoke English, but he could be the foreman of a shop in the SF Bay area that built cabinets because he was a bright guy.

Now 30 years later, he is the senior project manager for a much more successful version of the same company. He is an expert in his field. He works on $2million CABINET projects for Google campus or Rivian's offices. He makes $70 an hour. A little over 4x minimum wage.

Something had gone wrong.

This change is transforming a ton of peoples lives.

Just not yet of highly skilled labor.

So hn experience doesn't count if you want to measure the relevance or impact of this.

I, for one, welcome a boring self driving car experience. Unfortunately they tend to be exciting. And in the case of Tesla lethal. In the case of cruise mostly annoying and mildly terrifying.

My flying saucer was only going mach three. At this rate it was going to take hours to get to Singapore. What made it worse was the Starlink was janky and scrolling the influencer feed on my Oculus was only 120 FPS. Turned it off and started window whale spotting. Though they were so common now it got boring pretty fast too.

Found William Gibson.

Elevator tennis is really losing its shine, as is the soma. And the ladies aren't looking as pneumatic as they once did.

The goal is that it should be boring. When you take an uber normally you really only pay attention to the driver if they're really bad at driving or they're talking to you - so being bored by a self driving car to me is high praise

And if anything I would place a premium on boredom. I am paying, in part, to have my attention back.

The complete opposite for me would be something like Tesla's "self-driving" where I'm effectively an unpaid driving instructor for the equivalent of a drunk teenager that randomly shifts between F1 driver and actively suicidal.

I'd pay more for Exciting, and Safe rides.

I feel like it was literally just riding in a car. Sure the car had no driver but what I took from this article is that there was nothing significant or interesting about the whole experience, which is exactly what we'd want if the goal is a future where these are common.

I think this is it - the first time riding in an airplane is vastly different than anything you've ever experienced in your life. You're watching the first the ground, and then the clouds, recede below you.

Driving in a robotaxi is (if done well) exactly the same as riding in an Uber, just without the person sitting in front. The crazy part is the how, not the what, and we're pretty good at ignoring the magic that powers many of our otherwise mundane experiences.

Right. In terms of overall end user experience, it wouldn't, and shouldn't, feel different from just getting an ordinary Uber. The real self-driving revolution people have wanted is most/all consumer cars on the roads being self-driving so that you can (in theory) dedicate time to other things and be less likely to get in a collision, but that's far away.

Getting driven in a self driving car is not so much different from getting driven in a driver driven car. You get in, you check your email, you get out across town, etc. This is the same in both.

It's not really comparable to flying in the air to a different part of the world for the first time...

Reminds me of "If All Stories Were Written Like Science Fiction Stories":

http://web.archive.org/web/20040929041451/http://www.shrovet...

I think the indifference is a function of just how marginal the utility is.

Before self-driving cars, it's either: (1) I'm getting chauffeured around (2) I'm doing something tedious and boring until I arrive at my destination.

With self-driving cars: (1) I'm getting chauffeured around (2) I'm doing something tedious and boring or something entertaining until I arrive at my destination.

Like who cares how novel and futuristic the implementation is? The utility is nearly the same.

My four year old and I pass by several every day and always point out the magic of a driverless car. We look inside at red lights and think about how it might work.

I’m also cautious, worried it might run me over. I treat them like I might a dog… cute but could bite me or him.

My first driverless ride in a Cruise vehicle was like "oh this is neat, no driver!" and then I put on my seat belt and it was immediately just another ride in a car, no big deal. Not even a lingering thought in the back of my mind.

They drive just like a human would 99% of the time.

Gift link: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/21/technology/waymo-driverle...

Am I the only one finding it hard to be excited for this? It seems like automated taxis:

0. Encourage the use of cars in cities rather than public transit & walkability.

1. Centralize wealth by replacing payments to many drivers with payments to one large company.

2. Allow for further surveillance of individuates. It seems likely that Google will eventually create ad inventory by adding screens to the cars and incorporate travel history into peoples marketing profiles.

My wife lost 2 close relatives to accidental vehicular death. She's thrilled.

Hear hear. Anything that replaces humans at the wheel is a fantastic thing in my book. Road traffic injuries kill close to 1.5 million people every year. The sooner we can have robocars and robobikes replace all driving, the better. I don't care how much privacy that erodes in the short term.

>and robobikes

Is anyone currently doing this? I’ve seen proof of concepts for racing in motogp or something, but didn’t realized autonomous motorcycles was a thing outside the racetrack.

I also believe they will increase congestion in cities since when occupants switch from drivers to riders, they are less affected by the costs of road congestion (congested roads may mean riders get to their destinations slower, but because they are no longer driving, people may make extra trips where previously they would say "I don't want to make that trip now because driving during rush hour is too stressful").

But the public will face negative externalities of greater congestion (noise, pollution, slower travel times for busses & walking).

Without congestion pricing and right of ways for bikes, walking, and transit, automated taxis seem like a way to double down on a space inefficient mode of travel.

I'm a big urbanist (that also worked on AVs for a couple years), haven't owned a car for almost all of my adult life, and view it as a step in the right direction for a few reasons.

1 - I think the impact of parking is actually more insidious and detrimental than roads by themselves. AVs will have high utilization of a much smaller pool of vehicles and remove the need for the huge parking lots we currently have. The land-use issues from parking are perhaps the largest impediment (together with the requirements/zoning) to the density which would allow transit to outcompete private cars.

2 - The centralization of wealth is one thing, but the real economies of fewer, newer vehicles will be a boon for almost everyone. The cost of the automobile operation is about 1/4 of the average uber fare. That is a lot of room for price compression. Perhaps more will be going to a large corporation, but there will be a huge consumer surplus as well.

3 - The reduction in the size of the car fleet will likely reduce the lobbying power of the automobile industry, which may in turn lead to changes to the urban environment(bike lanes, transit expansions) which will likely shift mode share away from cars.

Wouldn't the reduction in cost of rides vs Uber create massive demand for self-driving car rides, increasing congestion?

There will definitely be induced demand. Most people don't just choose travel mode based on cost though. Travel time/convenience is the biggest factor, and AVs will probably not improve those significantly. The reality is that walking/biking/transit aren't competitive in terms of convenience in most US cities right now. If taking the train is faster than driving, people will do it. That is the fundamental issue that needs to be fixed to allow other options to be successful, and I view killing people's obsession with parking as the largest step in that direction.

Especially [1]. So many millions of American jobs are driving. Rideshare drivers, sure, but taxi drivers, couriers, delivery drivers, truckers, etc. The economic incentive to switch to driverless tech will be really strong, more than white collar AI automation, I think. So... what's the plan? That these drivers will all live in a hellscape where robot cars patrol their streets, surveilling them as they struggle against poverty?

I feel like this is such a HackerNews take.

Headline: Self-driving cars are actually a thing!

"Yeah so here's why that's not very exciting and actually bad."

I can't think of a single technology other than relational databases that Hacker News actually likes. Nothing invented after 2000 certainly. Cell phones give everyone depression, LLMs are just stochastic parrots, crypto is just a scam, Uber is just an expensive unregulated taxi, AirBnb is just an expensive unregulated hotel, self driving cars are just going to lead to centralization of wealth and congestion, every new browser feature is just another way for websites to fingerprint you, discord isn't an improvement over IRC and makes everything ungooglable, also google sucks now, also they kill every product 6 months after launch, fusion is 20 years away just like it was 20 years ago, electron makes everything slow because devs these days are too lazy to write native apps, Github is just Microsoft applying EEE to open source, WSL is just Microsoft applying EEE to Linux. I don't see why everything needs to be so terrible all the time.

