The frustrating thing is that developers are some of the most reluctant to change. I'm sick of fighting docker on my Mac among the many other problems. But if we can't break away nobody else is going to either.
Not really. Ultimately it's just a job and a job without any tangible benefit to doing well.
Most regular folk that end up in front of a judge would do well to have a quick and predictable decision. It's months to years before things happen in court and are usually gated behind 10s of thousands in legal fees or a ton of effort. To have a judge bot available for a decision immediately is enormously beneficial.
Companies spend an eye watering amount of money on AWS relative the underlying hardware cost. There's definitely a market for something like a mainframe that runs K8s, Postgres, Redis, and the like where you buy once and then run forever.
I don't know if it's true or not but it seems like our AWS bill is something like paying the full purchase price of the underlying hardware every month.
The problem is that "partisan" doesn't automatically mean "wrong".
People wield "the middle" as if it is some magic incantation that makes them correct or immune to criticism. In fact, it is generally the "middle" or, as I prefer to call them, the "inert" that tend to be wrong since they are always behind the curve rather than ahead of it.
In Milgram's experiment, only the most "partisan" refused to deliver the shocks. The "middle" dutifully continued right to the end and delivered the highest voltages even as their own distress mounted.
You may avoid politics, but politics may not avoid you.
There isn't exactly a "curve" to be behind, just as there isn't one single "history" that you can end up "on the wrong side of". Politics is just the constantly shifting borders in a formalised war for power between different groups, long term there is no single direction of "progress".
>You may avoid politics, but politics may not avoid you.
This is the correct view, in the sense that if you don't belong to some kind of tribe, you'll get ripped off by someone who does. The inert group are not wrong, but by participating less than the others in the battle for their collective self interest, they will end up being the ones taken advantage of.
That just means you cling to your wrong ideas with the same tenacity as your correct ones.
Someone very famous who predates social media had words for you:
"Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection."
...
There are layers to your post that need to be properly disassembled to be properly appreciated.
And I assure you that I do appreciate it.
Deeply.
...
<< That just means you cling to your wrong ideas with the same tenacity as your correct ones.
It is bold of you to assume that your ideas are correct and, consequently, my ideas are not.
It is not just bold, but also kinda well, not smart, to assume what my ideas are. For all you know, I believe circles are, in fact, round. Are you going to argue against roundness of circles now?
But to top of it all off with a quotable quote that seems like it should mean something, and yet manages to mean nothing, because, apart from it being -- lets say -- misapplied in general, it is also ridiculously wrong in the context.
How does work for an outright rejection?
We can stop talking now. We have no useful thoughts to exchange.
The paper says partisanship is strongly correlated with frequency of posting. Are you also pointing out that the commenters here are very partisan and this shows the paper is correct?
Or, you know, they actually have a point, and framing them as just another partisan is an uncharitable response. Which, ironically, is typical of partisans.
Neither the paper nor the original comment said the most partisan commenters are wrong. It found a strong correlation between how partisan a social media user is and how often they post.
You're being uncharitable by assuming the commenter is disagreeing that with the point that the Overton window has moved. Which, I've heard, is typical of partisans.
(De)legitimation is the dominant meta. Much more than arguing on the merits of ideas, folks argue on the legitimate status of their opponents real or perceived stance. A lot of it attempts to play to the audience rather than either side open to changing their minds. That's how I read it at least.
I'm not so sure either have much impact. Economic policy doesn't change much between administrations and Congress has been ineffective for a long time. Politics is mostly culture war things these days.
The Fed seems to be the big driver of the economy. Other than that, the government is moving things at the margins. Even Trumps tariff shenanigans don't seem to have rocked the boat much.
I transitioned Zendesk from their original Exim-based ingress/egress SMTP services to Postfix and set up all the DKIM and SPF stuff long before there was ever a mail team. I worked regularly with large email providers to ensure our egress CIDR blocks were clean.
That's good to know you knew what you were doing! However the product also didn't appear to expose any of the control we needed to have a good email setup. Maybe this is because we weren't paying enough (mentioned in another reply), but we were also never directed to pay more despite asking for this sort of control.
