At least in the UK, one of the most prolific serial rapists was a licensed taxi driver (not even an Uber driver (who get a lot of stick about not being as safe as "real" taxis) - but a licensed and supposedly-vetted London black taxi driver). https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Worboys

So I guess safety is a major plus based on that.

Totally illogical supposition. I'll bet a lot more taxi drivers have rescued people in trouble than assaulted them, a young female relative of mine was rescued by a passing taxi driver from a dicey situation outside Sheperds Bush tube station. The chances of thugs standing in front of future driverless vehicles like highway robbers to stop them is very high, especially if the predators can see their prey has something of value to them

We can do anecdotes back and forth, but many people would absolutely love “Uber but there’s not a stranger in the front seat.”

Perhaps people would "love" that but I have a feeling that the continued retreat from all forms of socialization due to technology is not a good thing by and large for society. I would guess that most people who think they desire this wouldn't even think they desire it in terms of safety but instead in terms of avoiding distraction or awkwardness.

Technology lets me socialize an order of magnitude more than I'd otherwise. We as a species have never been more connected. If it also gives me respite from having to engage with someone I'd rather not in a car, all the better.

Honestly, we could all use a bit more of a break from each other, in my opinion.

Point well taken, I meant physical / proximal socialization. I would contend that most forms of socialization over the internet are lower quality than a candid conversation with a stranger in a car ride.

They will love it until they are leaving from the bar and the last bar attendee left them a big wet bile-smelling present all over the seat. At least when this sort of thing happens on a bus there are other seats you could use.

Reject the ride due to cleanliness and request another one.

And who knows how long that will take? In some places it takes long enough just to request a single uber trip much less two in a row. Imagine how livid you'd get when a half hour after you first intended to leave the bar, the second self driving car arrives, and it to is soiled.

Hey, with a huge fleet of self driving cars that aren’t taking Saturday night off and only have mostly bar traffic to consider, I think you’ll manage.

And the robot won’t take offense.

'Your ride request has been refused due to your social credit score, spare the air day and your recent equity transgressions. Here is a 5% off coupon for sensible walking shoes'.

It's not the robot that might take offense, it's the folks in the panopticon and their databases.

The scenario you described already happens in San Francisco and the Bay Area on a regular basis to regular human drivers. There are plenty of videos of peoples' back window being smashed while they're sitting in traffic and their expensive goods are taken. The solution to this is not having human drivers, it's cracking down on property crime and treating it as equally as important to violent crime.

Exactly, I'm in the bay area also. Not hard to see next generation highway robbers standing in the path of self driving vehicles, which will stop to avoid hurting the 'pedestrians' in the road

I’ve always heard the opposite, that real taxis are significantly more dangerous.

Ubers are sent directly to you, and everyone’s identity has been verified.

Compare that to flagging down a random taxi, where you have no idea who the person is before you get in the car.

How is the taxi driver's identity also not verified? Are you assuming there could be a random person who isn't employed by a taxi company masquerading as a valid cab? Since you would need a genuine looking physical cab to pull this one off, that seems a lot less realistic than simply pulling up to a bar in any car, telling a drunk girl you are her uber, and driving off before she thinks to check the picture on the app, which is something that does actually happen.

Likely be able to get a taxi anywhere. No discrimination. No 20/25/30% tip suggested. No taking advantage of passengers, no weird routes to tack on extra fees.

> ...no weird routes to tack on extra fees.

At first. They will optimize that later.

There's no need for that. Rideshare drivers' pay overwhelmingly goes to cost of labor rather than fuel or maintenance, especially in big cities. Uber/Lyft take another 25-40% from the gross fare the passenger pays. Cruise will be capturing all of that and only needs to pass a fraction on to the consumer to get an unassailable price advantage.

This is only true now, until such rides become the norm. Then the margins will shrink and companies will optimize every way they can.

