I was just in CA for a few weeks and drove in SF quite a bit. There are Waymo cars everywhere and from the perspective of a driver I was more than a little cautious driving behind or next to one of them.

I would rate their driving as quite good, but their signaling of intent was terrible. More than once did I see them use turn signals, only to never actually turn. Turn the signals on, then off again, then on again, eventually turn perhaps but not always.

Humans are terrible at this too, but we also use more subtle and inadvertent signals like the slight movement to the line telling me they're likely about to switch lanes, only to see the signal go on halfway into it. Those subtle signals are easier to pick up on than a robot driving more or less perfectly straight while signaling, turning of signals, turning them back on again, and so on. Also super creepy with empty driver seats, and no one responsible to make eye contact with.

But the actual driving wasn't bad, as it turns out. Never had or saw a near miss, anything reckless or otherwise remarkable. I can see myself getting used to this tech and I would love for it to succeed, because man driving for anything but fun really sucks.

In England we call them "Indicators" as opposed to turn signals. My driving instructor said, they are call that because they are only indicating they might go that way. Never assume they will. It was some defensive driving advice.

I can understand that it's annoying that inconsistent use of turn signals is an annoyance, it isn't as bad a people that don't use them at all, but my understand is that the American road system doesn't have roundabouts like we do, which kind of require good indicator use for smooth driving.

We have roundabouts. We don’t have them everywhere but then I bet you don’t either.

My home town in Idaho has built at least five I am aware of in as many years, with more planned.

My neighborhood in Seattle plants a tree in the middle of unmarked intersections which effectively creates a mini roundabout.

I've driven in England and New Zealand, and they really had them everywhere.

Yes, we have them in the US, but we don't have enough of them that you can expect that all drivers know what to do with them. It's entirely too common for approaching drivers to be unaware that they must yield to vehicles already in the circle.

> I bet you don’t either.

Oh you haven’t been to the UK if you think that. :) They are absolutely everywhere. Traffic planers love them.

Good point about intent. As a passenger I appreciated how smooth it was but I can see how the lack of “body language” could be disorienting for human drivers.

The Waymo driving style is almost passive-aggressive. It has superhuman situational awareness and knowledge. I wonder if it isn’t using blinkers effectively but it’s everyone else that’s technically wrong.

It’s also not perfect so who knows. There’s probably still bugs to work out.

That sounds great for Waymo: I'd love to experience a ride in one and I'll make sure to catch a ride next time I am in CA.

I wonder what it does in common situations, like stop-and-go traffic with two streets joining at an angle, where one has to yield? In that case, if everyone simply followed the rules, the cars in the yielding street would never get through. While I am passive-aggressive myself as a driver, I religiously follow alternating one-by-one from either street "rule", even if I am in a street that has right of way, to ensure traffic moves for both of those and reduce chances of someone overly aggressively moving in from the yielding street.

If it is still passive aggressive in that case, it will work ok while there are other passive human drivers in the road, but would quickly fall apart when everyone drives the same.

> I wonder what it does in common situations, like stop-and-go traffic with two streets joining at an angle, where one has to yield?

Plan a better route? I can’t picture the situation you describe. Yielding traffic just… yields. When there’s an opening they take it.

On my ride the Waymo took a right turn on red. How is the situation you describe different?

Do you still yield unnecessarily when there are cars behind you?

I was talking about a case where there are cars behind me. And it's "unnecessarily" only legally, but most drivers understand this as a driving etiquette in congested traffic.

Picture two streets joining together, both with long lines of vehicles in them. One of them has right of way, the other one doesn't. When everyone drives "passively aggressively" (like Waymo is being described to), an opening never shows up, and "yielding" cars wait until the rush hour clears up, causing people in that street to go bonkers.

This happens quite frequently in many old European cities I've been to in the rush hour or when anything unusual happens (because there are no alternative routes and streets are tight: like a crash or broken-down car ahead might cause this with lots of traffic). Not sure how much it applies to Waymo and SFO, but I can imagine it certainly happens in some areas.

Ah I see, like merging on to a freeway. In Washington the law is actually to zipper merge (take turns) so I would expect Waymo to do that.

It’s a good question and I’m not sure what Waymo would do there. Based on my limited experience I expect it would navigate that situation correctly. The bias is to go (safely), not wait for perfect conditions.

Thanks for the term as well ("zipper merge") — that's what I was referring to.

Yeah, I really wonder how it'd fare in that case while differentiating between "there are just 3 cars there, no need to yield" and "it's an infinite inflow of traffic, better yield to one car"?

My Waymo ride was in LA. They aren’t operating on freeways there yet. Maybe this is one of the challenges.

Apparently they do operate on freeways in San Francisco so maybe someone who has taken a ride there can share their experience.

I think that as a pedestrian it would be hard for me to get used to. I like to look at the eyes of the driver to make sure they can see me.

There is a signal light mounted on the top of the vehicle. When it detects a pedestrian in a crosswalk or waiting to cross, it lights up with a little ‘human walking’ picture. It makes it very clear to everyone it sees you.

Does it see you or is there someone else it's seeing?

Waymo, take note: instead of displaying a human walking, display googly eyes glancing at pedestrians.

Ah, now we know what to do with the Vision Pro's outward lenticular eye visualizations.

Didn't know about this. Only Apple would think of taking live video of your eyes and projecting them on the exterior of the visor... and call it Eye Sight...

Potential users will read "external display" and immediately think of many uses, and I'd bet the last of them would be "stream my eyes". It's perfectly bland and corporate, I suppose Apple is aiming for normalization, "VR googles you could wear at a party without feeling dorky!".

The iFixIt teardown was very interesting, nevertheless.

I get what you are saying. However where I live in Florida, drivers are so pedestrian blind and oblivious that they’ll run you down right in the middle of the crosswalk while playing on their phone. Friend of a friend was just killed as a pedestrian a week ago. Bring on the robodrivers!

Don't move to South Korea, where nearly everyone has tinted windshields and you literally can't.

Ok I won't? What a horrible thing to normalise.

To avoid this very problem North Korea has no cars at all. Clever.

Why do they have tinted windshields?

In the future we’ll tell our kids, “try to make eye contact with the driver’s sensors before crossing the street”

Having just rewatched the original Total Recall, I can only think of one perfect answer for this. Need to add a Johnny Cab guy to the driver seat and have his head look the direction he is going to go.

Or the automatic pilot from Airplane.

We should require them to have big eyes like 3yo kids car toys.

>More than once did I see them use turn signals, only to never actually turn. Turn the signals on, then off again, then on again, eventually turn perhaps but not always.

>Humans are terrible at this too, but we also use more subtle and inadvertent signals like the slight movement to the line telling me they're likely about to switch lanes, only to see the signal go on halfway into it.

