@lauren Human-driven taxis are never going to replace private cars, unless you bring in a servile class to drive them.

Robot taxis could eventually be the primary mode of transport in cities. You could then have smaller parking lots, and charge people to park.

Robot taxis could either seat four with hard partitions between them so people would feel safe sharing, or they could be half-wide and share the lanes.

They can form convoys when they are all going to the same area, reducing traffic.

@mike805 @lauren

#Robotaxi is not a solution to a city transit problem.
It's a solution to a #crapitalism problem.
*ANY* portion of profits diminished by labor is unacceptable to capitalists.

@n_dimension @lauren Specifically thinking of LA area here. It is obvious that the people who run this city are not capable of fixing the transit in any reasonable time. Yes there is some, and people who happen to live and work around it use it, but otherwise it's faster to drive despite the traffic.

Robotaxis can be deployed quickly without any infrastructure building. Technologies like that usually win out, whether they are a utopian ideal or not.

Just move the charging location.

@mike805 @n_dimension I've lived in L.A. my whole life, in various sections of the city. I've watched the changes good and bad, increases in traffic, everything. And I'll say this. WE DON'T NEED OR WANT GODDAMNED ROBOTAXIS. Period. Full Stop. And attempts to force them down our throats by Big Tech will be regretted by those increasingly fascist firms. Anyone who knows me knows how painful it is for me to say this.

I've been working on the Net since early ARPANET days at the first ARPANET site at UCLA. I've worked inside Google. I still have many friends at Google -- that is, the ones who haven't already resigned or been fired.

Robotaxis are a means toward total control and surveillance of populations by authorities. Not so much in and of themselves, but as part of the fascist dream of eliminating human drivers entirely.

Things have changed. The factors that used to apply no longer can be taken at face value. If I sound fed up with the direction tech is taking now, you're damned right I am.

@lauren @mike805 @n_dimension yes, and:

The big payout the VC/finance crowd is chasing isn't about taxis or passenger cars, but automation of delivery driving at every level. This is one of the biggest employment sectors in the country & therefore one of the biggest "efficiency" (layoff cost reduction) opportunities in the adjacent possible. I've seen estimates (that finance people seem to believe) that there's around a trillion dollars to be made by capturing and automating that business.

@mrcompletely @lauren @mike805

Of all the crapitalists, some of the most brutal and exploitative ones are the transport industry.

That's because the margins are so slim, by the nature of their sub-sub-sub-contract business, that left unregulated, the cargo haulage industry will literally drive 40tons of cargo, into a family car, without applying any brakes with an functionally unconscious drugged biological in "control" of the vehicle.
All in pursuit of extra 0.50c per tonne.

Point being that 👉unless👈 there is money to be made, cargo haulage will not pick up Tesla trucks. Range is too short, and batteries are too heavy. Maybe we need a good shooting war in oil-lands to make electric trucks affordable?!

#Ev #evtrucks #oil #robotaxi

@n_dimension @mrcompletely @lauren The old NYC taxi industry was a good example. The taxi licenses were crazy expensive so you had a class of "taxi landlords" that rented the licenses to the actual cabdrivers and robbed them blind.

Once you have robot trucks, scale container shipping down to the individual package. Put the batteries in larger containers and stack them as needed. Robots should load both batteries and packages.

As with container shipping, the whole process has to be rethought.