That is true. There's a lot of magic that goes into parsing the emails. But end user configuration of the infrastructure of sending didn't really exist when I was there
It's cute but it seems like it's mostly going to come down to hiring a person to grow corn. Pretty cool that an AI can (sort of) do that autonomously but it's not quite the spirit of the challenge.
Right. If this level of indirection is allowed, the most efficient way to "grow corn" by the light of the original post would simply be to buy and hold Farmland Partners Inc (NYSE: FPI).
I'd like to see Fred follow right along and allocate the same amount of funds for deployment starting at the same time as each of Seth's expenditures or solid commitments.
The timing might need to be different but it would be good to see what the same amounts invested would yield from corn on the commodity market as well as from securities in farming partnerships.
Would it be fair if AI was used to play these markets too, or in parallel?
It would be interesting to see how different "varieties" of corn perform under the same calendar season.
Corn, nothing but corn as the actual standard of value :)
You don't get much any way you look at it for your $12.99 but it's a start.
Making a batch of popcorn now, I can already smell the demand on the rise :)
Yeah, this feels right on the cusp of being interesting. I think that, being charitable, it could be interesting if it turns out to be successful in hiring and coordinating several people and physical assets over a long time horizon. For example, it'd be pretty cool if it could:
1. Do some research (as it's already done)
2. Rent the land and hire someone to grow the corn
3. Hire someone to harvest it, transport it, and store it
4. Manage to sell it
Doing #1 isn't terribly exciting - it's well established that AIs are pretty good at replacing an hour of googling - but if it could run a whole business process like this, that'd be neat.
Is that actually growing corn with AI though? Seems to me that a human planted the corn, thinned it, weeded it, harvested it, and stored it. What did AI do in that process? Send an email?
It is trying to take over the job of the farmer. Planting, harvesting, etc. is the job of a farmhand (or custom operator). Everyone is working to try to automate the farmhand out of a job, but the novelty here is the thinking that it is actually the farmer who is easiest to automate away.
But,
"I will buy fucking land with an API via my terminal"
Who has multiple millions of dollars to drop on an experiment like that?
> [Seth is using AI to try] to take over the job of the farmer. Planting, harvesting, etc. is the job of a farmhand (or custom operator).
Ok then Seth is missing the point of the challenge: Take over the role of the farmhand.
> Everyone is working to try to automate the farmhand out of a job, but the novelty here is the thinking that it is actually the farmer who is easiest to automate away.
Everyone knows this. There is nothing novel here. Desk jockeys who just drive computers all day (the Farmer in this example) are _far_ easier to automate away than the hands-on workers (the farmhand). That’s why it would be truly revolutionary to replace the farmhand.
Or, said another way: Anything about growing corn that is “hands on” is hard to automate, all the easy to automate stuff has already been done. And no, driving a mouse or a web browser doesn’t count as “hands on”.
> all the easy to automate stuff has already been done.
To be fair, all the stuff that hasn't been automated away is the same in all cases, farmer and farmhand alike: Monitoring to make sure the computer systems don't screw up.
The bet here is that LLMs are past the "needs monitoring" stage and can buy a multi-million dollar farm, along with everything else, without oversight and Seth won't be upset about its choices in the end. Which, in fairness, is a more practical (at least less risky form a liability point of view) bet than betting that a multi-million dollar X9 without an operator won't end up running over a person and later upside-down in the ditch.
He may have many millions to spend on an experiment, but to truly put things to the test would require way more than that. Everyone has a limit. An MVP is a reasonable start. v2 can try to take the concept further.
There is more than that. He needs to decide which corn seed to plant (he is behind here - seed companies run sales if you order in October for delivery in mid march). He needs to decide what fertilizer to apply, and when. He needs to monitor the crop - he might or might not need to buy and apply a fungicide. He needs to decide when to harvest - too early and he pays a lot of money to dry the corn (and likely money to someone you hired to work who doesn't do anything), but too late and a storm can blow the corn off the cob... Those are just a few of the things a farmer needs to figure out that the AI would need to do (but will it)
There are plenty of CCAs out there that will happily do all those things for you. If hiring someone to come work the field is fair game, surely that is too?