Isn't waymo's behavior preferred? I'd rather see turn signals well in advance of any possible lane changes, rather than the moment before the cars actually start changing lanes. Sure, it'd be ideal if the turn signals were well in advance and there were no false positives, but road conditions are changing constantly, so by necessity you're going to be trading off between advance notice and false positives.

He said he can’t trust the turn signals. I’m case of a human driver, there would be the behavioral cues to fall back on. But with Waymo, you can’t predict its next move at all.

Did he see it turn without signals?

Not explicitly, I think. But if it uses the turn signals without turning, I wouldn’t feel to confident that an actual turn would be preceded by a signal, much less one with enough time for me to react (“I will turn” vs “I am turning now”).

The Waymo failure mode of false positives (signals but doesn't turn) seems much better than the human failure mode of false negatives (doesn't signal but turns)!

Human drivers also sometimes forget to turn their signals off, to the same effect as the described Waymo behavior: uncertainty of intent.

> use more subtle and inadvertent signals like the slight movement to the line telling me they're likely about to switch lanes

For what it's worth, this was explicitly taught in Northern European driving classes, especially in the context of turns. It would literally translate as "grouping" or "making a formation". You "group right" to make a right turn (think aligning text left/center/right). You can look at a line of cars and immediately know which ones are preparing to turn, even from an angle where turn signals aren't noticeable.

The whole thing with self-driving cars is that it feels like the story of NASA's space pen. All this money being poured into a technology that would not be needed if the richest country in the world had the common sense of simply getting rid of its car dependency and developed proper public transit infrastructure.

The NASA space pen story as you call it is a nice quip. It's also a complete lie. The Soviets using pencils wasn't a clever scrappy solution, it was an absolute nightmare for the Soviets. Pencil cores are made of graphite, when you write with it, small bits of graphite break off. On land it just falls down, but in space it floats around and attaches to things. Graphite conducts electricity and it caused countless shorts in electronics, as well as fires, all while in space. If the Soviets had space pens, they would've switched to those in a heartbeat.

> Soviets using pencils wasn't a clever scrappy solution, it was an absolute nightmare for the Soviets

Note, too, that NASA didn't pay to develop the pen. Fisher did.

> If the Soviets had space pens, they would've switched to those in a heartbeat

Guess what cosmonauts use(d) on the ISS? (Qualified because I don't know post-2022.)

> Guess what cosmonauts use(d) on the ISS? (Qualified because I don't know post-2022.)

I genuinely don't know. Do they use pencils still or switched to the space pen?

The Soviets bought space pens from Fisher in 1969 [0] and have continued to use them ever since.

[0] https://www.reuters.com/article/fact-check/nasa-did-not-spen...

Why the pop quiz? You’re not my professor, or even my TA. Just say what you mean.

I live in Switzerland which has a reputation for having good public transport. Still own a car because in many cases you can't beat convenience. Can't wait for Waymo to come here.

> Still own a car because in many cases you can't beat convenience

What about the places where people own cars not because it is the better choice, but the only choice?

Then self driving vehicles will be a new choice.

or it won't like how uber etc at least here only operate in cities, and not where people actually really need cards.

Self driving vehicles, with current technology, are unrealistic outside major cities. Major cities are the places where you least need a personal car.

Google Maps still thinks the speed limit on a nearby highway is 35 mph. We spent several months without lane markers on the highway. Any vehicle driving around here based on the current self-driving architecture, requiring central mapping/planning and good infrastructure, would be ridiculously unsafe.

Not to mention how lost they would be the moment they turned off the highway.

My Waymo ride went through a construction zone without trouble. I don’t know how much mapping it needs or how they keep it current but it’s not constrained to ideal conditions.

> Self driving vehicles, with current technology, are unrealistic outside major cities

Why? My Subaru can practically drive itself on most Wyoming roads, including in whiteout conditions. It’s easier to drive with fewer cars around. It’s just not as profitable to field a fleet in suburban and rural America.

> the story of NASA's space pen

As an example of an urban legend/facile pop science take being treated as fact [1]?

> if the richest country in the world had the common sense of simply getting rid of its car dependency and developed proper public transit infrastructure

Is there a single developed economy that doesn't make significant use of trucks and cars?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Pen#Uses_in_the_U.S._and...

> Is there a single developed economy that doesn't make significant use of trucks and cars?

You do not even need to restrict it to developed economies. Every city (even not very large ones) I have been to around the world, developed or not, has streets lots of cars: London, Manchester, Paris, Nairobi, Colombo, Madras, Bangalore, Sydney, Singapore..... and smaller towns and rural areas in those countries too. Those cover a pretty wide range of quality of public transport too.

Depends on your population density. Tokyo does pretty well with purely public transport. There’s still cars of course, but you don’t use them for travel into the city proper if you don’t hate yourself.

> Tokyo does pretty well with purely public transport. There’s still cars of course, but you don’t use them for travel into the city proper if you don’t hate yourself

Japan has .67 vehicles per person, almost 80% America's .85 [1] and above many European countries. They travel about a fifth as many miles per capita as America [2]. But again, four fifths and a fifth. Nowhere close to zero.

There isn't a developed economy that wouldn't see a significant quality-of-life improvement from self-driving cars.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_and_territor...

[2] https://www.fhwa.dot.gov/ohim/onh00/bar4.htm

Hence why I’m talking about Tokyo. Not Japan. Living in the countryside basically requires a car by definition. People also often have a car, but don’t use it that much. Maybe you’ll get more interesting numbers if you compare miles traveled per person?

Found only for 1997, but increases the discrepancy to 1:2.5 : https://www.fhwa.dot.gov/ohim/onh00/bar4.htm

> I’m talking about Tokyo. Not Japan

Tokyo would have a tough time existing in a world without cars, trucks or roads. Its economy depends on that access.

There is no tradeoff between self-driving cars and a multi-trillion dollar infrastructure rebuild.

> Tokyo would have a tough time existing in a world without cars, trucks or roads. Its economy depends on that access.

I will agree with that statement but mostly because you added trucks in when the original complaint was about car dependency.

Way to miss the point. Yes, it is known that the "NASA space pen" was not really funded by NASA, but but its development still took millions of dollars in R&D.

> Is there a single developed economy that doesn't make significant use of trucks and cars?

For the 127th time: car dependency is not the same as car usage.

> its development still took millions of dollars in R&D

$1mm at the time, $10mm today. They sold for the equivalent of $30 each in today's money and saved manned spaceflight from having to deal with graphite shards in the air and electrical.

> car dependency is not the same as car usage

"If the richest country in the world" got "rid of its car dependency," we'd still want safer cars.

> we'd still want safer cars

With the technology controlled by a handful of corporations? At an development cost that will force them to create any and every opportunity to seek rent on your mobility?

Yes, it would be better if the good thing were more perfect.

Nice rhetorical trick. It's not a matter of "more perfect".