According to HN, every app in the world could be supported by a single ARM EPYC server with a SQLite backend and some weird WASM magic.

0. Car use isn't actually bad, it not using cars that gobbles up space. Half of the car street space is wasted on cars that aren't in use - known as "parking."

1. Agree. But Taxi drivers are a relict of the past already. You can drive your own car and need no navigation skills. It's called Uber and it sucks hard already. Nothing much of value lost here (most of the economic value is captured by Uber anyway.)

On point #1: These large companies are publicly traded on the stock market and you are welcome to profit alongside them as they grow. I earned more from amazon stock than I've spent on amazon. I earned more from Tesla stock than it costs to buy a new Tesla.

A concept I look forward to is not just a driverless car, but driverless "various size vehicles" from a 1-person car to a 100-person bus. In this future we could get the advantages of public transport and car-free living into rural and suburban areas, while in the city these systems could adjust and use AI to find optimal routes that are a lot less slower than current buses (or even trains that require 2 or 3 connections). All the while using electric and reducing energy per passenger and knocking over fewer cyclists :-).

I just want a driverless RV that will drive me between all the National Parks in the US while I work remotely from the back via a Starlink dish mounted to the roof.

What a dream that would be for myself as well. Electric too so I can charge it up at night and then essentially get free travel during the day even if it only 100-300 miles a day.

The solution to homelessness too! No need to find a parking spot. Just drive all night. Could it drive very slowly and charge the batteries using solar? Hmmm

This is the solution to NIMBYness. A homelessness solution would let you stay in one place :-)

We saw an electric motorboat this summer, made out of an old archipelago fisher boat. Cabin top and bimini full of solar.

Owner estimated that on a sunny day you can motor at 3kt without depleting batteries.

Solar “sailing” is increasingly practical; there are companies selling luxurious solar ocean cruisers [1] already. As a sailor, the idea has a definite appeal for long ocean crossings. Sunshine is very reliable in the open ocean whereas wind can die for days at a time. The idea of cruising around the world without having to worry about the wind - other than to avoid storms - is very attractive.

[1] https://youtu.be/FnYL3C9pWO4?si=gjBXcRac6SOOkdDT

Probably not during the night

Just to moderate the dream slightly, if you're moving around at a solid pace and/or driving enough that you get actual work done, the fuel costs add up. I've had trips in RV/bus-scale vehicles have portions that work out at $100-250/day in gas. So, ideally you want an electric vehicle.

And to be honest, the actual driving is often a predictable and easy part of the equation. Finding camping/accommodation options near national parks, and then dealing with the hordes is a hassle that remains. If you can work on the road, in theory you're less rushed.

Travel with a partner and then at least one of you can work while the other drives.

Yes, definitely want the RV to be electric. Plus would cover the roof in solar to get a bit of extra charge.

I don't think the rooftop solar makes a dent in the vehicle's power needs, but maybe that changes with time. I've driven a lot of the US, a lot of national parks, and the driving is the trivial bit. Everything else is a pain, IMO!

The solar is less for the driving and more for the daily usage, so that if I'm parked somewhere in the middle of nowhere I don't need to be plugged in.

If it drives while you work, it can drive slow and save some power. Even if the range is just .. 20 - 40km. You have a new place every day :D

Why does having no driver suddenly enable this?

You can do all this now, you just need a driver. Why is that the part that needs to be eliminated before you can do all these things? All it is, is route planning based on demand. Uber, etc should be able to do all this now. Isn't that what Uber Pool was supposed to deliver? Nobody uses that shit for anything but a commute. Nobody wants to sit in a car with other random-ass people stopping 30 times to pick them up. That's half the reason people who drive don't take transit now.

What is it about having no driver that suddenly makes cars green, free up space on the road, etc?

Why would someone who owns a car now, want to wait around for a driverless taxi to pick them up? They can go into their driveway and be driven to their destination right away in their own personal driverless car. And if the car is gonna park itself, that means it's driving around, taking up more space on the road just looking for a parking spot.

I mean think about it. If you can work for an hour while your car drives you to the office, and you don't have to stress or worry about the traffic, why would you even bother with anything else?

Imagine being a human driver who has to constantly change routes based on what the computer tells you, switch vehicles based on demand, and not make any mistakes. That sounds exhausting. You're also occupying a seat which could be used by a passenger.

A centrally-directed autonomous fleet of vehicles would be genuinely revolutionary for public transit, replacing everything from taxis to buses with a beautifully efficient system. I can't imagine not being excited by that.

> Why does having no driver suddenly enable this?

No-driver will make it more economical eventually because:

1. There is no hourly wage to pay a driver.

2. The car can be utilized 24/7 (or most likely 16/7 based on demand, but much better than 8/5 of a typical shift driver).

> What is it about having no driver that suddenly makes cars green, free up space on the road, etc?

A confluence of things: electric cars, the cheaper rides, the critical mass of users so that algorithms can find ways for people to share.

Remember if I am using a bus now, and this is offering me a 30 minute journey but (oof!) sharing with other people instead of 1 hour on a bus, this is a good switch.

> Why would someone who owns a car now, want to wait around for a driverless taxi to pick them up?

The reason is posted to you several times each year: "Car service" "Registration Fee" "Compulsory Check" "Your Toll Invoice" "Third Party Insurance" "Comprehensive Insurance" "Speeding Ticket" "Parking Ticket" and so on. And that assumes you don't crash (on in my case, hit/run done on your parked car) and have to deal with that hell.

Selling your car, getting $X,000 and being free of all that is a relief.

> If you can work for an hour while your car drives you to the office, and you don't have to stress or worry about the traffic, why would you even bother with anything else?

Depends. Replace car with helicopter and the same applies. Not everyone wants to pay for a helicopter. Not everyone will want to pay for their own car when you can get it on demand. Say it costs $25 a day to own your own car and be taken, $10 a day for your own uber-like and $5 a day if you share. A lot of people will go for the savings. Even more so if cities add single-person taxes on cars to ease congestion.

These efficiencies could be getting born out by the existing ride share apps but the promised efficiencies haven’t come to fruition at all yet. All subscription services like this have had high promises of cheaper and more economical service but they struggle to stay on par with legacy things they replace. Streaming services are rapidly approaching cable. Uber and Lyft are often more expensive than a yellow cab.

There will be a very, very long time before a $80,000 self driving car and all the technology and services to make it self driving and service it automatically can undersell a driver making $35/hr after expenses in a $10,000 car that she owns, or a driver for a fleet making $25/hr.

A fleet driver making $25/h already costs more than $80K per year, at lower utilization and less flexibility.

I think you’re missing my point - I don’t think it’s going to be cheap, or even economical compared to a cheap self owned vehicle, any time soon. I’m predicting it won’t be cheaper than Uber or Lyft until 3rd or 4th generations, especially when they try to earn a profit.

> (or most likely 16/7 based on demand, but much better than 8/5 of a typical shift driver).

Or more practically 4/5 plus a small amount outside that.

There are cities on earth where taxis are ubiquitous and relatively affordable (even to locals making local wages). So nothing really changes there when the driver is eliminated (except maybe better traffic flows). But driverless might make ubiquitous taxis affordable in developed countries, it is a valid way of living. When I lived in Beijing, I used to commute to and from work by taxi, and used it for lots of other trips around town as well, and ya, not stressing about traffic was a bonus (but I changed my schedule so I would miss Beijing’s hellish rush hour).

