Musk doesn't need autonomous vehicles to derail public transit. Hyperloop predated FSD, to use your example. Moreover, the objection applies equally to taxis and Uber/Lyft.

It's also not an actionable objection. Let's say we go and ban autonomous vehicles. Why wouldn't the same billionaires simply continue lobbying against public transit improvements and for the repeal of the ban? They have the money to do both.

We haven't failed to invest sufficiently in public transit for 50+ years solely because of billionaire lobbying. That's not the blocker.

As a counter to your one example:

I've worked on autonomous vehicles for 16 years and my largest philanthropic effort is improving public transit. The common theme is being really interested in transportation and wanting it to work well for people.

Cruise was also the top funder of one San Francisco's recent MUNI funding ballot propositions (which just barely failed). You can certainly have a cynical take on that, but they still did it.

Obviously funding public transit is good, but people usually phrase funding arguments as zero sum tradeoffs. You wouldn't write "bookstores are cool, but I'd rather have public transit", because there's no trade-off there. I'm assuming the OP actually meant something by writing their post the way they did.

I didn't say it was easy. And I'm not talking about individual action. Governments should incentivize and force different things. Conceptually simple example: construction projects should require sustainability and aesthetics reviews, including, for example, use of better materials and green and walkable spaces. For example I find the butt ugly and cheap American solutions for sidewalks (I think continuously poured concrete cut into slabs with circular saws) much worse than the European ones (paving stones, often natural stone). The US is the richer country and it frequently looks cheaper and poorer.

Beauty matters.

At some point they diverge, otherwise we wouldn't have Karnataka and the US sitting where they are for HDI rankings.

Where was this place where you could not drive? I don't know of any such place.

> Yuri Gagarin was the first man in orbit, and that was absolutely a multi-billion dollar invention.

That was government-funded. Most projects aren't that lucky. And are any governments funding self-driving cars?

> Alan Turing didn't pursue his ideas because he wanted to get wealth beyond imagining.

I said multi billion dollar cost. Not multi billion dollar benefit. He's not an example.

> Mondragon makes billions of dollars annually, and strongly limits executive pay.

Have they made any inventions that required a billion dollars or more? Ten billion?

But you saying "makes billions" is exactly what I'm talking about. It's great that they don't pay a lot of money to executives and the workers own things. But the company invested money and the company profited. It didn't all go to making the world a better place.

You avoid particularly wealthy people when a coop can self-fund, but the coop is still trying to profit off the result of the research. And if a risky research project ever can't be self-funded, then whatever/whoever makes the loan might make a huge profit. If that incentive isn't there, the loan doesn't happen and the research doesn't happen.

> I think it's very reasonable to assume that we can, we have historically, and currently do, make multi-billion dollar investments for the good of all. The idea that it requires some profit incentive is, imo, a pernicious falsehood.

It doesn't require it, but if you make it possible to profit off research then you end up with much more money spent on research.