The bad outweighs the good, plain and simple, and only those who are extremely naive or stand to gain from it refuse to acknowledge it.

The bad things you describe as side effects already exist. So adding in good is... good. However you rate the current situation.

Isn't that already the status quo?

Nobody says it has to be a car form factor. It can be a self driving van or shuttle or bus.

Last mile is a nightmare with all public transit. With the low population density of the US we need a lot of small vehicles to feed transit hubs.

For "last mile", we already have bikes, scooters, skates, plain walking...

Really fun stuff but most people have a limited amount of time in the day so if they can afford to take a car they're going to take a car.

> limited amount of time in the day

For trips shorter than 2 miles, I can bet you that it's faster for me to hop on my bike (or to find an electric scooter) and get to my destination than it is to drive. And let's not even talk about the time to find parking.

The grocery store is 1.3 miles from here but it’s a 300’ climb and it’s 42f and raining right now. Even with my e-bike that’s not pleasant. On a conventional bike that’s unrealistic for all but the most hardcore cyclists.

There’s a bus that serves that route but the stop is uncovered and service is unreliable because it’s immediately after a rest stop where the human drivers take care of their biological needs.

A robo-bus would be more predictable and enable more frequent service.

> stop is uncovered and service is reliable

And it doesn't even occur to you that the problem is the poor infrastructure? Do you honestly think that the optimal solution here is just to keep waiting for some trillion dollar corporation to be able to sell some new product that will bring you more "convenience" (at the cost of dependency and yet-more environmental costs related to cars and its required parking infrastructure) when you instead could be doing something like, I don't know, getting your city council to improve the fucking bus service?

> And it doesn't even occur to you that the problem is the poor infrastructure?

It has occurred to me.

> Do you honestly think that the optimal solution here is just to keep waiting for some trillion dollar corporation to be able to sell some new product that will bring you more "convenience"

Not sure where you got this idea. I’m not waiting for anything. I’m still excited for self driving vehicles to compliment the existing system.

> at the cost of dependency and yet-more environmental costs related to cars and its required parking infrastructure

Why would a self driving car need to park? The ability to always be in use is one of the advantages.

As I said there’s no requirement that the self driving vehicle be a car form factor. A self-driving bus could improve access and reliability.

> when you instead could be doing something like, I don't know, getting your city council to improve the fucking bus service?

How?

I choose to live in a city with good (for America) transit. I vote for every transit measure available to me. I ride the bus. I commute by bike when I can. I don’t own a car.

What else should I do?

> Why would a self driving car need to park? The ability to always be in use is one of the advantages.

They are not going to be always in use. Unless you got a perfectly uniform distribution of demand over time, eventually most of these cars will have to be parked somewhere.

And whey they do, let's hope they don't keep doing this: https://www.ctvnews.ca/video/c2977546-lot-full-of-self-drivi...

> And whey they do, let's hope they don't keep doing

How does bringing this up help anything? It's a bug, bugs happen, bugs get fixed. Quickly when they are software bugs. As opposed to NIMBY mind bugs.

Ok but they only need one parking space and even it can be time shared. They don’t need the same parking infrastructure we have now.

Buses also need a place to park and get maintenance. Self-driving allows locating the parking in more distant locations.

> They don’t need the same parking infrastructure we have now.

The existing parking infrastructure is not going away because of self-driving cars. The exact same argument could've been applied to the car sharing programs that already exist. People that own cars are not going to leave their cars for a robo-taxi, in the same way that they are not getting rid of their cars in favor of a ZipCar membership.

> Buses also need a place to park and get maintenance

Do you know that picture showing people standing on the street to show the density of the different methods of transportation? What do you think needs a larger parking footprint? I'd guess that even if autonomous cars got to a remarkable 10% idle rate, they would still require more space than buses.

> Self-driving allows locating the parking in more distant locations.

Guess what companies will do when they realize that their customers do not want to wait 10 minutes for their ride to come pick them up at home? That's right, they will get lots of parking spots close to the urban/suburban city centers.

> The existing parking infrastructure is not going away because of self-driving cars. The exact same argument could've been applied to the car sharing programs that already exist.

Why would the existing infrastructure not continue to change? We are redeveloping parking lots today. Car and ride shares did reduce parking needs.

> People that own cars are not going to leave their cars for a robo-taxi, in the same way that they are not getting rid of their cars in favor of a ZipCar membership.

Building codes for parking spaces are constantly changing here and consider transit availability and car ownership. If self-driving vehicles (including expanded public transit) are available that will further reduce the requirements.

Self-driving vehicles (even cars) put downward pressure on parking needs.

> Do you know that picture showing people standing on the street to show the density of the different methods of transportation? What do you think needs a larger parking footprint? I'd guess that even if autonomous cars got to a remarkable 10% idle rate, they would still require more space than buses.

Why are you so obsessed with the car form factor? I don’t see how a robotaxi needs any more parking than a taxi. A self-driving bus needs as much space as a conventional bus today.

> Guess what companies will do when they realize that their customers do not want to wait 10 minutes for their ride to come pick them up at home? That's right, they will get lots of parking spots close to the urban/suburban city centers.

That’s not how busses, taxis or Ubers work. Ubers are not dispatched from a hub on every call. Demand is predicted and capacity is dispatched accordingly. As demand goes up dispatched capacity utilization goes up. More vehicles can be dispatched when demand approaches dispatched capacity.

This problem is the same no matter what form the driver takes. Taxis, ride shares, and busses already do capacity planning. Robot drivers just remove the human driver complexity from the equation.

Robotaxis (like busses and taxis) can use denser parking structures in their depots because they don’t have to deal with the limitations of the public, or even humans.

>The grocery store is 1.3 miles from here but it’s a 300’ climb and it’s 42f and raining right now.

I would get a jacket and umbrella and walk this without giving it a second thought.

That’s 1.5 hours round trip by foot and 15 minutes by car/e-bike.

And I have to carry my groceries so I’m limited on how much I can buy.

If there was a robobus I would absolutely take that option.

I routinely walk considerably further than that for groceries, in less time. On a route including a steep hill.

Short trips made any way but walking have considerable overhead. Bad urban planning makes it worse. How many times do you have to stop a car on that route?

> I routinely walk considerably further than that for groceries, in less time. On a route including a steep hill.

Not everyone has or wants to spend that kind of time. Especially when it’s not necessary and the weather is bad.

I’m hosting a party this evening so I need to run up there and get snacks and beer. The hour of time the e-bike saves lets me do that between work and guests arriving. I don’t have time to walk that distance and still eat dinner.

> Short trips made any way but walking have considerable overhead. Bad urban planning makes it worse. How many times do you have to stop a car on that route?

I don’t own a car. I ride my e-bike. There’s two lights and a stop sign on that route. It has a bike lane which is nice. Takes 10 minutes including time to put on my helmet and gloves and lock/unlock the bike.