For me it's more to possibility to have the ideal car for each situation. Going to the dentist, order a one person car, pick up the kid, order a two person car or order a truck if I need to pick up something large. Utilizing smaller vehicles when ever possible will use less energi.

Some one like me who lives in a small village could also opt to share a car with someone else if me and my partner wants go to the city for night out. A few of my coworkers live close to me, I wouldn't mind sharing a car with them if we happen to leave the office at the same time.

There's small changes that will eventually yield pretty big results. Some German road scientists have a study that show that it's only a few percent difference in the number of cars on the road that leads to traffic jams for instance. Eliminate 5 - 10% or cars and traffic jams goes away, for the most part.

My cities public transit system is currently limited by the number of drivers they can find. The pay is quite good, they just can't sign people up. This has lead to extreme inconsistencies where if a driver calls in sick a bus or train just won't show up for 30 minutes instead of the usual 10. Driverless busses allow for the system to greatly expand the number of routes and increase consistency.

> The pay is quite good, they just can't sign people up.

Quite good does not sound good enough.

it's well into 6 figures in a MCOL area. If they paid any more they'd have to raise fares which would cause less people to use it.

Or raise taxes, pay more for drivers, and lower fares.

That would be nice, but the current funding level is already under political attack. There is absolutely no chance of increased funding when people are already incredibly pissed about the tax burden.

The technology is pretty amazing, but does anyone else feel like we (the public) got duped?

What I wanted was for my own car to drive itself so I could relax and make better use of car time. I also wanted some new novel ways of interacting with cars to make them feel more like public transit that would be enabled by driverless technology.

What we got was ... SciFi Uber. We are not going to be allowed to own the cars, and hiring them for trips will not be any cheaper or easier than Uber. And most will be owned by big companies with motives besides transportation.

The driverless future was so exciting in 2013. Now it's just ... there.

This is why Tesla was valued beyond the top 10 car companies combined - the idea was to kill the idea of people just buying their cars and make it an overpriced subscription

Dont we call those "leases"

It’s not actually here yet so economies haven’t actually been employed. It’s still a tech beta, though I’m not sure our Teslas will ever really do the thing.

Are you not aware of how FSD beta performs in SF?

There are several videos where Tesla FSD beats cruise and Waymo in getting to random destinations, with no interventions.

yeah, but there is going to be plenty of situations it can't handle. So you really can't relax, you need to be vigilant to take over. So not clear what the point of it is then

FSD Beta still runs on the old fork of the Tesla software, and nothing "good" has been merged into the newer branch that I'm running (the one that supports Apple Music), and on long road trips, the phantom braking (which I've surmised happens mostly on undulations on a rising or falling road) is still a huge bother/risk... and the fact that Tesla hasn't back-ported whatever fixes they claim exist for phantom braking with AutoPilot means.. it doesn't exist yet. And it's been a problem for years and years now.

Also, my Tesla on AutoPilot freaks the f*ck out in large suburban intersections where the roads all go very straight -- it'll jump from lane 1 to lane 2 in the middle of the intersection. Not sure if SF has big intersections of the sort I'm talking about, but Sacramento, Reno, Las Vegas, Phoenix, and LA certainly do. Again, something they could fix if the fix was real, and for all the drivers out there smacking their stalk and AutoPiloting.

And lastly, on the highway, where the right lanes expand and contract with onboarding and exiting lanes the car tracks to the right solid line and not the un-moving dotted line to the left of the car. So the car is constantly jumping left and right as the "center" of the lane changes (because the width of the lane is changing), when the lane expands to allow for merge-lane traffic from those entering and exiting the freeway.

Two of these examples are on highways, which are ostensibly easier challenges than city streets.

Where's the rapid evolution of the tech? Not in product scope of the features people with Teslas are using day to day.

I don't feel like the tech is there yet to start selling the cars to consumers. Waymo only recently got permission to start doing rides for money right? And in the early stages, scifi Uber makes way more sense than trying to sell the cars directly.

> hiring them for trips will not be any cheaper or easier than Uber

Why wouldn't they be? When the price of a business's inputs goes down, the profit-maximizing thing for them do is lower the price of their outputs.

You can own the car if you want to. Mercedes-Benz is about to start selling level 3 autonomous vehicles to consumers.

https://media.mbusa.com/releases/release-1d2a8750850333f086a...

Different companies have different visions, but "driverless car that you own" is a goal some have. For example, if you buy a Mercedes with DrivePilot then in approved locations (including Germany, California [1], and Nevada [2]) you can legally and safely read, watch a video, or play a game while in the driver's seat. It's only Level 3, and can only do highways under 40mph (traffic jams), but it shows that this is still an active direction.

[1] https://media.mbusa.com/releases/release-1d2a8750850333f086a...

[2] https://www.theverge.com/2023/1/27/23572942/mercedes-drive-p...

On the other side of that, "hiring an Uber" even several times a month to do a longer trip that you can't manage in any other way is much cheaper than any ownership situation for the same cars. Heck, you almost certainly save in recovered space from not owning the car.

Going down the path, though, as someone that has extensively used public transit in every US city I've lived in for my adult life, I'm curious how you envision "more like public transit" looking? I get that you wanted better use of "car time", but I also have to confess I don't really know what that means. Even public transit is mostly a place for you to maybe read a book. If you are super hyper and have a long commute, you can consider some programming/drawing/writing. Most anything else, though, will be pretty difficult to pull off in a highly confined space.

I was a daily biker in San Francisco for more than a decade... no car....

I had ZIPCAR and one month I took one on a trip and on several other excursions - and the bill for ZIPCAR that month was $850.

for like minimal time...

NO WAY was that "an affordable option"

You would be surprised what people are regularly paying for a car. 850 is probably on par with what the parking/storage costs alone are. Those are almost certainly "priced in" to most houses, but there is no reason you couldn't work to reclaim a lot of that space.

More, I don't know enough about ZIPCAR to know how they price in the costs to refill the vehicle between drivers, but depending on how the fuel was managed, that is a 20% chunk of that, easy.

Concretely, googling "average monthly car payment", shows that "The average car payment for a new vehicle is $725 monthly, according to first-quarter 2023 data from Experian." So, not as incomparable as I could hope it is.

$850 / $12 hour (current hourly rate for Honda CRV in SF) = 70 hours. I wouldn't call that minimal time for a month. Is there a more affordable option for on-demand car rental in SF than $12/hour all-inclusive? Seems quite reasonable to me.

One possible silver lining would be if governments ordered and managed fleets of self-driving passenger vehicles, as public transport.

There seems to be a growing, invisible force working against us, nudging us toward owning less and less and renting more and more. Don't own and maintain your own car! Pay me every time you need a ride somewhere! Don't own your own single family home! Move to the city and rent an apartment from me! Don't own your own computer! Do everything in "the Cloud" and pay me every month for it! Don't own your own media! Pay me monthly to stream it! It's not the future we were all looking forward to.

They're not fn invisible!

They display their methods all over the place. WEF, Klaus and Hariri are demons.

I'm not sure there's a particular virtue in owning vs. renting or vice versa. It's all situational. I'm certainly going to own my car at home (which I also own). But if I take an even fairly lengthy trip it probably doesn't make sense to buy those things at my destination (though it may make sense to have a more extended arrangement than a typical night-by-night one).

If I'm going to watch a movie once it's not clear why I have to own it.

I think some people make ownership vs. rental much more of a value-laden decision than it needs to be.