It's like I can't grow corn, but I can buy corn. That's not the same thing. I can also write code to order corn for me, provided I supply it with a credit card and pay the bill. That is also not very interesting.
Also what's the delta b/w Claude Code doing it and you doing it?
I would have to look up farm services. Look up farmhand hiring services. Write a couple emails. Make a few payments. Collect my corn after the growing season. That's not an insurmountable amount of effort. And if we don't care about optimizing cost, it's very easy.
Also, how will Claude monitor the corn growing, I'm curious. It can't receive and respond to the emails autonomously so you still have to be in the loop
Tell that to all the car accidents caused by people distracted by siri, the people who’ve done horrible things because of AI induced psychosis, or the lives ruined by ai stock trading algorithms.
I didn't write the statement, nor did I waste time and money on this "experiment" when the US needs time and money spent on very different actions right now.
We got these in Atlanta. I haven't had the chance to ride yet but watching them it's pretty clear that they're legit.
I think we're on the cusp of something that will change the landscape of our cities. It's going to revolutionize getting around and take a chunk out of the land dedicated to parking.
It will also funnel large amounts of revenue out of every city into s/SF/Bay Area. Currently around 35% of the money spent on Uber/Lyft stays in the local economy. Waymo in SF still employs a large number of highly paid engineers who are paid the money which used to move through SF via Uber/Lyft. And those SF engineers spend a decent chunk of it locally on food, art, entertainment, and various other services - so it has (somewhat) less of an effect on the city's overall economy/total employment.
Waymo in Miami won't be locally re-spending nearly as much of Miami's money as Uber/Lyft did. Significantly more of it will be removed from Miami with each ride. This might be even more pronounced for cities like Houston, which don't attract tourism from Waymo staff.
> It will also funnel large amounts of revenue out of every city into SF.
Why SF? Does Google even still have an engineering office in the city? Alphabet is a publicly traded company with employees all over the USA and the world, even if you said the money would be funneled into Mountain View you'd be incorrect. The money will be funneled into 401Ks would be more accurate, and a lot of snowbirds in Florida are living off of their 401Ks and stock investments (which probably have a lot of Alphabet in them), so it is definitely something for Florida.
But I think your point is that gig workers won't be making the money anymore. That's definitely true. That is just like when loom machines took money away from weavers back in the 19th century, or computers took money away from typists/secretaries in the 20th century. We should carefully consider whether or not that is a net good for society.
> That is just like when loom machines took money away from weavers back in the 19th century, or computers took money away from typists/secretaries in the 20th century. We should carefully consider whether or not that is a net good for society.
I don't want to sound like a luddite, but each of those contributed to a consolidation of wealth that was largely offset by new jobs and new markets. How exactly do you think this is paying off here? Tech companies get to benefit, we know that, which sounds like a dead end. So it's ok that everyone else loses?
It's a loaded word by this point. The luddites smashed stocking frame
looms. At first those looms were human powered, and then water powered, and then steam engines came onto the scene. Steam engines where when people got wrecked. Those things were a menace! They'd crush limbs, amputate fingers, give you horrible RSI, fuck up your lungs with all the dirt in the air. The worst part is that children were better for it because they have little fingers which were better at fixing the machines. The late 16th Century didn't have the legal system in place that we have. OHSA, labor law, unions, liability, insurance. Those are all things that didn't exist back then but do now.
So these days, saying you're luddite doesn't mean you care about your professional and personal communities, it says you're anti-technology and anti-progress. If you want to say you care about your professional and personal communities, just say that.
Their arguments back then are not different at all to those today’s. Luddism was always about protecting jobs, a was against tech (self driving cars or automated looms) that would eliminate those jobs. Smashing a Waymo in SF is not much different from smashing up an automatic loom.
