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Comment by ultimoo | Hacker News Reader

I was talking with someone visiting from Florida the other day and they were talking about how Waymo is slurping money that would have otherwise stayed in the local economy. E.g. you pay an uber driver, the uber driver pays the grocery store, etc.

This is something that had never occurred to me since I love taking Waymos here in the bay area. I guess Waymos operating in Florida need local labor to maintain and clean the cars? How are others thinking about this?

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For sure , this is gonna kill driver jobs and/or lower their wages due to the increased competition. The upside is cheaper mobility for everyone - in general tech like this should have a deflationary effect (We're still not seeing this enough). Think robots building an entire city in months/couple of years instead of a decade, that would cheapen housing dramatically. We're obviously not there yet.

>The upside is cheaper mobility for everyone

Why should Google leave money on the table? They will raise the price until it's just below what people are already paying.

Not an expert but in general that's usually not how tech works. It generally gets commodified and cheaper : TVs, mobile phones, computers etc etc. They're either becoming cheaper or you get a way better product for the same price (think of today's TVs that make the 80s tvs look like something from the middle ages). Yes Google in the initial decade will possibly have a big head start but in the end Tesla and a bunch of Chinese names will also run robo taxis in the U.S. So my take: efficiency and competition should bring prices down in a non broken economy.

>not how tech works. It generally gets commodified and cheaper: TVs

Hardware gets commodified and cheaper, not services usually. Do you pay less for cable tv now compared to 20 years ago?

Its complex. Cell phone plans became way cheaper in my country than 20 years ago, they used to be shockingly expensive. People old enough will remember SMS weren't cheap and a single minute of call was shockingly expensive. I'd same similar thing happened with the internet, you can now get a basic plan for cheaper than 20 years ago. Is it as cheap as it should be? Probably not.

It's interesting this hasn't happened with cable I somewhat agree with you there. However you have alternatives that are just as good like Netflix and cost 20 bucks or less if you can live with ads.

Agreed, I think it's a mistake to treat "cable" as the entire product category here. It's a (dying) subset of the product category, not the whole category. Like internet and cellular service, SOTA television content as a whole hasn't ever really been cheaper than it is today.

The US is unique in its "cable" and telecom approach (maybe shared with some other Western countries).

In most APAC and African countries cell plans are extremely competitive and data is SUPER cheap. Same with streaming services.

That's only until they destroy driver's livelihoods, once they get rid of the competition they can name their price.

If robot driven cars are more expensive than human driven cars then the solution presents itself.

You are right, the clear solution is to eliminate all human drivers.

- ChatGPT

Because they aren't going to be alone doing this for very long. Competitors will just undercut each other until just above the cost threshold. And people will simply pick the one that gets them from A to B fast and cheap. I've never cared about who drives my Uber/Taxi, what car shows up, etc. It's just a service that I buy without knowing any of that. It's only a problem if they don't show up.

The cost threshold should be pretty low. No fuel (only electricity), and no drivers. Those are two of the larger cost factors here.

There are a couple of other important factors: one is safety. Waymos observe traffic laws and safety rules. With enough Waymo on the road, everyone else will be forced to obey speed limits. As a cyclist, I welcomed the day when Waymo waits to pass me rather than a human driver who will get impatient and do a close pass.

The reason I say Waymo specifically is that I don't think it's well appreciated the tech advantage Waymo has by using Google's unequalled geospatial data. Elon keeps claiming that Teslas will do the same thing much cheaper and everywhere, but there's no actual evidence that that is possible. Grinding out larger and larger service areas in more cities is likely to be the way automated rides expand for the next several years.

It wouldn't necessarily lower prices. Waymo could compete on quality instead of price. If you offer a better and safer service than the competition (human and AV) why lower prices at all? There's a reason Waymo often charges more than Uber+tip.

There is some need for local labor, but it’s an order of magnitude lower than the number of Uber drivers that get paid.

I never thought of this, but I think this is a valid concern. Uber drivers will end up spending in their locality while money that goes to Waymo will be used for further investment that’s probably concentrated in the Bay Area. I will say this though, Uber it self somehow takes > 50% of the cut a driver and makes and once again spends it on engineers in California, so Uber is guilty of this same issue, but Waymo is probably worse at this than Uber.

In general AI is guilty of destroying the demand for normal human labour and accumulating money into companies with highly paid engineers.

Someday some politician will propose a law to require companies to maintain most part of their revenue in the city where it was acquired. I know that it will not necessarily be a good thing, but it doesn't matter

This is a clever talking point from Uber that doesn't get the same attention for any other nationwide company. Restrict Walmart, Home Depot, McDonald's, Verizon, Apple because they're taking money away from mom and pop: grocery, hardware, restaurants, mobile networks, and phone manufacturers.

Are you saying that Waymo spends a similar percentage of revenue on local salaries as a labor intensive business like Home Depot or Uber? That would be surprising to me.

I've seen Walmart and similar companies criticized countless times for driving local shops out of business. It has been a common attack for decades, IME.

This doesn't mean the big corporate option is always inherently bad, but it's weird to me that their defenders often attack the very notion that there could be tradeoffs and downsides.

The Uber driver likely gets a different job, probably something a little less stressful and low paying (and frankly dangerous) than Uber.

Usually if you're working a stressful, low paying, dangerous job it's because you don't have many other options. I'm pretty sure "just get another job" is easier said than done for most Uber drivers

I think Uber is openly stressful, but is not transparently low paying or dangerous and that is why people are working it. On face value, it seems easy to earn with your existing vehicle, but most drivers dramatically overestimate earnings after depreciation, fuel, maintenance on their vehicle. Additionally, Uber puts the driver in the most dangerous situations (pickups and drops on active roadways) which aren't apparent to the driver. Driving for 6 hours a day will eventually wear on you.

So, yes, I think drivers severely underestimate the risks and rewards and that is why another job is likely better (which is loosely defined here)

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