Lol this is straight up conspiracy theory stuff. Yea it’s the reptilians who created streaming services instead of letting us all continue owning our VCR tapes like the goddamn red blooded Americans we were meant to be.

It’s the reptilians who have made people want to live above a grocery store and bike 15 minutes to work instead of driving their Ford F-150 two hours every day from their McMansion and back, and 45 minutes to Wal-Mart.

> Lol this is straight up conspiracy theory stuff.

It's not. The system needs growth, can't have growth if everyone owns reliable things. What you need is people either owning thing that need constant maintenance or straight up renting/leasing everything

In France they're preparing a law to build your "own" house on rented land, to "help ease access to home ownership" because land is to expensive. What will happen is that land ownership will be even more concentrated and the average joe will never ever be able to buy land, you'll need to rent the land $$$ a month, with whatever terms (which might or might not change with time)

> We are not going to be allowed to own the cars

You'll own nothing and be happy ;)

Everything will be a subscription/lease/rental, your medias, your car, your house, your land, &c.

> I wondered what would happen if I touched the wheel, so I grabbed it as the Waymo merged from one lane to another. The car ignored me and drove on.

Surprised they admit to this, considering earlier in the article they mention being instructed not to touch the wheel.

It’s a good thing to test as a reporter. There are too many people for at least one person not to do something dumb, or fall onto while doing something dumb, so it’s good to know nothing would happen.

Disagreed. They were clearly told not to do that and didn't follow their directions. It sounds like a potential safety hazard to me.

They could just have reported what you said - they were told not to touch the wheel, and are concerned that in reality this could be a problem because there are too many people for at least one person not to do something dumb, or fall onto while doing something dumb etc.

If there are self driving cars on the road with a "press here to instantly cause an accident" widget fixed to the dash it's a problem regardless. Testing involves trying out exceptional inputs to find out how the system responds.

And if that were the case and someone did it, journalists would get plenty of opportunity to get in on that story. They don't have to be the first to trigger every failure mode.

If you dive over the seat in a Lyft to grab the wheel and yank it on the freeway, it's going to get pretty interesting, too.

It's an already-extent but not frequent threat. The main difference is a change in the amount of social pressure to not do this. That change probably makes it worth exploring a little.

If Waymo chooses, those steering actuators have enough oomph to always win.

I don't think the difference is social pressure, I think the difference is understanding of cause and effect. I know exactly what will happen if I grab the wheel while my friend is driving. If this journalist didn't try it, I would not know how the self driving car would respond here.

Would it stop self steering and let me take over? Will it overpower me by force? Will it resist me but let me overpower it if I try hard enough?

All of these outcomes seem to have legitimate arguments for them from a system design perspective.

Disagree on what? What angle is this from? Their bosses? The police? As a reader of journalism, I appreciate that they tested this edge case. I am not responsible for their safety, and as autonomous adults I trust they know what they're getting themselves into.

That did cross my mind, but how far should they really take it? Should they also deflate a tire to see how the vehicle responds to that?

Now that you mention it, I'm really curious if it could correct it's steering enough to stay in the lane with a deflated tire

Yeah, many failure modes would be interesting. If Waymo think they've handled them well, maybe they should let some journalists have at it on a car or two.

I'm pretty sure it would detect the flat tire, alert a technician, and refuse to move.

So many things that were the preserve of the ultra-rich made it's way to the masses thanks to technology finding ways to make it cheaper.

- music in your house

- new clothes that fit you at least sort-of-well

- ice in your kitchen

- travel

- communication at speed and over large distances

- access to a lots of literature

- and now, chauffeur-driven cars

But… why couldn’t we just build more and better trains?

Trains aren't a panacea for transportation. They work well in some areas, less well in others, and not at all in many.

You still have to get to and from the stations themselves, and the dependability of transportation arriving on time and proximity to your destination plays a big factor.

The metro area I went to college in had a light rail train that ran from downtown to a popular tourist destination. To get there, though, you needed to catch a connecting bus ride.

It is a 15 minute trip by car, but an hour by bus+train. If the bus ran late, it would actually be faster to ride a bicycle all 13 miles.

The metro area cities want to add more trains because it is the progressive thing to do, but ridership on one of the lines is abysmal, and the other lines aren't utilized as much as they could be because people feel unsafe on them and are disgusting- smoking cigarettes, drinking hard alcohol, food all over the floor, loud music, the occasional gang posturing or aggressive pan handling were all cited by locals in a survey as to why they chose to drive instead.

Back during my first trip to China, a bunch of retired military guys would hang out at subway stations offering rides from the station to your house for 5 jiao or one Kuai in a gas powered tuktuk. I imagine electric ride share bikes could do the same thing today if they weren’t being abused all the time.

I actually see autonomous cars complementing trains very well because they can be used for the last mile problem (getting people from the train station to the destination they actually want to arrive at). They are also available for areas poorly served by transit/inconvenient connections.

But I don't see them making more impact on somebody who's already driving. Traffic will still be traffic and walkable cities will have to limit that. It's the same car after all, just driven by a computer. All those current issues for heavy car-dependence won't be solved by autonomous driving.

> It is a 15 minute trip by car, but an hour by bus+train

I have the same issue. Due to location and geography I'm looking at a 90 minut bus ride, with at least one change of bus. If I need to drop the kid of at daycare, you can add 30 minuts, because I have to get of and wait for the next bus.

So I'd have to leave at 6:00 to be at work at around 8:00, I then need to leave no later than 15:30, pick up the kid at 17:00 and be home at 17:30, assuming that everything lines up perfectly. There's nothing left of the day and my child has spend 10 hours in daycare... and I haven't worked a full eight hours. It's a 15 minute drive to the office.

You are underestimating how much trains and public transportation can do. Public transportation is abyssimal in the US, so I get why you think that it may not solve many problems.

If you take a look at Switzerland which did public transportation right, you will see that even in low densities areas, it is very much possible to get around by public transport. The canton of Graubünden (area: 7105.44 km2, density: 28/km2) has more train lines and bus lines than the city of Atlanta (area: 353.04 km2, density: 771.3/km2). Switzerland has a lot of tiny villages, evenly spread around. We don't have crazy dense cities, and certainly not large cities.

While public transport does not solve every trip and every commute, it is a solution for a significant percentage of the population. You can get to remote areas for hiking, leisure, ... You can find bus lines that connect one village of 30 people to another village of 100 people. They may not be frequent (4x a day), but they allow for tourist to go hike to remote areas, visit nice places, ... Also, public transit is clean here and very safe.

For some numbers: a decent amount of people commute by public transport (up to 50% in certain areas), and an even larger percentage of people use public transport for leisure activities (>70%).

In an ideal world, you would have decent public transit inside cities and around, pedestrian friendly cities, bike sharing, and fery vew (robo)taxis in dense areas. This makes the cities confortable to live in (less noise and polution). Also, intercity transit is very important (by train, highspeed train or plane). Then, in rural areas you would have robotaxis that can get you anywhere you want. The remaining vehicles on the road should be work related vehicles.

More and better trains are great... when they are connecting very dense areas that have a lot of traffic. Madrid's subway is great, and so is rail to nearby towns, and high speed rail to Seville, Valencia and the like. But the value of rail drops precipitously as density decreases.

In the US, we are basically allergic to the density required to make trains good. I look at, say, St Louis to KC: a route of ideal length for high speed rail. But on both sides of the train, the density just isn't there, so people would drive themselves to the station, and rent a car on the other side, and suddenly you might as well have driven yourself across.