Not really, it parallels the movements of today almost too perfectly:
The Luddites (1811–1816) were not merely destroying machines to stop technological progress; they were a broader, community-backed protest movement fighting for economic survival, fair wages, and against the erosion of their traditional, skilled way of life. While they were textile artisans at the core, the movement was fueled by widespread distress during the Napoleonic Wars and received support from local communities and even some sympathetic small-business owners.
The purely 'luddite' argument is rather obvious. Exploring the effects of that new path of money are somewhat more interesting to me. I believe that the cash flow will be much more concentrated, both by geography and cohort.
Even just taking it at face value that "the vast majority of the 35% of the fare that would have gone to the drivers will now go to '401k's" is interesting! Currently most drivers for Lyft/Uber are in the bottom 50%ile of wealth in the USA, and they are currently getting that 35% cut. The bottom 50% of the USA hold nearly no stocks at all. 50% of the S&P500 shares are owned by the wealthiest 1% of the USA.
Also, computers and looms were perhaps a bit different - the result of their automation was a product that actually cost less than their equivalent human labor could produce. Waymo currently charges more than Uber and Lyft, but still takes significant market share.
I do expect them to be cheaper eventually, but they'll also have an opportunity to establish market monopolies and then raise prices again. Sure, uber and lyft driver supply is obviously elastic, but possibly not quite as elastic in the very long run - it took a lot of capital to raise the current driver base for Uber+Lyft, and I'm not sure that can be repeated, say, five years after people stopped driving for them.
Of course people have to get new jobs as the world churns. But all of these other effects are interesting too! And, many, many people never really attain those new jobs. I don't think that's Waymo's "fault" as a moral judgment if the reality is that removing money from these jobs will lead to increase in squalor. It's just a pretty stark example of the rich getting richer.
Midwives were replaced by the male-dominated medical industry, which initially raised infant mortality, nevermind women losing autonomy over birth.
Night soil collectors were replaced by partial sewage systems, which resulted in cholera and typhoid outbreaks.
Local butchers were replaced by meat packing plants. The Jungle tells us why this didn't go so well either.
In all three of those cases, we rushed to an incomplete solution before it was fully ready. In this case though, no one's banning humans from driving cars anytime soon, so that part of it will go okay.
The loss of manufacturing jobs and the movement of jobs in to services has been hard for the US, and is basically where MAGA came from, which I would say is a net harm to society. We wouldn't be arguing about Waymo right now if those Uber drivers had better jobs making things instead of being forced into gig work.
Only the money from Alphabet employees who put money into their 401k will end up there. Other parts go to taxes paid by Alphabet and taxes paid by the employees. The vast majority though will go into Alphabet's coffers and be used to pay back investors and make big bets on the future (ideally). Sundar gets a bunch, as does Sergey and Brin. Waymo's taken more than a decade to get this far (and it's not quite there yet). DARPA jump-started this with their Grand Challenge in 2004, so I think the government does deserve a bunch of tax revenue off of this.
Index funds have a lot of alphabet these days, so most 401ks are heavily vested in it. Future productivity increases are paying for our retirements one way prove other, especially since the birth rate is tanking.
I think the pie will grow more than Waymo takes out. Stuff like a plumber realizing they're missing a part. What might be a trip to the supply house can be a self driving delivery instead.
Either way, it's not all that much different. Most of the money spent on getting around a city goes elsewhere through vehicle and gas purchases. Adding the cost of self driving to that probably won't move the needle all that much.
I strongly believe that if you extrapolate 5-10 years then at that point the really big revenue stream(s) that self-driving cars will be funneling to themselves will revenue poached from the legacy auto manufacturers and adjacent industries.
With Waymo usually double the price of taxis this, to put it mildly, won't happen. Taxis, obviously, do not compare favorably to just owning a car. It's just not realistic unless you barely do any driving at all.
Not for me. Right now, Thursday, ~7pm. The given Waymo ride I'm looking at is going to cost me $30. Uber black is $42, UberX is $20, UberXL is $25. Uber wait & save is $17. Lyft priority is $23, Standard is $19, Wait and save is $17, Extra comfort is $26, Lyft Black is $46.
