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Comment by nazgulnarsil | Hacker News Reader

I want to hear the argument about people who want to ride. I enjoy riding. I like riding horses. I still ride a horse and will not buy an automobile. I participate in riding clubs and I compete in horse racing events. I enjoy horse photography and I do my own hoof maintenance on my steeds. What happens to people like me who actually enjoy riding and the act of owning a horse? Do my loves get phased out because the majority of people just think of transportation as appliances? Will this give birth to "classic-riding shows"? Not saying I don't like innovation, I'd absolutely love to own a model-T, but some things need to be preserved.

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Didn't think of the horse perspective. Thanks for that.

Still feels bad that some I love doing every day will be regulated to somewhere far removed from where I live and done only a few times a month at best.

I doubt it will be outlawed. You can still ride horses on public streets in most places (probably not freeways I imagine), but most people of course don't. In the same way you probably will be able to drive cars manually indefinitely, even while most will choose to use autonomous vehicles.

It won't be outlawed; it'll just be priced out of existence. When autos are good enough, insurance costs for manual driving will skyrocket. Only the very richest will be able to afford driving on roads.

That doesn't seem to follow. Insuring a manual driver wouldn't carry any more risk than it does today (on the contrary, there may even be fewer payouts due to other drivers being replaced with safer autonomous counterparts).

It's possible they don't really skyrocket. However, right now insurance rates are not at all cheap. It's not at all uncommon to have to pay $100+/month on insurance, per driver. For most families, there aren't many things they're willing to spend $1,000+/year on. When it's no longer a necessity, I would suspect that even if prices don't go up, because the marginal cost of driving yourself will have increased (cost to drive - cost of next best alternative, i.e. autonomous driving), most people will choose not to self-insure. Just like in some cities, the marginal cost of car ownership is so large (even if it's only a few thousand dollars more than in a suburb) that it makes more sense to rely on public transit.

The wildcard is lawsuits. In theory, being one of the (say) .1% drivers on the road that is human ought to be safer than driving today, but if you do hit anybody or anything and cause any sort of significant distress you're going to be looking at a negligence lawsuit that could be wildly larger than anything we'd see today "because they shouldn't have been driving"/"because they should have been in a self-driving car".

But other wildcards could cancel that out. A law could be passed shielding humans from excessive payouts, in which case insurance could stay low. If you were demonstrated to be a safe driver by the automotive panopticon, you might still be able to get cheap insurance, although that one raises its own questions. And of course the ultimate wildcard is that they get sued out of existence entirely somehow, despite being provably safer at some point.

It won't be just insurance prices. With self driving cars, you will not need to own a car. Self driving cabs are the future.

Just like horse-riding, it will probably never be relegated below the position of virtually every other hobby in the world.

This brings to mind the central premise of "Humans Need Not Apply", which I'm happy to bring up as worthwhile viewing whenever the discussion trends towards dramatic lifestyle changes from automation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Pq-S557XQU

Funny analogy but it doesn't quite work here. Driverless cars are still cars. They both still use the same roads and infrastructure.

I believe in the beginning, so did automobiles and horse-and-buggy vehicles.

You've never seen a horse or a horse-drawn carriage on a public road?

Yes, but they are more or less considered a novelty than an actual efficient means of transportation. Most of the time, horses are not allowed on roads.

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