It's intriguing, people in a city with over $300K GDP per capita burning an AI enabled transportation robot. I feel the urge to fit it in some kind of cyberpunk narrative.
It’s Chinatown, San Francisco. It’s Chinese New Year. The Streets are tiny, narrow, crowded and full of the young and the drunk celebrating the Year of the Dragon, and nobody at Waymo thought to tell their cars to stay away from this area at this time (or they did and this car missed the memo and ended up in the wrong place at the wrong time anyway).
> It's intriguing, people in a city with over $300K GDP per capita burning an AI enabled transportation robot.
That GDP per capita figure really misses the mark on what San Francisco is like. Also: not everyone here is in tech, or cares about tech.
That's why its interesting. Extreme wealth next to poverty must be a hotbed for things happening.
Besides one or two main thoroughfares, the streets are absolutely narrow considering how many people are there during these events. Or hell just during a Sunday. Driving in downtown/chinatown yesterday would be extremely stressful and ill advised for the best of human drivers. IMO.
EDIT: actually you’re probably just remarking that parking sucks which hell yeah wtf, get those cars outta there. Street parking in sf is already so bad that they need to bite the bullet city-wide and commit to transit.
It does not warrant to set the car on fire.
I agree, but it is also true that Waymo shouldn’t have been there. You can blame Waymo for not planning ahead, or the City/State for not being proactive about regulating where and how autonomous vehicles operate around what is basically a festival, or both; and you can also blame the crowd for setting fire to it.
However you want to slice that blame cake, it probably shouldn’t have been there and it had no way of making that determination without being directed.
Or it could just be regular vandals looking for an excuse to tear up something and a vague memory about a self driving car killing someone in the news was good enough to tear up one of them.
But yes, that doesn't prevent people who don't even seem to be aware of that "old money" from going after tech.
My perception is that, people were partying & were drunk. The Waymo vehicle likely was just passing through and probably got stuck. People simply took out their pent up frustration on it. It's nothing more than that.
SF is a polarized city. Rich tech bros close to people barely making by.
This was Chinese new year. If Waymo was blocking traffic and stuck, they’d do it to give a middle finger to the big fat corporation.
Technically Waymo is taking away from a job that a human would do. That might not sit well with some.
https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/michael-webb-ai-jobs...
However you can be both correct and wrong at the same time.
What we're seeing in US economy is the largest transfer of wealth from middle class to wealthy class in last few years.
The wealthiest 10% owns 90% of the stock value. https://www.cnbc.com/2021/10/18/the-wealthiest-10percent-of-...
The zero interest rate phenomenon accelerated this, but also technology accelerates it.
We're seeing the effects in mass tech layoffs yet the tech companies continue to add trillions to their cap and bring in 100s of billions in profit per year to their balance sheets.
Total share of top 1% of all wealth rose from 23% to 32% https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/WFRBST01134
In any case, either we need a healthier wealth curve. Or what the young generation are learning the hard way is that it doesn't make sense to have kids. It's really hard to move income classes. Technology makes this worse as the richer get richer owning capital and means of automation - which does what humans used to do much cheaper.
I wonder if its a result of discontent with the social contract or just drunk or drugged folks.