The taxi ride I took from the airport yesterday was $60 with tip but Uber would have been $40. Waymo doesn't go to the airport yet tho.
To the best of my knowledge, Waymo still has humans in the loop as Fleet Response agents that the vehicles can call for remote assistance when they aren't sure what to do. Caveat that the number needed likely isn't on the same order of magnitude as human drivers, but the job is likely higher paying. I could see a scenario where these should be locals for both latency (ChatGPT says SF to Miami RTT latency might be 80-100 ms and I don't believe the humans really teleoperate the vehicles, so that may not be meaningful, but that might be a bigger deal for international expansion) and knowledge of tricky intersections or road quirks in the city. They could also potentially help with labeling quirky city-specific scenarios and other various evals.
Isn't that how it always is when new technology disrupts an existing market? We no longer have telephone operators, toll booth agents, gas pump attendants, etc
Those all eliminated the work so that no one had to pay for it anymore, which freed up that money to be spent elsewhere in the local economy. Waymo is not cheaper than Lyft/Uber. So it's more of a direct wealth-transfer than the most cursory analogies were.
If Waymo is not cheaper, I don't see how it replaces Lyft/Uber. I imagine that not having to pay drivers and the deal with the associated liability, will eventually be cheaper so will free up money.
If the cost per ride is 35% cheaper than Uber/Lyft, then that money stays in the local economy, just in the hands of the consumer rather than the gig worker. Currently WayMo is more expensive, but I see that changing as they scale. And certainly CyberCab is promising to be much cheaper.
You don't think this will also have an effect on improving life in the cities where Waymo is utilized? I understand there is the threat to induced demand with too many waymo's being on the road but this is going to help improve city living and in turn, help increase people wanting to live there.
At least in SF, last I checked, it's as expensive, or sometimes more expensive, as Uber/Lyft. It'll serve the same sector of the population as those apps already do, so it's unlikely to actually reduce parking needs.
There's an argument that more competition could reduce prices and/or wait times for consumers, but there's also the argument it'll take away gig jobs, which are already somewhat of a "backup net" for people who need money but can't find a formal job for some other reason.
I don't live in SF anymore. When I did and now that I occasionally visit, I personally don't see any meaningful difference from when only Lyft and Uber operated there.
Honestly, in a lot of ways, yes. I'm a massive critic of Uber, but outside of the hotel areas and nicest neighborhoods, it was often incredibly difficult to successfully call a taxi to pick you up before Uber.
I remember once playing ball all day in the front yard, calling all the taxi companies just on a lark. They'd claim they were sending a driver, that the driver pulled up and honked, but we were outside the entire time. No one ever actually drove up over about 20 calls to 6 cab companies.
Uber/Lyft finally served all neighborhoods mostly equally, and that was a huge benefit.
It might but I’ll be still driving home “intoxicated” so long as the vehicle I drove to the drinking establishment can’t drive itself home. This is why I prefer the model for personal self driving vehicles.
I usually ask most of my drivers how much they're getting paid for each ride. Across MCOL and HCOL areas like SF, NYC, HTX, ATX, DMV - I've generally been seeing around 40% going to the driver.
I wonder how they will impact traffic. Rideshare has already added traffic according to some studies I've read.
Basically, instead of someone going from point A (current location with own car nearby) to point B (destination), Point A becomes the destination of the previous passenger, and point B and C were the previous points A and B. So a single trip adds one more leg.
It might reduce the need for parking... potentially. But there will still need to be a certain amount of time dedicated to charging for these cars that requires parking.
If private car ownership continues increasing in cost, and households become increasingly cost burdened (transportation is already the second highest cost for households), then I wonder how this will impact demand for housing in areas dependent on cars.
Curious on the outcomes here. I think the best thing we can do for city transportation is increasing the number of viable transportation options. Waymo is one option amongst the options dependent on roads, but walking, biking, and transit should still be a priority so that we maintain competition amongst transportation modes.