If we both left my couch at the same time I’d be home on my bike before you even arrived at the store on foot.

> Last mile is a nightmare with all public transit.

In rural areas, sure. In urban and dense suburban areas, in most developed countries there's probably a bus stop within easy walking distance.

Yes, the last mile is walked. That’s the problem. It’s not practical to put a train station or bus stop at every corner. This is why cars exist everywhere. If those cars can be automated they can be shared even more efficiently than Ubers and allow more efficient bus and train routes.

> It’s not practical to put a train station or bus stop at every corner.

Tell that to Dublin Bus. Some routes are more or less unusable due to ridiculously high numbers of stops; there’s one in particular near me which has 37 stops over about 4km.

There are large parts of the suburbs here where you’re never more than a couple hundred meters from a bus stop. The last mile is, for much of the city, just not a problem, though when taken to extremes it does make the routes very slow.

> Tell that to Dublin Bus. Some routes are more or less unusable due to ridiculously high numbers of stops; there’s one in particular near me which has 37 stops over about 4km.

Sounds impractical.

> There are large parts of the suburbs here where you’re never more than a couple hundred meters from a bus stop. The last mile is, for much of the city, just not a problem, though when taken to extremes it does make the routes very slow.

We have a solution to this. It’s called a taxi.

That would be a more reasonable trajectory for US cities: more frequent, faster main line transit plus a flood of local inexpensive automated electric vehicles. That would be compatible with the current low density.

If it succeeds, self-driving technology is likely to be integrated into public transit systems, enhancing their reliability and overall efficiency.

With self-driving tech, buses could be made a lot smaller and more frequent. They are large and infrequent because of fixed per-vehicle costs (mostly the driver).

EDIT: Small size then enables personalized routing: a multi-passenger taxi taking a set of people to similar destinations.

That makes a lot of sense, I never thought of the labor as the limiting factor on bus route (clearly I just never thought very hard about it) but boy would it be nice if there was a 9 passenger van every 5 minutes to replace a full size bus every 30.

Vans to complement buses are definitely a thing in São Paulo, and the cost of labor is not a limiting factor.

Really the lack of stops and parking places is, and would be even worse for self driving vehicles deployed in numbers. Unless it's self driving motor bikes or such small personal transportation.

In my city the cost of labor is very much a limiting factor. Robot drivers will open up transit options that aren’t practical now.

How much are you willing to bet that the price of a Waymo ride will converge to be within 10% of the price of an Uber ride today?

(Also, followup question: how are the prices of Uber rides compared with regular taxi service, now that Uber has stopped subsidizing most of their trips?)

> How much are you willing to bet that the price of a Waymo ride will converge to be within 10% of the price of an Uber ride today?

It should! That’s the competition! Hell, I’ll pay a premium for a quieter, safer (and for now, due to novelty, more fun) ride.

And if Waymo maintain a monopoly that will stay the case. Otherwise, the normal thing will happen.

> how are the prices of Uber rides compared with regular taxi service

Cheaper if I wait. More expensive if I want immediacy. Either way, far more utilised than taxis in almost any city I visit.

Thank you for spelling out my argument for me: regardless of situation, the cost of labor has nothing to do with it.

> regardless of situation, the cost of labor has nothing to do with it

Sort of. The cost of labor is the cost floor of the competition. So long as Waymo et al are smaller than the competition, i.e. so long as they don’t need to compete on price, they should tack under their direction. They aren’t setting the market price.

The moment they need to compete, they can tank the price or increase service quality. (They could also stay put and milk it. But that invites new-entrant competition.)

Internet companies compete on price out the gate because we have low marginal costs. A company like Waymo has hardware costs that make competing on price out the gate prohibitive. So in a sense, their costs don’t have to do with labour. But that’s sort of true for any automation tech.

> They could also stay put and milk it. But that invites new-entrant competition.

And believing that this is likely to happen is the problem I have with the whole proposition. I don't see any real player with capital, data and tech know-how to get into this in a way to turn it into a proper competition.

You advocate blowing everything up because you don’t see a way to your favoured state?

I'm saying that we shouldn't be so enthusiastic about the idea of giving more power to one of the largest corporations in the world, and that the idea is only worth pursuing if we have better ways to put them under check. To call this "advocating for blowing everything up" is just weasel wording and really disgusting rhetoric.

>developed proper public transit infrastructure.

No amount of public transport can accomodate the personal whims and demands of anyone let alone everyone. Even Japan, famous for its public transport infrastructure, still has a healthy population of drivers both in metro and rural areas.

Nice strawman.

I am not saying to get rid of cars altogether. I am saying that it would be better (and cheaper) for everyone if we took all those resources being out into "autonomous vehicles" and developed public transit first. Reduce the amount of yearly trips that are done by car. Provide alternatives.

The important thing about Japan or Europe is not "they don't have cars", but "people make 3-4x less trips by car compared with the alternative modes of transportation". If you want to have safer roads (in a way that doesn't give even more power to tech companies) the best way to do it is by simply reducing the amount of trips taken.

> if we took all those resources being out into "autonomous vehicles" and developed public transit first

Waymo has raised about $11bn [1]. That is at best 4 miles of New York subway [2]. It's a third of a train between Bakersfield and Merced [3].

These things aren't competing. To the extent we can compare them on capital efficiency, it's not a good look for American public transit.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/28/business/waymo-investment...

[2] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2023-02-24/cityla...

[3] https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2024-03-21/high-spe...

Try using a unit per person. It starts to look much less rosy for Waymo and also do not forget roads are still public infrastructure that has to be paid for and maintained.

What, you think Waymo will be able to weasel out of road tax or drive without roads?

> Try using a unit per person

Not relevant when we’re comparing project costs. OP argued we should devote self-driving resources to public transit. I’m arguing that’s nonsense.

> roads are still public infrastructure that has to be paid for and maintained

Sure. But that isn’t a new funding commitment. Cancelling Waymo won’t reduce our road costs.

>OP argued we should devote self-driving resources to public transit.

Yes, because it would allow moving people more cost-effectively (among other things) - which is measured per person per unit distance traveled. (I'm not OP, but nothing in this discussion is even remotely new for transit advocates like myself.)

> because it would allow moving people more cost-effectively (among other things)

Add last-mile and model for the real American population distribution. Not an imagined America where everyone lives on Manhattan.

Not all miles travelled are equal. In value, urgency or desirability and thus price willing to be paid. Complaining about self driving cars is asinine. The scales are wrong. The problems are wrong. The places are wrong.

> nothing in this discussion is even remotely new for transit advocates like myself

I mean, exactly. We’re urbanising without commensurate increases in public transit. Deployment or use. Perhaps that hints at a change being in order.

>Add last-mile and model for the real American population distribution. Not an imagined America where everyone lives on Manhattan.