But sure, rebuild dense enough as to make subways, trains and walking the best modes of transportation, and the world would be pretty nice. it'll just cost, say, a few trillion to rebuild US cities that way. And the people that live far from the city center, and whose land values would probably drop massively wouldn't be all that happy.

As scaling kicks in, it'll be the cheapest transit that can be added at margin within car-centric environments. Still centrally administered, professionally operated and maintained just like a bus fleet. The modality is something that can be tinkered with to take bigger or smaller loads and correspondingly save space and fuel per trip. The incentives are basically aligned to stay cost-competitive. These are things that were never the case with taxis and privately owned cars.

We could just retrofit exisiting road infrastructure to be more autonomous car friendly. Standardized signals, sensors, etc

Self driving cars are effectively "more and better trains". They also go wherever you want whenever you want, don't subject you to other passengers, and are less expensive per passenger mile.

You know what is more controversial than letting robot cars drive around? Trying to make a new train line literally anywhere in the US.

You are better off buying a bunch of robot cars, tying them together with a rope, and starting a company to run hacker trains on city streets and charge money.

In fact, in SF, if the protestors were clever, they'd just get together tie a bunch of cars together and create their own train. What are they going to do, arrest you?

I think that robot cars are likely the end of cars. They will lure people off of public transportation, especially those that don't have the up-front capital / borrowing ability to buy their own car, but whose commute times can be improved by driving. This will lead to a lot of congestion. And then congestion ruins it for everyone, humans and AIs alike. (Congestion is already what enables public transportation. No commuter rail system can compete with the speeds of a car on the freeway at 3am. But, people start work at 8am, and EVERYTHING competes with the speed of a car at 8am.)

Eventually people will say "you know what, I guess I'll just live closer to work". Congratulations, you just invented cities. With land being used for humans and not automobile storage, mass transit becomes more viable. Thus, the car's death warrant is signed.

I’m of the same mindset. A cab is still a cab to me, even if it’s autonomous. We’ll still have to deal with traffic all the same. Uber and Lyft showed us ride share even worsens congestion in cities. As a result, in dense locales, taking the train can often be quicker and cheaper than hailing or ordering a ride during rush hour.

While other developed nations show us it’s possible to reduce our accident rate per mile driven, we could also make progress on reducing the time spent in a car. So many suburbanites drive the whole way into the city for weekend trips here in my city because their local commuter rail stinks. I see missed opportunities all around.

If cities are increasingly considering offloading public transit burden off to private entities, they might as well consider introducing the private sector into rail…

>We’ll still have to deal with traffic all the same.

It's not the same because the time can be productive or used for leisure. Plus far less stressful and tiring than driving.

Well I could say the same for a human driven cab or transit. My rides are often too short to do anything productive anyways. Even if I were driving, I could listen to a podcast for leisure, same as when I take other forms of transport.

Because it's a very expensive way to move relatively few people?

Trains great if you need to move a large number of people between few destinations, less so if you have a smaller number of people or many different destinations. The city next to where I live cancelled their light-rail project, because it's insanely expensive and yields no benefit over busses, in fact busses are more flexible. If your distances are short enough trains again make no sense.

You also still need to get people from the stations to where they actually need to go. It's rare that a train station is your end destination. Busses work, but they are a little slow, taxis are faster because they normally go direct.

And how do I get to the trains?

It takes me about 30min to get there, no matter what method I use and I actually live in a city. Then waiting for some train, ten-twenty minutes is not unusual, then riding it, leaving the station. It’ll easily be an 2h experience to travel what would be at most 30min in a car.

Getting basically anywhere in NL with a train is an automatic 2-3x slowdown, unless you happen near some public transport hotspot and your destination is actually near the station.

It’s also uncomfortable for all kind of reasons, to be honest.. but I’ll take that if it wasn’t such a waste of time.

I don’t see any way of improving this as well. What would you propose? Demolish housing to make place for tracks?

Taxis enable train use.

When I fly to London for work, I take the Heathrow express to Paddington and then a short cab ride to my hotel.

If I had to switch to the underground and then walk, I’d just take a taxi the whole way or rent a car at the airport.

Sure, but it would cost a few billion. For just modestly sized stretch of rail and a couple of stations and trains.

Waymo is of course not cheap but they can do a lot with a few billion. Rail just isn't cheap. Privately funded rail tracks are basically not a thing in most countries. Just too expensive to be interesting to normal investors. Especially if they are looking for ROI measured in years rather than decades/centuries. Governments spend on rail because of the wider economic effects it has on their economies. Not because exploiting rail roads is particularly lucrative or even profitable.

While there's some truth to this, the myriad externalized costs of a car-based city may dwarf the apparent "savings". Once you consider the dollar and social costs of car pollution, parking, accidents, etc. it isn't so simple.

Unfortunately, in order to do that you would have to rip out the core of American identity, individualism and capitalism.

American society in general despise public transport ouside NYC

It turns out most Americans don't want more and better trains. So you'd have to convince them.

As a programmer, I won't put myself into that thing. I'm also not happy to be an unwilling participant in this experiment. Given the state of technology and our capabilities to write bug-free software (Seriously, we can't even get things like buying airline tickets correct), I think it's way too early to approve those vehicles on city streets.

Clearly you're unwilling, but if you got in, wouldn't that make you willing? :-)

If you share the road with a self driving vehicle you’re part of the experiment.

If you are alive you are part of many experiments.

Among them being human driving, which hasn’t panned out well.

It's significantly more absurd to permit highly distractable, slow-reacting meatbags to operate the multi-ton high-velocity death barges in the close vicinity of pedestrians and other meatbags-cum-death-barge-pilots.

Why? We have what, like 50+ years of certainty as to how dangerous people are as drivers? They’re a known quantity and we know we can keep making cars safer to reduce the danger to drivers and passengers.

Instead we’re going to YOLO a half-baked tech-bro fantasy onto the roads and hope for the best?

Also “meatbags” has the same tone as “sportsball” imo.

> We have what, like 50+ years of certainty as to how dangerous people are as drivers

Yes, the answer is "very". Over one percent (1 in 93, National Safety Council, 2021[1]) of Americans will die in a car crash. That is insane.

The data so far is clear that autonomous vehicles are safer, and it isn't close.

> Also “meatbags” has the same tone as “sportsball” imo.

We're comparing humans to computers. Sue me.

[1]: https://injuryfacts.nsc.org/all-injuries/preventable-death-o...

> The data so far is clear that autonomous vehicles are safer, and it isn't close.

The data so far on fatality rates is near nonexistent. There' a fatality every 75 million miles in the US with a human at the wheel, with significant proportions of those fatalities considered to be humans operating so far below the threshold for acceptable human driving we jail them for it. Waymo hit 1m autonomous miles this year.

I’ve seen many people in this thread insinuate driverless cars are as safe as human drivers despite the vehicles being subjected to a subset of conditions the average US driver is. I’m surprised to see such disingenuous statements on here.

But we absolutely don't keep making cars, or trucks, safer for pedestrians: We are actively putting people in vehicles with worse visibility, because said human drivers feel safer when they are driving in a larger, taller heavier vehicle that is more dangerous to others.

The argument is not that self-driving cars are very safe, but that we tolerate risks that are quite large when it comes to humans doing the driving. Risks so high that it might not take all that much for entire categories of drivers to be less safe than a computer.

If we need 50+ years of certainty for self driving cars, we will never have said certainty, because we'd not let them drive, ever. And yet, we have very old people, those that are easily distracted, and people who often drive impaired in the road all the time. We also put them very close to places where we have pedestrians, and let them drive with huge differentials over said pedestrians.

