I haven’t seen any statements but here’s the context:

It’s Chinatown, San Francisco. It’s Chinese New Year. The Streets are tiny, narrow, crowded and full of the young and the drunk celebrating the Year of the Dragon, and nobody at Waymo thought to tell their cars to stay away from this area at this time (or they did and this car missed the memo and ended up in the wrong place at the wrong time anyway).

> It's intriguing, people in a city with over $300K GDP per capita burning an AI enabled transportation robot.

That GDP per capita figure really misses the mark on what San Francisco is like. Also: not everyone here is in tech, or cares about tech.

>That GDP per capita figure really misses the mark on what San Francisco is like. Also: not everyone here is in tech, or cares about tech.

That's why its interesting. Extreme wealth next to poverty must be a hotbed for things happening.

See: the United States since 1970. I think “inequality is destabilizing” should be a pretty tame non-controversial take, hopefully

There is very little “poverty” in San Francisco. There’s a lot of addiction and mental illness, though.

The street is so narrow that it has a car parking lane on both sides. Truly a scares resource, this road.

I encourage you to Kagi Image search “San Francisco Chinatown Chinese new years”.

Besides one or two main thoroughfares, the streets are absolutely narrow considering how many people are there during these events. Or hell just during a Sunday. Driving in downtown/chinatown yesterday would be extremely stressful and ill advised for the best of human drivers. IMO.

EDIT: actually you’re probably just remarking that parking sucks which hell yeah wtf, get those cars outta there. Street parking in sf is already so bad that they need to bite the bullet city-wide and commit to transit.

I just think it's ridiculous to say that Jackson is an impassibly narrow street. The reason the Waymo encountered a crowd at this spot is because some outlaw dirtbike losers were having a sideshow in the intersection. It is not some car-free paradise.

Are we blaming Waymo now for letting one car driving through a busy street ?

It does not warrant to set the car on fire.

I don't see anyone here pinning blame on Waymo for the incident.

> It does not warrant to set the car on fire.

I agree, but it is also true that Waymo shouldn’t have been there. You can blame Waymo for not planning ahead, or the City/State for not being proactive about regulating where and how autonomous vehicles operate around what is basically a festival, or both; and you can also blame the crowd for setting fire to it.

However you want to slice that blame cake, it probably shouldn’t have been there and it had no way of making that determination without being directed.

I mean it's an unprotected corporate asset in a city where the median employee only makes 1/3rd the revenue they bring in, it's not difficult to think of an excuse.

There's tons of unprotected corporate assets all over the world, only some are burned down.

I wonder if its a result of discontent with the social contract or just drunk or drugged folks.

It's notable that it's in Chinatown. I lived there a decade ago and currently work close by. There are few drug addicted homeless people who reside there. The news makes it sound pervasive for political reasons, but it's actually highly localized. I would bet on job displacement, personally.

While I understand your sentiment It will be interesting to compare income versus average revenue per employee of tech businesses to other kinds of businesses as well. I have a feeling that employee expenses of 30% are quite normal across all industries.

Averages are a very bad way to look at things. Elon could be in the midst of a 100 homeless folks and the avg would be still billionaires.

SF is a polarized city. Rich tech bros close to people barely making by.

This was Chinese new year. If Waymo was blocking traffic and stuck, they’d do it to give a middle finger to the big fat corporation.

Technically Waymo is taking away from a job that a human would do. That might not sit well with some.

There is no history of new tech not creating more jobs than it displaced. None, zero, zilch. Maybe it will be different this time but with out any evidence to back that up, all of history says that new tech makes more new jobs. So, blocking new tech is protecting a few today and actually preventing more people from having jobs in the near future. Yes, it's no fun for those displaced and we should try to help them but given that more jobs have always been created in the past, protecting those few today means asking more people to go without/starve/be-poor etc. In other words, blocking tech is the exact wrong thing to do if you want more people to have jobs.

https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/michael-webb-ai-jobs...

https://pastebin.com/uix3rgBe

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There's plenty of history of tech turning high skilled, high wage jobs into low skilled, low wage jobs though

Not sure why you got downvoted. You are correct in terms of jobs not lost.

However you can be both correct and wrong at the same time.

What we're seeing in US economy is the largest transfer of wealth from middle class to wealthy class in last few years.

The wealthiest 10% owns 90% of the stock value. https://www.cnbc.com/2021/10/18/the-wealthiest-10percent-of-...

The zero interest rate phenomenon accelerated this, but also technology accelerates it.

We're seeing the effects in mass tech layoffs yet the tech companies continue to add trillions to their cap and bring in 100s of billions in profit per year to their balance sheets.

Total share of top 1% of all wealth rose from 23% to 32% https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/WFRBST01134

In any case, either we need a healthier wealth curve. Or what the young generation are learning the hard way is that it doesn't make sense to have kids. It's really hard to move income classes. Technology makes this worse as the richer get richer owning capital and means of automation - which does what humans used to do much cheaper.

There's no statement, so it just looks like random destruction. But people in SF have vandalized e-scooters and specifically blocked tech companies' buses before.

Lots of people in SF feel that these tech companies are pricing them out of their hometown.

Or it could just be regular vandals looking for an excuse to tear up something and a vague memory about a self driving car killing someone in the news was good enough to tear up one of them.

I feel like if you live in SF and don’t own property or don’t work in tech, the rise of the tech industry has been bad for you.

SF was a city of "old money" long before the tech companies set foot there. And old money still seems to have a lot of say in San Francisco.

But yes, that doesn't prevent people who don't even seem to be aware of that "old money" from going after tech.

SF streets aren't exactly safe for cars for a long time. Breakins are extremely routine occurrence. So, this one time somebody decided to take it up a notch. No need to make Butlerian Jihad out of it.

Per capita income doesn't reveal the actual income disparity. SF wasn't always expensive city to live. It was in fact quite the opposite. Last several decades have made the city inhospitable for the economically vulnerable population. Instead of looking at the per capita GDP, you should see the income distribution in the city. The median household income is $126,000 which is not a livable wage in the city for a family. The recent poverty rate is ~10%.

My perception is that, people were partying & were drunk. The Waymo vehicle likely was just passing through and probably got stuck. People simply took out their pent up frustration on it. It's nothing more than that.

I mean, look at him https://imgur.com/a/7UTrwCQ.png . I don't think the philosophy goes too deep.

This is not a political statement, it just teenagers doing really dumb things when having a metric-ton of fireworks is easily available and no people who will hold them accountable (self driving robots cant get mad)