Last I checked, Waymo also operates exclusively in urban areas.

> Waymo also operates exclusively in urban areas

There is no proximate future where public transit makes sense in Wyoming. There are multiple where self-driving cars do.

Self-driving cars are public transit depending on the terms of use; but I assume we're really talking about mass transit here.

When I was in Germany 25 years ago, a district of about 25k people (less than 1k per square mile) had multiple bus routes (4 IIRC) connecting the main town to other settlements, running through farmland. It was not unduly expensive and the locals certainly seemed to think it made sense. Children would take it to school in lieu of a dedicated school-owned service.

There's a light rail system in Rennes, France (city population about 225k; metro about 750k - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rennes) that's longer than the PATH system in the NYC area and almost as well used (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_metro_systems).

Even Iceland has public buses, both local and inter-city (https://www.straeto.is/en).

You are starting to seem dishonest when you resort to outliers and present them as the baseline.

> To the extent we can compare them on capital efficiency

We can not. This logic is stupid. This logic will take you to the idea that the best thing to do is to get everyone a helicopter because helipads are cheap to build and it zero dollars to "build roads in the sky".

Yeah, you are right. These things are not competing. Yes, you are also right that proper infrastructure (re)development in North America will take a lot more money than what Big Tech has invested in self-driving cars.

The upsetting part is to see even supposedly smart people buying into the idea that American Exceptionalism is a real thing, and that you can keep holding on to the hope to find a shortcut away of your problems. Self-driving cars or not, the US is still going to be an expensive, inefficient country that can boast about its amazing economy, yet most people living there are at third-world country levels of development.

> Self-driving cars or not, the US is still going to be an expensive, inefficient country that can boast about its amazing economy, yet most people living there are at third-world country levels of development

For fuck’s sake, the world’s largest rail system and navigable waterways say hello.

I’ve advocated for public transit. But it’s turning into zealotry when an $11bn project showing actual gains is turned into a soapbox for decrying a pet project.

If Waymo/Google/Alphabet really cares about people's safety and this is nothing but a pet project where the amount raised ($11bn) in 15 years is ~3% of their whole revenue in 2023, they wouldn't mind open sourcing their whole system, including for other commercial ventures.

Until then, the whole thing is nothing but a Trojan horse to let encroach themselves even more into another aspect of our lives.

Also:

> world’s largest rail system

The world's largest freight rail system.

> they wouldn't mind open sourcing their whole system, including for other commercial ventures

You seem to just not like that this is done by Google. (Or by any private entity.) That is fine. I, like, hate this one restaurant in New York. But be honest about your motivations and check your biases.

This isn’t self-driving cars vs public transit debate because there isn’t one. If Google were funding a leg of passenger rail I suspect you’d be similarly incensed.

> world's largest freight rail system

The world’s largest rail system, period. We have to qualify that other countries have the largest passenger rail systems.

This is not a matter of who is doing it, but (a) why and (b) second-order effects.

> If Google were funding a leg of passenger rail I suspect you’d be similarly incensed.

It depends on (a) why and (b) second-order effects.

Are they doing it, e.g, because they want to build a new campus in a lower-cost-of-living area, and they want to make the idea of living in Tuscaloosa, AL more palatable by having it connected to Atlanta, GA with train service that does not take 6(!!!!) hours as Amtrak currently does? Amazing, go Google!

Oh, they want to make it so that everyone can use it at reasonable prices, but Google employees can do it for free and get priority boarding? Fine, if that's what it takes to get private enterprises investing in infrastructure, I'm okay with it.

Oh, they want to do it because they are going to use it as a test-bed for some revolutionary transportation technology that they pinky-promise will eventually work as some Futurama-style tube network where anyone can go door-to-door as fast as possible? And they are offering the whole thing for free (or heavily subsidized) for everyone that enrolls in their beta program? Then please Google go fuck itself, because we all know how this is just bait.

> The world’s largest rail system, period.

I despise this way of arguing. Laying down x length of rail track is not a difficult problem whatsoever. Such a crude metric is entirely insufficient to back up an argument about how great American railways supposedly are.

What's the ticket cost for the passengers compared to other countries? Average train delay? Cancellation rate? Speed? Death rate? The argument is not looking so hot anymore, right? Then stop it with the irrelevant statistics of rail track length.

> Laying down x length of rail track is not a difficult problem whatsoever

First by track and third by tonnage (after China and Russia).

>Laying down x length of rail track is not a difficult problem whatsoever.

It actually is. Japan's new maglev shinkansen line is stalling because they can't get land rights to lay rail through.[1]

An even more blasphemous example is California's high speed rail project which never accomplishes anything, but I'm pretty sure that also suffers from a severe case of legalized money laundering.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ch%C5%AB%C5%8D_Shinkansen#Shiz...

>That is at best 4 miles of New York subway [2]. It's a third of a train between Bakersfield and Merced [3].

Bakersfield to Merced is 171 miles of intercity high-speed rail. It's unclear to me why Californians need to make such trips with any significant frequency, and it's certainly not what I'd normally think of as "public transit".

22 years ago in Toronto, the Sheppard line (3.4 mi, underground) was built for less than $1b CAD (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Line_4_Sheppard). From what I can tell, costs in NYC are mainly a NYC problem.

Chicago is extending an existing above ground train line along an existing freeway (no right of way issues, not a subway, etc) 5.6 miles. It’s four stops and a new rail yard. 3.6B.

https://www.transitchicago.com/ctas-36-billion-red-line-exte...

It may be an American problem but it’s certainly not just NYC. But of course most of Waymos market is American as well.

Something may have changed more recently. The first stage of the Eglinton Crosstown LRT line in Toronto looks like it will come in at around (converting currency and distances) 9B for 12 miles. Locals generally don't seem to think this represents a success. (Despite being light rail, about 2/3 of this first stage will run underground.)

(The REM in Montreal - https://www.cdpqinfra.com/en/projects/rem - is doing much better than that, despite going over budget and being delayed quite a bit.)

But the Bakersfield/Merced HSR line is an actual project, estimated at over $30B (it makes no sense independently but is part of LA-to-SF).

You seem to be comparing an actual, private tech project to what you wished public transit looked like, not what it actually looks like.

Public transit is awesome, but construction costs in the anglophone world are bananas (https://transitcosts.com/).

The Sheppard line is real. It was constructed about 20 years ago. I have used it.

> It's unclear to me why Californians need to make such trips with any significant frequency,

Because they’re both between Los Angeles and San Francisco.

> and it's certainly not what I'd normally think of as "public transit".

If not trains between cities what do you consider public transit?

>Because they’re both between Los Angeles and San Francisco.