We aren't really making the cars safe enough as it is, and in the US we lack any practical roadmaps to make them safer, other than, 'never walk, and drive in an increasingly bigger car'. We are YOLOing every day, with large, single passenger trucks that will strike a pedestrian at chest height.

So yes, self driving research is a better way out than hoping to change human drivers, whose hardware and software are hard to upgrade. I won't necessarily assume a Waymo car is better than most drivers today, but I'd already trust it more than some that have licenses today.

Right, we have 50+ years where motor vehicle involved deaths are like 15-20% of all deaths for people under 50, not to mention how many more people are permanently injured due to motorists.

The status quo is really bad and we are doing a terrible job of making them safer for anyone besides the occupants of the vehicle causing a collision. So yeah, we should really focus on pushing technology that can reduce the danger of distractable drivers. That mostly should mean investing in public transit, walkability and speed-limited small vehicles like bikes or golf carts. But the bar for driverless cars is basically: do they speed? Do they drive on sidewalks? Do they kill a few people a day? No? Then they’re better than the status quo, because the status quo is awful.

I don't agree with your characterization of what's happening as "YOLO" and "half-baked". It's taken many many people many years to get to where we are now. It's pretty easy to do a miles driven and accidents caused comparison. Self driving cars appear to be wildly safer thus far.

What would make you happy with a self-driving safety record? Why not be excited about the future?

I understand when some folks think that the focus would be better spent on public transportation, but you just seem like a hater.

> Why not be excited about the future?

Gestures broadly at the world

I mean I guess you have a point. Go nuts with the driverless cars.

And yes, this money would be better spent on a huge number of things — public transit among them.

They're a known quantity of death though. Human drivers are going to drive drunk, sleepy and distracted. We've been at this since 2005 with the DARPA Grand Challenge. it's not half-baked, it's not a "tech bro fantasy", and hope is not a strategy. It was, a decade and eight years ago when the shit barely made it across the finish line (and many did not), but in those 18 years, theres been some development work and some money invested in making it work. In those 18 years, some 180k people have been killed by drunk drivers.

There are growing pains, absolutely, but at 2:15 am, crossing the street next to the bars, which driver with a red light are you going to step out in front of, crossing the street.

I know which one I'd choose.

Honestly, the safety bar set by human drivers is on the floor (and being run over by a "light truck").

Is it?

"""The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has released its latest projections for traffic fatalities in 2022, estimating that 42,795 people died in motor vehicle traffic crashes. """

"""The number of vehicle-miles traveled on all roads in the United States decreased by some 1.55 percent to approximately 3.17 trillion in 2022. "

Ignoring some important details, that means americans drive 75 million miles before a person is killed. That seems .... awfully damn good to me.

Pedestrian fatalities are significantly up in recent years.

I believe my reported numbers include pedestrian fatalities. I would love to have better sources that made that clearer, as these are markes as "traffic fatalities"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_traffic-r...

The US is #5 (of 26 countries for which the statistic is available) in fatalities / km. That's only "awfully damn good to me" if your goal is to kill more people.

What does our relative position amongst a group of countries matter to my argument? The best countries see 150M miles between traffic fatalities. If we roll out self-driving cars and they continue to work as well as they have so far, the US numbers will get better.

Agreed. If a risk in super low, being worse than other countries doesn’t change the fact the risk is super low.

Why ignore the other columns? Is it just because that one statistic leaves out most undeveloped and developing countries? Having lived in China before, not one of the 26, I know traffic can be much more fatal than in the states.

Cars are dramatically safer for passengers than they used to be. Miles per death isn’t reflective of the skill/attentiveness levels of drivers.

As the sibling comment points out, miles driven per death for pedestrians isn’t necessarily being improved by the mass and visibility and safety factors.

I believe my numbers include pedestrians, based on the definitions I can see.

Here’s a detailed breakdown (although no deaths/mile figures).

Proportional to population, pedestrian fatalities have risen significantly since 2010.

https://www.iihs.org/topics/fatality-statistics/detail/pedes...

It has deaths/mile, in that they provide deaths, and we know the miles.

I do not disagree the numbers are trending up (although, I believe rates/miles driven might show a different story, but I didn't grab the miles driven for years 1975-2021 to normalize).

Americans drive 400 MILLION miles before a pedestrian death.

Let that sink in. 400 million miles per ped death. That's just absolutely gob-smacking amazingly good for something involving direct human control of an enormous ton+ vehicle.

If a couple drives 10,000 miles each for 50 years, that’s 1 million miles. In a neighborhood with 75 houses, each inhabited by such a couple, 1 person will die from driving in those 50 years. And when they die, they usually had many more years to live otherwise. That’s to say nothing of injuries.

This isn’t accurate because the deaths include pedestrians (which could be someone outside of your neighborhood of 75)

Sure but the spirit of my comment stands and it’s a small adjustment to the math. Needless to say pedestrian safety is paramount.

Sure yet a human driver is not a device that can be hacked and then used as a weapon or weapons.

Yeah it's a good thing that cities aren't filled with retail locations that sell liquids that, if ingested, turn humans into bad drivers that think they're great drivers. And it's a good thing that those hypothetical liquids don't form debilitating addictions that make the humans want them more.

hmmm your analogy doesn't totally fit and you might have drank too much of the AI tech bro kool aid ;-)

These cars can be hacked as used as weapons ... for terrorist attacks. As well malfunction and lock you in driving into the bay or off a cliff or etc.

Open to your rebuttal ;-)

Rebuttal to what? You accused them of being a tech cultist and then started talking nonsense about terrorist attacks that are already performed with cars and trucks and would probably be harder to do in a self-driving world, as well as fear-mongering about "hacking" when all modern cars can be hacked by ATPs anyway, and they're the only ones who'd be capable of pulling off something like what you're talking about. Nonsense doesn't require a rebuttal and neither do insults.

Any computer can be hacked, so nonsense (?) and you are saying a AI robot car will never be hacked?

It previously happened in Charlottesville sometime ago (https://www.nationaldefensemagazine.org/articles/2015/5/1/20...) and will surely happen again but possibly not just one car but a fleet as others in this thread agree/noted.

There's two sides ..either you're all for them or on the fence or against. Im on the fence with trusting Waymo more then Cruise as Waymo's been at it for more then a decade but am concerned about all things I noted.

I did not insult anyone it was tongue and cheek. As well i was just responding to the drinking and driving analogy which my argument and that are two different ones.

Plenty of cars today are already drive by wire and connected. Cars have had computer controlled cruise for a decade or more. There's absolutely no reason to assume the security of the car's systems is impacted by its ability to drive itself.

Charlottesville might have thoughts on this

That was one car. The thing with hacking is that it's incredibly scalable. Imagine a million cars going haywire at the same time. It could be worse than being hit by a nuke, and it could be dropped by a single talented extremist.

I think at least part of the issue is that most people view other drivers as `highly distractable, slow-reacting meatbags`, but themselves as responsible, reasonable, highly capable drivers.

Interestingly missing from these discussions is: What does the distribution of accidents look like across the population of drivers?

It's possible to introduce an automated driver that is better than an average driver, but if the only people that use it are above-average drivers then you could end up with more accidents.

I'm a software engineer and I put myself into that thing. Didn't die. AMA

But last week, a block from home, this old lady killed a 4 year old in this city. Perhaps the little girl was a consenting participant to this, but I am quite doubtful.