Maybe you haven't ridden a cab in the last 10 years, but like any other major industry these days, they do have an app you can use. You can call one up immediately like an uber or schedule it in advance like a traditional cab, it gives you a fixed price up front and a set route, tip can be included in the app how you like. In my experience taking a cab like this is better than ubering to the airport since its the same price any time of day rather than in flux between $50-infinity.

You clearly haven't taken a cab lately in a place without Uber or the like.

Fine in the UK. I assume yellow cabs in SF are still just as scammy as ever, since that's basically the reason Uber was started.

Are you arguing that software in general never discriminates or prioritizes the company over users; or that there's something special about self driving tech that will make it far more utopian than other products in the wild?

I would much rather prefer my own private car than one being driven by someone else. It'll be interesting to see if the level of cleanliness though as most drivers tend to take care of their car because it's their car. If someone throws up in one of these cars does it know or does it just show up to the next pickup?

That raises another question for me: I thought Uber and Lyft[0] had COVID-related cleaning protocols that require their drivers to disinfect some surfaces of the car after each ride. How can a driverless car do that?

[0] https://www.lyft.com/driver/clean

Sounds like getting rid of some hygiene theater is another benefit of self-driving cars then.

Covid transmission via surfaces is basically non-existent, as far as we can tell.

Do they? I've ridden plenty of ubers in the past year and haven't noticed any such disinfecting.

Why would you? Presumably they don't do it while you're there.

And you still think they do it?

You would smell the alcohol

Easy to add cameras and have someone remotely decide to send the car to get cleaned.

I'm sure that any of these services are going to depend on customers reporting when a car shows up in an unacceptable condition.

That sounds like a great way to burn reputation among your customers. "Why would I take a self driving car from the bar, the last one was full of puke?"

Cheaper, you don’t have to tip (in the USA where that is required), availability (driver doesn’t need to sleep), and safety (you don’t have to worry about your driver trying to cheat or rob you).

People aren’t getting cheaper. Indeed, this pandemic is showing us just how fragile the labor market is and automation that was too expensive to consider before (like fry robots at caliburger) are now very reasonable upgrades. Uber was great when they cost $40 from the airport, but not $200 given the driver is now considered a full time employee with full benefits.

Where are Uber drivers considered full time employees?

Didn't that almost happen in California?

The UK, for a start.

Eventually I think it will reach a point where it’s safer too. The car doesn’t get tired, meanwhile I’ve had plenty of taxi/uber rides where the driver has been driving long, long hours.

> What is the benefit of a taxi being driverless, for the passenger?

Not risking kidnapping, sexual assault, etc.—or even just “this person won't shut up”—from the driver.

> Is it cheaper?

Eventually, though perhaps not initially.

If you can reduce the cost of a car trip to fuel + maintenance + depreciation, you are providing a very compelling alternative to private car ownership. It will change everything.

nobody owns a car because its cheaper than other forms of transit. and if you want to be cheauferred around by an ai instead of taking a bus, you will pay for it.

People own cars for convenience. In the US public transit is impossible. A self driving service can be as convenient or even more convenient compared to owning a car. (No registration, oil change, insurance, fueling, parking, maintenance chores) I’m a car guy and I see the appeal.

Indeed. Exactly how this all will play out is unclear, but if it works the impact on land use will be substantial.

> In the US public transit is impossible

No sarcasm. Why it's impossible to have public transit like every other country in the world but it's possible to pour tons of money on driverless cars development?

The suburban land use pattern doesn't admit good transit because not enough people live close to the stations.

Also, we have bad combinations of when to make things public/private - the US actually has much more public services than many other countries (other places do have privatized mail, transit, etc) but then doesn't fund them. If this was Japan all the good stores would be in the train station and would fund the operations.

Thank you, I really appreciate your answer.

You will pay more than the bus, yes.. but perhaps less than the cost of owning and maintaining your own car.

The benefit, one day, is if you're a criminal whose face is detected, the car doors will lock, and you'll be driven directly to law enforcement who will be ready and waiting to apprehend you.

Although possible.

I suspect and hope there will be some push back. Imagine a counterpoint in either a bug or malicious attack where innocent person is locked in and then driven into a lake or something.