This explains exactly nothing to me. There are many cities between Toronto and Montreal (the two largest CMAs in Canada, and about 88% of that driving distance) and I can't imagine why anyone would regularly travel between those two, either. Nor can I imagine why someone would make regular trips between Belleville and Ottawa (very close to the Bakersfield-Merced distance, and two of the larger cities in between).

>If not trains between cities what do you consider public transit?

Subways, light rail, streetcars and buses, all operating within a city. And, yes, trains operating within a CMA. (GO Transit trains from Toronto can get you as far as Kitchener, but as far as I know it's a vastly less popular route than the main Lakeshore lines. From Hamilton to Oshawa is definitely not solid built-up area, but it's pretty dense.)

I can't understand why this would be non-obvious. Maybe there's a cultural difference. Are Americans really so dedicated to urban sprawl that residents of a metropolis with an 7- or even 8-digit population might still require regular intercity travel to go about their lives?

> can't understand why this would be non-obvious. Maybe there's a cultural difference

Yes. Many Americans take it for granted that we have quick access to a variety of cities and landscapes. (Particularly on the coasts.)

Keep in mind that America is about a third richer, on a GDP per capita basis, than Canada. Even with stark income inequality, that produces a large disposable-income gap. Add to that the population gap and you have about the population of Canada travelling intercity many times a year.

Many cities in Europe still have their Roman era street plans. The street layout of a city is incredible sticky. Once you have a city built around cars and all the private property and infrastructure that goes with it, you are basically stuck with it for 1000 years. And American city layouts are horrible for public transit and walking.

We can look at international cities with longing and jealousy, but LA, Houston, Miami, and so on will never have useable public transit. You’d have to bulldoze the whole city and start again. So great for Paris and London and yes I would rather live there, but we are stuck finding solutions that work inside the mess we made.

I agree with you in part - we do have 100 years of development patterns baked into concrete and steel, but they were not originally built just for cars.

LA was built around interurbans, the idea that I should drive my car all the way from San Bernardino (or frankly even from Pasadena) to Los Angeles would be foreign to the original planners and builders in Southern California. Consider that every major freeway in LA is basically in whole or in part paralleling a former PE line, and suddenly my assertion doesnt seem so odd.

https://www.pacificelectric.org/collections/pacific-electric...

LA is not the only place where the sprawled layout was created by interurbans, Arguably to a greater or lesser extent - Detroit, Dallas, Cleveland, Cincinatti, and there are others whose early development was deeply influenced by the interurban exist.

LA is densifying around transit. It’ll end up with islands of dense areas connected by trains.

Wait, what? Paris streets are a mess, even after Haussmann. That does not prevent outstanding transit. Even before the latest obsessive aggressive agenda-driven nonsense. The two things that Paris has are (1) inhabitant and workplace density and (2) the will to pursue public transit decade after decade.

After that, there are lots of streets with a single lane of traffic - and buses go through them just fine. And there are lots of too narrow streets but they are isolated here and there - in between streets that are okay for buses. Equally there are lots of very wide avenues for several lanes of traffic and that's fine for pedestrians and transit even though it makes subway stations sometimes very wide. And there are lots of randomly angled streets. There are steep hills. There are rivers and canals and giant mining voids which make building subway tunnels interesting. There are lots of train track rights of way which sometimes block pedestrian traffic but are covered and crossed reasonably often (sometimes still not optimally so). There is snow, ice, floods, hot weather. You name it it's there.

Both of these are essential. "Decade after decade" is essential. Both density and building that infrastructure are impossible to build at the stroke of a pen. So an advantage of Paris compared to San Francisco is that it had decent inhabitant and workplace density from the infancy of public transit when it was private animal pulled carriages.

So what's missing in US cities: decade after decade of density followed by decade after decade of public intent. SF could do it - but for sure you wouldn't see the result tomorrow - but NIMBY so no, SF can't do it. Not before getting rid of NIMBY. LA is much more willing to build anything anywhere so it would have much more of a chance. But it's huge and people often live far from their place of work. Smaller areas with LA would have a better chance. Perhaps Glendale plus the entertainment industry north-south corridor? That might be manageable.

Yet still more "even then", ride Paris transit at rush hours in summer and you won't feel that it's all that good: it's sweaty, packed, and there are lots of timetable incidents. You will regret having chosen rush hour. You car would have been nicely air conditionned and comfortable (but depending on your trajectory would have been stuck in traffic for a while.)

> if the richest country in the world had the common sense of simply getting rid of its car dependency and developed proper public transit infrastructure.

Then have the dignitaries and environmental policymakers give their uparmored gas guzzling cars up first, leading by example.

What are you talking about? Many politicians catch public transport around the world. I remember a few years back a mini nothingburger controversy about a politician 'caught' drinking a canned cocktail on the train in London https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2019/apr/20/diane-abbot...

And just like the NASA space pen story, the private sector is developing them on their own at their own risk, with maybe some indirect grants or subsidies, but not a direct contract specifically for the government to be a beneficiary.

Way more money is being wasted on the grifts surrounding developing public transit infrastructure. LA County for example is 88 different municipalities and it will never get resolved.

>technology that would not be needed if... developed proper public transit infrastructure

NYC and London have had 'proper' public transit for over a century. It's handy but not that great. I was on a 52 year old Bakerloo line tube train the other day and they are much like modern tube trains, if grubbier. It's not going to suddenly turn wonderful and solve everything. (typed on a London bus)

Also while I'm not sure any technology is really needed, as in we could get by without it, there are about 1 million road deaths a year globally. A 90% reduction would save 900,000 lives which is a nice to have. And more meaningful than a space pen.

Why the dig at the space pen? Robot drivers rely heavily on GPS which was made possible in part by the Space Pen.

> if the richest country in the world had the common sense of simply

- There is nothing simple about it.

- There is nothing inevitable to this appearance of "not enough money". For example very little of self-driving cars development has been on public funds. For example, there is plenty of money in California govt. And plenty of money in US federal govt.

- One doesn't prevent the other. You can't seriously argue that better transit would remove all needs for automated driving.

It's impressive and all, but my reaction to self driving cars are completely different.

It's a great technical feat, but it's not ever going to be efficient as public transportation. The form factor of the car works against it.

I suspect the advent of self driving cars will just help get the streets even more clogged with cars.

There's a future, not in the short-term, where 99% of folks don't need to or want to own a car. You hail a ride, and a vehicle shows up, perhaps with 3 of people in the vehicle in their own bubble internally designed into the car. You get in, it drops offs others in the vehicle, and then finally drops you off. The vehicle exhausts its entire electric charge, recharges, and then gets back on the road. The number of vehicles on the road is down 50%.

Like I said, a self driving car isn't ever going to be efficient as a bus. The bus can literally do the same thing as a car, but better.

Public transport cannot do everything cars can do, especially outside big cities. Better public transport can reduce the need for car ownership - I did not own a car for much of my life for that reason. However, it does not eliminate it.

