I like the idea that the ability to use both hands to eat chicken nuggets while operating a motor vehicle at speed is so inherently and universally valuable that a person couldn’t possibly believe otherwise.
Currently, Americans spend about 100 billion hours driving every year, which is about 11 million man-years.
If you can't see the transformative impacts of freeing up that much time for people to enjoy any other activities, whether it be doing work, reading a book, sleeping, or eating chicken nuggets, then I honestly have no idea what to say.
I just found it somewhat ironic that instead of considering alternatives, people would rather hold out for self driving cars, which may never happen, to reduce time wasted in driving.
Before the damn'demic had the thought that the reason people commute long distance is partly because company VIP's all like to live a) close to work. b) next to each other. Which due to suburbanization forces everyone else to commute. This seems like an incredible waste of societies resources whose costs are born by poor and middle class people. I think the whole work from home thing is a rebellion against that basic unfairness.
If you think about it getting misted because your car plows into oncoming traffic is actually not that bad because some day others will be able to pay $15,000 for DLC in their car that unlocks “road head”. It’s basically on the same level as antibiotics or the Haber-Bosch process in its necessity for the flourishing of mankind
Somehow, when we build a $2 billion Central Subway in San Francisco, through some of the very densest neighborhoods in all of America, with a realized daily ridership of ~3,000, there are no jokes about how unimportant the train is compared to fertilizer.
Far too many people are so selfish that they get hung up on questions like “Could this cause death or grevious bodily harm to me or others on the road?” and do not have the ethical fortitude or wherewithal to focus on “What could the abstract concept of ‘transformative’ mean at an unknown point in the future?”
> there are no jokes about how unimportant the train is compared to fertilizer.
This is a good point. There is basically no meaningful difference between a self driving Tesla and a train. The only explanation for why you don’t hear people discussing the myriad times that commuter trains veer into traffic or otherwise behave in dangerous and unpredictable ways must be collective ignorance and hypocrisy.
I'll happily admit there are problems with autonomous vehicles today, and that is not what I dispute. What I dispute is that autonomous vehicles are not important. And of course they are. They would free up more human time than any other invention on the horizon.
However, to the non sequitur point about safety, we are not designing a system from scratch. The existing system has two million crashes per year in the US alone. If the new system has one million crashes, that's a massive improvement.
> There is basically no meaningful difference between a self driving Tesla and a train. The only explanation for why you don’t hear people discussing the myriad times that commuter trains veer into traffic or otherwise behave in dangerous and unpredictable ways must be collective ignorance and hypocrisy.
Once again, you've quickly switched the point to something different. The question was if an astronomically expensive train that carries a mere 3,000 riders a day is also worthy of derision, since few people use it, and all it does is replace walking, freeing them up to play Wordle during their commute.
I also liked how you brought up trains and then said I’ve switched the point when I responded to your point about a train.
I concede that your point about San Francisco’s train ridership is unassailable proof that self driving cars are as important as water treatment and germ theory. Since it is the only train in the world and has less than stellar ridership, it is proof positive that the very concept is worse than a car that drives itself into oncoming traffic.
It is a shame that the author of the article did not take a moment to consider ridership numbers of the San Francisco rail project as his car was attempting a u turn on the freeway. A small minded person could find themself thinking about impending death and not specific train projects worthy of derision.