You trust a drunk driver more? a distracted teenager more? a parent with a car full of loud kids more?

Do you avoid flying too?

In GA, yeah. On commercial passenger jets with a couple well-trained pilots and a multiple-times lower fatality rate per hour than cars, there's no safer place to be if you need to cross the continental US. I doubt a self driving car is anywhere near as safe as that, especially considering how unlikely violent crime is to get anywhere on a US domestic flight, for obvious reasons.

It seems pretty clear to me (if you've been to SF recently) that autonomous cars react to pedestrians quicker and are much more careful around pedestrians than human drivers.

You can certainly take the attitude "I will only agree with having autonomous cars on the street once they are provably 100000000x safer than a human" but I don't think that matches most people's view on what constitutes safety.

Also, that goes pretty strongly against the American ethos, where we let people make their own decisions in terms of what kind of things they buy, within reason.

We already know that SUVs are more dangerous for pedestrians, but I think most of us agree that making SUVs illegal for this reason would not be a good idea, and is against the American ethos.

> We already know that SUVs are more dangerous for pedestrians, but I think most of us agree that making SUVs illegal for this reason would not be a good idea, and is against the American ethos.

As a non-american that doesn't own a car it's not that unreasonable for me :) At least banning SUVs that are excessively unsafe for pedestrians in a collision. Or maybe just ban it in cities where some walkability is expected. I just don't want to die by getting hit by a car

> I just don't want to die by getting hit by a car

Most Americans couldn't care less about pedestrians. All they care about is where to park their car.

Nobody expects self-driving cars to be bug-free-- why would we?

All that matters is, statistically, that the cars are better than humans at driving. And that's something that will eventually be achieved through a combination of software engineering, hardware engineering, and spending lots of money to build trust. Some number of people will still die in accidents even if the entire fleet is self-driving.

You might, if you do not already, find a like-minded crowd on the Risks mailing list, where they argue about 0.0000001% risks like "streetlights that turn green automatically when emergency response vehicles approach the intersection, fail at some rate because the designer didn't anticipate two emergency vehicles approaching the intersection at right angles" (which very very rarely causes an accident).

As another programmer, and one with decades of experience building software running critical infrastructure, I have a very different view.

You seem to be expecting perfection, or a reasonable facsimile of it, but that's not the bar that's being set by the existing solution (people).

Using your example of even a pedestrian task such as buying airline tickets, humans generally have a worse error rate than a computer doing it.

Source: I live in the Philippines where manual handling is still de rigeur for everything from buying ferry tickets, to immigration paperwork, to car registration and driving licenses. The error rate is far, far higher than the automated systems that do these things in other countries.

Similarly, humans (in aggregate) are really not very good at driving cars safely. Software on the other hand, is only getting better at it as time goes on. It's perhaps debatable whether computers are currently better (again, in aggregate) than humans, but with the current state of the art my view is that they are.

I'd welcome these things with open arms in the Philippines compared to the average driver on the road. Or equally so in my home country of Australia, or the US, or anywhere where humans kill each other every day in fast-moving steel cages.

15 years ago I worked on robot tanks for the US Army, I currently am in machine learning and I live in Phoenix, so I was very interested in this and have taken several rides on Waymo (never been in a Cruise). The Waymo felt very safe- and is definitely trying to convince you of that fact. Most seats have a screen that shows the cars current situational awareness of all obstacles around it- you can even see pedestrians, parked cars, etc., and when you come up to a stop light it will display a little icon with the correct light so you know that it is reading the red/yellow/green correctly. It plans routes such that it rarely takes an unprotected left turn (though the current generation of vehicles seem to be more willing to do that- on the old Pacifica minivans I don't think I ever had one do that, the iJag's have done it occasionally though not often). They are clearly thinking about trying to make it feel safer, and convince riders of that safety.

Now, I will note that the Phoenix area is by far the easiest driving I have ever encountered in 25 years of having a license. Wide roads, little traffic, few pedestrians (I moved here from NYC!), little weather, and I don't see them out as much at night. They crucially also completely avoid the most unpredictable driving in the area, for example Sky Harbor Airport, and near construction sites (there is construction in our kids school parking lot, and the Waymo won't go in- they will only drop us off next door and make us walk). But this too builds my confidence in the system- the people who are operating it seem to understand that it has limitations, which suggests to me that they are wearing their engineers hats and not management or, God forbid, salesmen hats. Is it perfect, I'm certain not. But I definitely prefer it to Uber or anything like that- no tip, no worry about the driver doing something concerning, just gets me where I want to go.

Are you happy to put yourself in a human-driven cab? Human drivers are not bug-free either.

It's plausible that this robot, albeit not bug-free, would drive safer than an average human driver.

What does it matter being a programmer?

This thing has a statistical safety rate. Which is either worse or better than your average Uber/Lyft/taxi driver.

But if it's better, it's better. And if you'd rather keep getting in vehicles with human drivers then they're statistically more dangerous, well that'll be your choice.

Buying airline tickets usually works fine, but I'm going to visit a client in upstate New York and a business class ticket BDA->LAX->SYR was cheaper than BDA->PHL.

I ride a motorcycle. I'll trust a machine to check its mirrors. I won't trust a person. I'll ride ten miles and see twenty people on their phones, holding a cup of coffee, turning around to look at their kids, whatever. I get cut off by people who don't look both ways. I get cut off by people who do look both ways and think they will be out of my way before I get close to them. I get cut off by people making turns that aren't in a lane that allows turns.

I'm not afraid of self driving cars because I know that even if they're not perfect, they will still be far better than the overwhelming majority of drivers on the road.

Bicyclist here. The biggest danger to me are trucks and buses that swing around corners without visible signals. Electrics can slap more cameras and enforce blind spots.

But the biggest of all — which this article repeatedly notes — is enforced speed limits. We could have that on “human cars” of course with GPS speed limiters, but that is of course politically impossible despite there not even being a coherent argument for why cars that can move faster than 75mph are legal to sell.

Drivers can pick and choose which laws to abide (see that incident just last week where David Simon made the case that speeding in school zones is just find); ultimately, a computer can be forced to do what it’s told. https://hellgatenyc.com/david-simon-got-a-speeding-ticket-in...

By this logic, we should go back to manual deploys since CD lets... aghast... computers deploy our most important software to prod

I'm with you. That's why, as a house builder, I'll never get into an aeroplane. I mean bricks are way too heavy to fly, the concrete will crack at the first sign of turbulence and how far can they really go before the mains power cables get cut? It makes no sense. At least, unless they're doing things differently.

> Though there’s no driver, each ride is supported by staff at a Waymo site that can be summoned if a car runs into trouble.

Unless they have multiple rides looked after by a staff, what are they planning to save by not offering a driver? Also, is there any path to profitability given how many billions were poured into the technology? Not that I care so much though, Alphabet has enough profitable ventures to recoup otherwise.

I think it goes without saying that the remote observer likely sits at something resembling a trading desk with a wall of LCD panels, monitoring heaps of vehicles like a glorified security guard.

It'd be interesting to know what the permissible overcommit ratio is though, if there even is a limit codified by the state/city somewhere.

Of course there's not one on-duty staffer per car. You'd only need that many people if all rides required human support at exactly the same time. But in reality, most rides wouldn't require it at all. Even if there's likely to be some correlation between support requests, it'd be all cars on one street or block needing help at the same time, not all cars in the same city.

> Also, is there any path to profitability given how many billions were poured into the technology?

Sure, let's do it back of the envelope.