Sure cars are helpful for transporting stuff. But most car rides is one dude sitting alone in a 1.5 ton machine moving his lazy ass around town.

Public transport, if done correctly, can replace that, also outside of big cities. There are good examples across Europe for this.

> Sure cars are helpful for transporting stuff. But most car rides is one dude sitting alone in a 1.5 ton machine moving his lazy ass around town.

I do not know about lazy. I find it a lot easier to use public transport myself. I would like to see numbers for "most" especially outside the US. Very few of my car trips are by myself without something to carry.

> Public transport, if done correctly, can replace that, also outside of big cities. There are good examples across Europe for this.

Where has public transport eliminated cars? Not anywhere I have been in Europe. You can significantly reduce car usage, but not eliminate it, so any safety improvements are still very important.

Another problem outside big cities is that some buses and trains, especially at quieter times, also run pretty empty. There were about four or five people in the bus my daughter got into this morning (on a weekday morning!) and its close to the end of a journey between two reasonably large towns. The next bus gets very full though.

One of the features of public transit--certainly the commuter rail relatively near my house (although I still need to drive to the station)--is that it's often very empty in off-hours but if you don't run (an insufficient number of) those near-empty trains, a lot of people are going to say screw it and drive. I won't take commuter rail into the city for an evening event in part because because I really need to time the return journey--and it takes quite a bit longer.

> Where has public transport eliminated cars? Not anywhere I have been in Europe. You can significantly reduce car usage, but not eliminate it, so any safety improvements are still very important.

Sure, not eliminated. There will always be cars. But reduced, as you said. I guess my main point was that one should not falsely believe that the existence of driverless buses and trains will somehow magically and significantly improve the public transportation situation in a given country.

Ok but hear me out. Self driving public transit.

Right now I have to walk 12 minutes to a bus stop because the one literally in front of my house was closed due to a lack of drivers. Then I wait 3-10 minutes for a bus that takes 20 minutes to get to the bus hub in my neighborhood. It takes 8 minutes to drive there. If my neighborhood bus route was replaced or supplemented with self driving shuttle busses feeding that hub then a 1 hour door-to-door trip could be 30 minutes.

More frequent smaller busses is a great idea. If self driving busses helps achieve that, it would be amazing.

Sure. I'm not saying that there no use cases. But I don't see the US turning into a public transportation utopia just because there are self-driving buses available. Because the reason public transportation sucks in countries where it sucks is not because drivers are expensive.

But it does suck because drivers are expensive. Seattle is struggling to find drivers. It's a constant battle to identify the most used routes and keep them staffed but that's why there's not a critical mass of riders to pay enough fares to hire drivers.

Doing the rare things that actually require a car, does not entail a need to own one. (And it's perfectly possible to have a fulfilling life without those rare things.)

Make a self driving bus then. I take Ubers to bus stops today. Doesn’t seem like much of a leap.

and with dedicated bus lines and predictable behavior that could be easier to do

This is definitely going to be coming.

You'll be able to pay more to take a single dedicated vehicle the whole way, or less that includes a self-driving bus or two for most of the middle segment of your journey.

But the bus "routes" will be totally dynamic based on demand, and will only stop occasionally, and you won't have to wait long.

It's going to be a complete revolution in public transit.

> I take Ubers to bus stops today

Same for trains. I wouldn’t take the LIRR to JFK or Caltrain to SFO if I had to bike with my luggage or whatever. And I’m not adding an hour to my trip for the bus.

You're conflating two tangential things, automatic driving is automatic driving whether it's a car or a bus.

The biggest issue that automatic driving needs to overcome is that it's sharing the road with manually driven cars. We've already had the technology for a long time to have perfect automatic driving if the environment was fully automatic; computers are unparalleled at accurately sharing and processing data with each other.

This isn't to say that the solution is to get rid of human drivers, because driving a car has been one of the most empowering paradigm shifts for the commons. Being able to travel yourself timely anywhere anytime for any reason is a level of power that pre-automobile commons simply did not have. Subjugating your power to travel to a computer is surrendering that incredible power.

If (and likely when) we can figure out how to better share human data with computers and vice versa computer data with humans, everyone on the road will be better off.

GoA 4 (no trained personnel onboard) is only practical for entirely grade separated (ie it's almost impossible for anything else to be there, no cars, no bicycles, no pedestrians) routes.

Even GoA 3 is fraught without this constraint, and for GoA 2 you're still paying for a driver because although the machine does most of the work the human has to handle the inevitable deviations from the model.

GoA 4 railways exist, if you're putting a metro in tunnels or elevating it obviously this is grade separated, and in principle you can do it for long distance rail if you're willing to eliminate at grade crossings (expensive). But they are nothing like a city bus route for example.

>driving a car has been one of the most empowering paradigm shifts for the commons. Being able to travel yourself timely anywhere anytime for any reason

Everywhere that the roads go, sure.

The more other commoners are trying to do this, and the more useful places that the roads will allow it, the slower it gets. But not only that, it's very unevenly paced - and therefore inefficient and less safe.

The problems are compounded by North American road and intersection design. Many urban areas in Europe manage to get by with far fewer streetlights and stop signs (often by using roundabouts). But cars in North American cities routinely get to speeds that would be dangerous in a collision (which would be much less of a problem if this could be confined to routes where they're isolated from pedestrians - but this often doesn't happen), only to have to stop and wait for a minute or more at a time, an embarrassingly short distance thereafter. And then buses have to deal with the car traffic and the lights, make additional stops, and take extra safety precautions due to their size.

Everyone thinks of taking the bus as slow. If there were no cars, the roads could be designed for buses, and streets for pedestrians. But we don't even properly distinguish streets from roads around here.

Once the technology exists and is proven, the only thing stopping public transportation from being automated with the same technology is their union.

I doubt that the reason public transport is not as prevalent e.g. in the US as in some European countries is the cost of the driver. The fixed costs of operating a train or a bus must be many many times more.

Subways and light rail already have such automation in many places. For example in Montreal: https://rem.info/en/light-rail

Self-driving cars help get us past the path dependence and move toward better public transit.

I tried using the train for my commute. However, I had to maintain a car at each end and I could only use the 7AM train as the parking at my origin would be filled at any later time.

Self-driving cars break my dependence on a car at destination and allow me to pick an origin train independent of parking.

> The future is bright.

Ask the 2.3 million employed drivers in the United States how the future looks.

Because pretty soon, they'll all need to be doing something else. And I don't see a technology that will open up 2.3 million jobs for them to move into, or training initiatives to support them while they shift professions.

The future _could_ be bright, if we approach AI right, and build the social safety net to soften the massive amount of transition that will be necessary. But we're not. We're looking at cuts everywhere in the near future. And long term, it seems we have no strategy. Which makes it more likely that a lot of people will be harmed.