Parking for charging can be done en masse though. For example, waymo could have a single large charging facility somewhere out-of-the-way. Small price to pay in my opinion.
The parking gains are huge though. As adoption increases, parking demand for shopping centers, apartments, workplaces, etc. should all decrease. Say hello to higher density cities. Although I imagine it will take quite a while (decades) for these pressures to have a real effect.
Yeah I imagine it will be many decades. Simply because minimum parking requirements would have to be removed (which is unpopular in a lot of cities), and then redevelopment would need to take place based on demand and investment potential.
We've had it for a few years in SF and, while it's very convenient, I haven't witnessed the revolution you speak of. Judging from the traffic, people still mostly get around in their personal vehicles. There's about as much parking as before and it's still a nightmare. But I'd like to believe.
I forsee the cost of travel increasing quite a lot.
Private cars will end up 2nd class citizens with 'waymo lanes' and sky high insurance costs, pushing everyone to self driving taxi services who have a really high cost per mile compared to your own car, since they have a huge debt to pay back to investors so will never get down to the $0.15 per mile that driving your own old car costs.
On the other hand, insurance costs for robotaxis should be lower if they are able to drive significantly safer.
Then the one I'm more interested / excited for: optimizing the fleet for the cargo. If most trips involve single passengers, then most cars can be small electric single seaters. This can further reduce insurance costs as well as fuel, maintenance and depreciation.
I'd hope that's enough to offset the price of the sensors, compute hardware, and engineers to maintain the system.
But yes paying back investors; not sure how long that would lead to elevated costs for riders.
We see this already in cities with a 'congestion charge' and barely any parking - taxis and Ubers become the main vehicles, and private cars are priced out.
I definitely see a future where global transportation is powered by driverless Chinese EVs, except the US, which has driverless cars that are worse and 6x more expensive.
When I was working for the automotive industry their models and projections suggested that ubiquitous self-driving cars would reduce the total market for cars to ~15% of its current size. As in, sales would drop by 85%. The addressable market for automotive OEMs is set to undergo a dramatic reduction in size.
Few automotive companies have a coherent plan for how they were going to survive that existential risk.
People will still be doing about the same number of miles per year, and cars will still last a similar number of miles. So if a ride share car does 10x as many miles per year we need 1/10 the cars, but they also last 1/10 as long, so it evens out.
Sure they'll get slightly more miles out of a ride share car, but the number of miles will also go up do to dead heading and because cheaper/better transportation causes prior to use more of it.
Sorry, but at the current price of Waymo rides that just can't happen. They become more expensive than leasing a car at something like 8 rides per month (as in, get into a Waymo, expect to pay $60 per ride)
If they can figure out how to really take advantage of economies of scale, and drive the costs down quite a lot -- the desirability of car ownership will drop dramatically.
Everyone I know under 40yo already professes to hate driving and hate car ownership.
Owning a car and living somewhere you have to use it for day to day everything is tedious. But the option of one for the weekend, trips out of town, into nature is ultra valuable, enough so that it's worth it to have a car sitting doing nothing during the week for us, even in a well connected large city, in a walkable area.
At present or I suspect future costs, any kind of taxi for an out of town trip (without any rail option) of 50-100 miles is way too expensive to consider, we'd sooner hire a car, if it was slicker and more convenient. But hiring a car anywhere but an airport terminal needs a trip to the hire place, and needs to start and finish when they're open to avoid spending an extra day or two of hire. Plus time taken on paperwork and insurance faff could easily be an hour.
At worst you can just pay extra to have a smaller or more luxurious private self driving taxi vs. something more like a bus, shared with others. The appeal of owning and having to maintain something like this is nil. You're not in control, there's no ownership of the driving experience, and if appropriately compliant with the law, they should all drive the same speed.
Guaranteed availability and being able to leave stuff in the vehicle would be the main draws. Even privately owned, they'll still have subscription fees.
I think it fundamentally shifts the cost of transport from marginal to capitalized. Meaning a 20 minute trip is $0.50 of gas and some fraction of the manufacturing cost of the car. Today it's that plus $5-10 to the driver.
