Enshittification in a nutshell.

So much regulation can sadly be boiled down to the idea "Contempt of Business Model." Because once that business is entrenched and can afford lobbyists, now it's time to lobby anything other than their business model as illegal.

Uber spent a decade telling cities that protecting taxi drivers was anti innovation. Now that robotaxis threaten its own business, suddenly limits on new competitors sound reasonable.

Uber has also been working on and I'm pretty sure has been operating robotaxis.

My impression is that human drivers were probably going to be a temporary situation for them as they built out their system, which would provide a strategically-advantageous position relative to competing robotaxi operators for them to do the transition to robotaxis.

searches

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uber

The company has launched or is in the process of launching robotaxi services in several cities worldwide in partnership with operators, software designers, and car manufacturers including Lucid Motors, Nuro, Baidu, Pony.ai, Avride, Nissan, Rivian, Zoox, Stellantis, Wayve, and Nvidia (to use the Nvidia Drive software).[3][4][5][6]

»disruption«

What's with the weird syntax. Is this AI bot having a stroke?

I remember watching a video showing how increased reaction speed can virtually eliminate traffic jams (I believe it was this one?). It'd require nearly all vehicles to be automated, but someday city traffic might flow smoothly even during the busiest of rush hours.

Or maybe we could put all that effort into public transit? I lived in Germany for a few years. I did have a car, but I rarely ever used it. I could take a bus to most places in town, including the train station. Most downtown areas were pedestrian traffic only and it was very nice. Now that I live back in the US, I spend so much time in traffic. Their is always construction to make the roads bigger for all the cars. But it never seems to be enough. The whole thing feels like an expensive mess. I don't think self-driving cars will fix enough of the problems with cars.

Why stop dreaming there? We could have functional transit and citie streets you could walk and play in if the cars weren't there.

Yeah it's called a rail. We inexplicably paved over them in the 60's.

I get a glimpse of what once was every time they tear open the road. :(

Yeah, and with the state of cybersecurity, we can regularly experience the beginning of that movie Upgrade!

The entire rhetoric relies on the idea that self driving road cars are

1. Feasible
2. Desirable over rail or bus

Tesla's failed efforts have proven time and time again that the road is full of unexpected and arbitrary inaccuracies, ambiguities and risks that cannot be assessed by a machine alone. They've also been sued in multiple markets on claims of false advertising because autopilot is not, in fact, autopilot.

They don't even have the best system in the industry, that would be Drive Pilot, a Level 3 autonomous assist system by Mercedes-Benz. The only systems to have level 4 are taxis that only operate in limited areas, on limited, known routes, and they are well known for being very easily confused and blocking emergency vehicles.

As someone who deals with IT and cybersecurity (and traffic) as part of my daily job, I will happily sit in traffic to actually own and have control over my vehicle.

Not worth the instability on society from the job loss. Also claims like faster traction times are questionable.

Personally, I don't want a computer making life or death decisions in the heat of the moment

Autonomous cars sound cool in theory, but I’m a techbro-phobe.