I dont think autonomous cars should be able to lock people in. The car can report to police silently, that's fine.

>> The car can report to police silently, that's fine.

No, it should not do even that. You are making an assumption here that police/government always have good intentions.

What society needs is kind of power balance: law enforcement being able to catch 98% of criminals is a noble goal, but pushing that number up to 100% is not possible in democratic society, it requires totalitarian control. That's why we need to make a choice here and oppose surveillance, event if it seems well intentioned.

This is basically the point I was trying to provoke. We forfeit a good bit of our privacy and autonomy with these technologies. Rather disgusting how convenience always wins.

Seems like it would be a lot less dramatic to just trigger a head on collison on the highway which you could do today if you broke into the tesla fsd system.

There's a story to that account: https://www.vice.com/en/article/xygzvz/one-star

Wow...spot on! That was a fun read. I don’t think the scenario is that outlandish.

That won't ever happen. If it did, it would disproportionately affect people of color, be declared a racist "feature," and be banned.

yea, you take the biggest cost of taxi out of equation.

The $250,000 SF taxi medallions?

Assuming it is $250k one time purchase, it seems cheaper than annual pay for a person to drive around SF, and the overhead to manage the person.

You still have overhead to manage your fleet of self driving cars. They aren't self repairing, self fueling, and self cleaning yet.

Cheaper than having individuals manage their own cars.

The Uber trick is that people don't understand how much it costs to own a car, so riders get to extract money from overinvested drivers.

Let’s assume you get a loan for 30 years on it for 6%. That is $18k a year. What is labor? $50k a year?

It will likely be cheaper (maybe not initially), but more restrictive in pickup/drop-off and availability (ETA).

Don't you mean less restrictive? A human might have preferences against areas that a computer might not. Further if it's cheaper and less complex to operate (not dealing with employees is a significant decrease in complexity) I would expect more car owners to enter the market and provide services.

The restrictions on pickup/dropoff locations (if any) might have more to do with road conditions. Cruise might not be comfortable with their cars stopping in certain places.

More restrictive because without a human driver it has to have absolute certainty it will stop in a safe place (unlike a human driver who may make the right or wrong call to just double park and let you hop out).

Think of self-driving cars as likely to use their own version of "bus stops" but the route and flexibility would be greater than that of a standard bus

It will more restrictive because they haven't mapped all streets.

Labor is the most expensive part of a taxi.

1) cost (majority of the uber ride cost is paying the human)

2) social anxiety / norms

3) experience tuning / consistency

For the passenger – unless the cars drive significantly better there's really no difference. Rides may get cheaper but the overall market will decide that.

The benefits to the company who runs the service is, of course, huge.

No forced chitchat, no chance I’ll be rated badly, (eventually) safer than many of the drivers I’ve had.

I’d use it daily if it were an appliance rather than an interaction. Right now I have a car.

This is why I like cabs. Customers should not have a rating.

The Omicron variant of COVID-19 is the most infectious disease known to mankind. In mid-December, with caseloads similar to now, the asymptomatic positivity rate was around 15%, so you can roughly put the chances of your driver being infected with COVID-19 at around 15%. So, right now, I'd feel safer in a driverless cab. (Of course, that calculus changes as the number of cases changes, which is right now happening rapidly.)

>The Omicron variant of COVID-19 is the most infectious disease known to mankind.

Based on what? Certainly not RO

Rt multiplied by serial interval it is, so "fastest and most widely spreading contagious pathogen in modern history" is probably correct.

R₀ for Omicron is 8-10, but the generation time is 5 days instead of 16 days for measles.

Omicron is the "live vaccine" variant of COVID-19. I've had it and it was no problem.

Cheaper and greater availability at all hours I'd imagine, as the driver doesn't need to take shifts.

Yes. Instead of the variable cost of a human, it's just the variable cost of maintenance + gas.

no. a billion dollars wasnt invested to socialize transportation. ultimately it may be more, if there is value in not having to interact with the smell of a fleshbag