First, the unit economies. Let's assume that a taxi is driven for 16 hours per day (two 8 hour shifts), and the average wage for a driver is $15 / hour. That works out to 16 hours / day * $15 / hour * 365 days/year = $87600/year. This is how much less it costs to operate a self-driving car is than one driven by a human. Since human-operated taxis won't be running at a loss, this means a self-driving taxi would make a minimum of ~$90k/year profit if it got as many drives as a human.

Would they get as many drives? Would people prefer a self-driving taxi over a human-driven one? At least if the self-driving taxi is cheaper, I don't see why not. It'd be easy for the self-driving taxis to undercut human drivers on price, while still remaining very profitable. The big challenge is the service area, where self-driving cars currently have no flexibility.

The unit economies seem to check out. Is the market big enough to run this as a proper business, or is it depending on unrealistic growth? The numbers I'm finding aren't super consistent, but it seems that the taxi + ride-sharing business is something like $50B-$100B / year just in the US. The addressable market is definitely sufficiently large to pay for billions in R&D.

So really it's just a question of how fast they can scale it up, and how quickly the competition catches up.

> That works out to 16 hours / day $15 / hour * 365 days/year = $87600/year.*

True, but they also have to pay the staff who is monitoring the cars. Maybe 10 cars have one staff? For 250 cars, there should be a team of 25. Maybe they earn a year as much as one car saves? i.e. nearly 90k/year. So, that still works out profitable.

Staff to clean the cars. Staff to refuel the cars. The cars themselves. The administrative and technology teams to ensure the cars work, logistics work. Teams to handle incidents.

Replacing that $35/hr driver gets pretty difficult unless a lot of things are all in place at once.

> Of course there's not one on-duty staffer per car. You'd only need that many people if all rides required human support at exactly the same time.

Now I'm curious what happens when a lot of cars need support at the same time, and not enough support people are available. For instance say SF gets magnitude 8+ earthquake. That could cause a lot of problems for traffic, probably including many things that would confuse current self-driving systems.

So say you are in a Waymo, such a thing happens, and your Waymo is having problems. You decide you'd like to abandon the ride and proceed on foot. Is is safe to just open the door and leave? Or do you have to do something locally to tell the Waymo you want to immediately exit, so that it doesn't decide to start moving while you are getting out? Or does it automatically stop and stay stopped while the door is open?

There is a button in the app and also on touchscreens (accessible from both front and rear seats) that you can use to ask the car to pullover as soon as possible. You can exit the vehicle this way if you think it's unsafe.

> we tried to duplicate the experience a tourist might have bopping around the city in a driverless taxi.

Tourists are probably going to be the last cohort to get access to Waymo.

Why is that? It's a fully public taxi service that will probably be heavily marketed in Fisherman's Wharf/Pier 39.

They're only opening it up to residents bit by bit. They've shown no interest in opening it up to tourists.

Presumably it will only be available for tourists once it's available to absolutely anyone.

I know I'm late on this, but..

"That means residents and visitors to San Francisco will be able to pay a fare to ride in a driverless taxi, ushering in new automated competition to cab and ridehail drivers." [1]

[1] https://www.cnn.com/2023/08/11/tech/robotaxi-vote-san-franci...

btw - are they going to check ID's??

These things should not be allowed to drive as is. I had one ignore a crosswalk and just drive at our family. Alternating between aggressively accelerating towards us and braking. As opposed to the normal behavior of waiting behind the line at the prior junction.

Waymo has been, for the longest, the king in the AV industry. These are the vehicles I would trust my family to drive in.

Can’t speak for Waymo, but took a Cruise starting in the Tenderloin the other evening. Most people complain about these cars obstructing traffic in some type of way, but not much discussion about rider experience. First, these cars are susceptible to harassment by malicious pedestrians (someone walking around and bumping the car), halting operation. Second, surprisingly, the cars do not always stop for pickup at the specified location (they can get stuck before making a final turn due to an obstruction and still be obstructed when attempting to depart). This doesn’t deter me from using these cars, but some things the service should consider and riders should be aware of when picking routes.

The article says that the general public in SF can use Waymo starting this week, but is this actually true? My Waymo One app just says I'm on a waitlist and SF is invite-only.

What took them so long? Is “new“ a core concept of “news“, and hasn’t this been possible (in select cities) for many months?

It only recently went from “closed beta for free” to “charges anyone who wants to get on”. SF just cleared them to take fares.

No, the California Public Utilities Commission just approved them to take fares. Unfortunately San Franciscans have had very little, if anything, to say in any of this.

It's like this paragraph is obligatory:

> Waymo has had fewer headline-worthy troubles. In May, one of its cars struck and killed a small dog. A few years ago, a driverless Waymo car with a human safety driver operating the wheel hit a pedestrian who needed to be taken to the hospital.

After reading that reporters were explicitly instructed to go after tech[0], I just can't not see stuff like this.

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33456708

Of course it’s obligatory in such an article to mention the ongoing controversies surrounding self-driving cars. They’re relevant context. But if anything, that paragraph makes Waymo look good, given that it comes after a paragraph listing a series of more-significant incidents involving Cruise, and explicitly says Waymo has had “fewer troubles”.

Sure, that makes sense. Except how is it an "ongoing controversy" that one of the cars hit someone, while being driven by a safety driver? There's providing context, then there's digging for anything that might stick to make them look bad. This, to me, reads as the latter.

> The Waymo rides were affordable, ranging from $18 to $21

Goes to show you what world these journalists are living on that think that's totally acceptable for a five mile ride. I'll stick with public transit.

Compared to Lyft or Uber, that's a fine price. Those are its real competition.

Do you have any concept how long it takes to go five miles on SF public transit? If both your stops aren't on a MUNI rail line, you've easily burned an hour.

Have you ridden in the Bay Area? Public transport in SF is slow outside of a few routes.

A MUNI ticket is $2.50 for 120 minutes. I would gladly pay 10X that for 30 minutes if my train was timely, clean, and safe-feeling.

A five mile trip in a SF taxi is $24.30 before tip [1]. So for five miles, this is notably a bit cheaper.

And it's obvious that "affordable" here means relative to other car services. Not relative to public transit.

[1] https://www.sfchronicle.com/sf/article/S-F-taxi-meter-rates-...

I'm the first to call journalists out of touch, but in this case it's you.

There's a reason that cars and private-public transport like taxis and uber are so popular all around the world, even in cities with much better public transport than SF. A reason why quite poor people will often spend a lot of money to own cars.

Look at London or cities in the Netherlands or Japan. Car ownership rates around 50% per household, and use of taxi services from time to time would be far higher.

It's because even very good busses and trains don't offer the freedom and convenience of a car. And it doesn't require an outlandish value of a person's time for that $18 to $21 to look at lot more cost competitive with the public transport option.

Public transit is cheap if your time is not worth much

I'm sure the time of a person posting on HN all the time is infinitely valuable.

As an example, riding public transit from Marina Green to Beach Chalet takes 1 hour in Muni: https://goo.gl/maps/8mPmP8ZsC61c2CL5A and involves a change of buses. Is it worth it to spend $20 and do it in 1/3 the time in a clean and safe setting? To many, yes.

Why public transport in one of the richest cities in the world isn't clean and safe?

Muni is actually fairly clean and safe, it just goes nowhere.

Many in SF would disagree.

Idk, BART generally is considered to be dangerous and/or dirty but I don’t think the muni rails are considered as such when I lived there. They were generally pretty clean and not particularly janky.

Paywall bypass: https://archive.is/vMBom

Thank you! :)

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