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Comment by weatherlite | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

>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.

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