It's somewhat equivalent to the advent of trains but on a personal level. In the way that trains made shipping goods across the country more or less free once the rail was built that's what's going to happen to people and packages getting around cities.
I live in the city and as much as I'd like to be car free waymo doesn't do it (yet). I take frequent weekend trips that travel (I assume) outside of waymos range. Once waymo supports car rentals I could consider getting rid of mine.
I’m skeptical. Is the presence of a human driver keeping you from using Uber/Lyft/taxis more than you currently are? Why would you think removing a driver will lead to more ride share trips? Capitalism is going to do its thing, so between the touted benefits of driverless ride shares and capitalist economics, could you please explain how exactly our city landscapes, namely parking lots, will be revolutionized in any way, shape, or form other than zombie lots occupied Waymos endlessly arranging and charging themselves? Forgive my cynicism, it feels like I’ve seen this how this dream turns out many times before.
> Is the presence of a human driver keeping you from using Uber/Lyft/taxis more than you currently are?
Yep. A couple of bad experiences with Uber/Lyft drivers put me off using them. Waymo is honestly more comfortable/less stressful for me. Similarly, I just read an article discussing parents making use of Waymo to schlep their kids to sportball practice/friend's house/wherever kids hang out these days, even though it is against Waymo's terms of service. The article indicated those parents didn't trust their kids to be in a car along with a strange human, but were ok with an automated system (and violating the ToS of that system).
> please explain how exactly our city landscapes, namely parking lots, will be revolutionized in any way, shape, or form other than zombie lots occupied Waymos
Today parking tends to be located near the shop/restaurant/office people want to go to. If people no longer need to park to go to where they want to go, parking (for charging) can relocate and be concentrated, thereby freeing up the parking spaces for other uses.
Thanks for the reply. The perception of safety in attended ride shares is masking the larger economic constraint. So let's assume for sake of conversation that your safety concerns are warranted. I'd ask you to consider how much money additional money you're willing to spend on ride shares. The urban utopia of autonomous vehicles is often championed, yet fully unconsidered in a capitalist regime. How much additional money do you expect most Americans to spend toward ride shares, to the degree that they abandon vehicle ownership? What degree of broad behavior and spending change do you expect to occur as result of unattended ride shares?
> Is the presence of a human driver keeping you from using Uber/Lyft/taxis more than you currently are?
I have no horse in this race, but for my female family members, the answer is absolutely yes. The odds of getting a weirdo driver are just too high. One of them lives in a Waymo-supported city and uses it all the time.
I've never been as scared in a car as I was in an Uber in Chicago going to the airport. That man drove around cars like we were bleeding out in his car and had to get to the hospital or someone was going to die.
The zombie lots can be consolidated and moved to less desirable areas.
And I think there's some demand shifting that can happen. People get driven to the office in the morning. Deliveries happen during the day and then people are driven home.
It also eliminates the need for parking for a lot of places. A restaurant doesn't need a parking lot if people are primarily arriving in self driving cars.
Any idea how much they cost? Because for me the main use is mostly one off rides to the city to have drinks with friends and go there and come home safely. I live in Central Florida, I mostly use Uber or Lyft for these scenarios.
In SF, Waymo costs about the same as an Uber or Lyft after factoring in a couple buck tip. For awhile, I checked both Uber and Waymo when I wanted to get somewhere, but after not seeing significant price differences I stopped bothering.
I would hope so, but it's not yet clear if the economics pan out for large scale deployment. The ride is amazing, but the sensor-laden cars are also very expensive.
The only sensible aspect of Elon's boneheaded move to remove non-camera sensors from Tesla models is the drive to reduce costs, because low costs are essential for mass adoption. Yes, sensors are rapidly dropping in cost, making the move even more boneheaded, but the theory is sound.
Some Waymo exec claimed that they are seeing very encouraging unit economics, which gives me hope for mass diffusion, but we'll only know when the rubber actually hits the road (heheheh).
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