I think if we ban cars now we may still have a chance to save the horse industry

No, we won't need horse drivers either.

But you might decide to build in enough additional taxes on the self-driving vehicles to cover at least the state's increased costs in terms of unemployment, medical, and services.

This way all those people riding the fancy new cars are the ones subsidizing the new industry's hidden costs instead of every tax payer.

What is the normal annual turnover in those 2.3 million drivers? 20% perhaps? I doubt self driving cars are going to replace 20% a year - they'll take many years to roll out. So it'll just be less people entering the field rather than mass layoffs.

This presupposes that the move won't be forced. It'll show up as competition in the gig economy. And there will be slower adoption in the long-haul or commercial receivables market since someone will need to be responsible for the cargos.

In the end it will be forced, even if it's not a layoff. Fewer gig rides. Cheaper competition for hauling contracts as the driverless fleets grow and customers adapt. Forcing people to do more for less, or leave.

But where do those people go? The slow decline that forces people out by starving them out does not suit the situation well for retraining in a different career path.

The truckers will join all the tech support and customer service people queued up to interview for a smaller allotment of jobs. Then the programmers. Eventually even the business people who take up space following random business workflows that don't require an ounce of creativity will follow.

When automation starts to be really good, it will be the restaurant cooks. Servers will still be around, for dine-in restaurants, and personal services like massage therapists. But how long will it take for competition in the labor market to drive those wages down? Demand certainly won't be increasing since the pool of potential customers with disposable income will decrease.

The shrinking of the middle class that we've seen up until now is nothing compared to what we'll see in the next decade or two. This should not be handwaved away with an "Oh, those people? They'll just go do something else."

If we need to turn a 15-year long haul trucker into a solar power technician, what's the time frame and cost to do retrain, how does that trucker afford and avoid starvation while he does so?

Hopefully whatever minimally viable level of support we decide on as a society will be higher than "living in one of the growing tent cities while eating at the local soup kitchen". We're already struggling with those in the current labor market, which is a sign that the existing support system is insufficient. We're totally unprepared for the future labor market.

> But you might decide to build in enough additional taxes on the self-driving vehicles to cover at least the state's increased costs in terms of unemployment, medical, and services.

A better idea would be to tax capital returns more rather than selectively adopting taxes individually on newer, more efficient but also capital (vs. labor) intensive industries.

Make one change and solve the problem globally rather than creating a new legislative fight over each automating industry.

> This way all those people riding the fancy new cars are the ones subsidizing the new industry's hidden costs instead of every tax payer.

Reduced labor costs aren't a hidden cost (they are the opposite of a cost, in fact.)

If there is a hidden cost it is capitalist society hiding basic social support costs in payrolls, artificially inflating the cost of labor-intensive goods and services and subsidizing automation.

Technology will open up new jobs. But I don't expect employed drivers to suddenly become data scientists.

Its a fallacy we constantly use as an argument when we talk about technology taking people's jobs.

Low specialty professions have been in my view a great way to have people employed, people who may be less fortunate, unspecialized or even students. Now that such professions start getting absorbed by tech, I don't know how those people are supposed to get by.

I can see how somebody would argue 6hay this has occurred before, but for example replacing horses with cars just made postpone jump to learning how to drive. They didn't have to "specialize for 4 years" and become computer scientists. Now this is a bolder issue imo. But my perspective can be argued

> Now that such professions start getting absorbed by tech, I don't know how those people are supposed to get by.

Now? This has been going on since jobs were invented.

2.3m people we don't need to pay any more. Jobs'll open up, that money will go somewhere else.

Sure but building yachts is skilled labor, there will have to be a massive retraining operation

Eh, ask switchboard operators how they feel about the Internet.

Cars wiped out farriers. Should we go back to riding horses?

Gig work is a symptom. Not a triumph worthy of protection.

Hard agree. Soviet Union built its economy around making sure that everyone had a job and, as a result... oh wait, nevermind.

That was one of the few aspects of their economy which was probably good.

At some point my country started borrowing lots of money and spending it on social programs, which eventually led to its bankruptcy. Some people still think that the guy in charge back then was a great leader.

> The future is bright.

We have been there. The internet and then Google, Facebook were the same. Big Tech can't be trusted.

> Big Tech can't be trusted

Trust, trade and mutually-beneficial coëxistence need not go hand in hand.

> mutually-beneficial coëxistence

Their side is benefiting a lot more than ours, and the few benefits that we might end up seeing come with a good amount of harm inflicted by them.

I like my tech toys - the usual macbook, iphone, internet etc. provided by big tech. I'm not sure how they are supposed to have harmed me?

This is the type of comment that makes you look either like a privileged elite that is part of Big Tech, or just a clueless moron whose day at the barrel is yet to come.

Do you really need a list of ways how Big Tech has harmed society? If things like "Surveillance Capitalism" is not enough, maybe:

- the collapse of quality journalism, because SEO and content farms made impossible to maintain a financially sustainable team of independent reporters?

- The absolute destruction of people's ability to read a piece of text for longer than 15 seconds?

- The mental health crisis in teens and even young adults caused by social media?

- Planned obsolescence and the removal of our right to repair things on our own?

- The normalization of the "gig economy" not just for young kids who are looking for some extra cash, but as the main source of income for grown up adults, with actual families to support?

- (Google and Facebook mostly) adopting the absolutely anti-competitive practice of "when we get a competitor, we buy them out as early as possible or just keep offering our stuff for free until they eventually run out of money"?

- Apple outright refusing to let people install alternative app stores, because they know that without this artificial scarcity they would not be worth 1/10th of what they are today?

Seriously, get out of SV bubble.

I'm not in SV and was trying to think of ways it had harmed me personally.

I haven't really been affected by any of the above. Maybe the app store thing a bit as I wrote an app and dealing with Apple was hard work. But then I wouldn't have been able to make an app without some company making the device for me to do it on.

Re society, I grew up pre internet and I'd say there are pros and cons. On the plus side you have access to the world's information and video and text communication for free across the planet which you didn't have before. On the minus side that's led to people spending a lot of time staring at their devices and less interacting with each other. Nothing's perfect I guess.

You don't need to live in SV to be in its bubble.

> I wouldn't have been able to make an app without some company making the device for me to do it on.

If you are not asking yourself why should you need to ask permission to develop an app, I'm sorry but you are lost beyond repair. Stockholm's Syndrome is real.

> If you are not asking yourself why should you need to ask permission to develop an app, I'm sorry but you are lost beyond repair

We should get out of our bubbles…and make transportation decisions…based on our preferences as developers. Mobile app developers. We’re in the SV bubble…

I think the Internet is pretty great. It’s not perfect but I’m not ready to throw out the frictionless communication baby with the cynical bathwater.

How does trust factor into it. I would not say trust is even applicable to a corporation.

But does this absolve Google for killing Reader?