They depend on it, but sometimes those resources are scarce
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I’m not talking about whether or not alternate accommodations can be figured out by enterprising people living in poverty situations (rural or otherwise); I’m talking about how it impacts them to be told “oops, we messed up, so you don’t get to have access to the luxuries we blew through”.
Here’s another example: with the improved economic conditions, the meat consumption in China has gone through the roof, with all the incumbent environmental and health issues that come with it.
When people start to have access to modern conveniences and luxuries, surprise surprise they want their turn too. Any national and international decisions that are made need to maintain respect for those who never got to be part of the problem but are now expected to shoulder an equal part in creating the solution.
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Yep. Those in the developing world need to come up with ingenious workarounds just so they can squeak by. Those of us in the Western world can simply take advantage of the latest technological advances, and find ourselves much further ahead with practically no effort to speak of. A bit of a learning curve there.
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My point is about the investment scam and how it helps keep “rugged individualist” countries from doing proper transit, among other thing. The hatred of the rich for public transit definitely infects the infrastructure choices that oligarchs make elsewhere. That goes back to developing concrete ways of keeping the rich in check.
People are required to have cars here, so the self-driving fantasy is going to go along with it as a marketing plan to distract us from how bad the problem is, especially for people who need accomodation.
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So, what you’re saying is that the problem self-driving cars are supposed to solve is actually easier (and better) solved with trains and other forms of public transit, and self-driving cars will cause the already weak rail infrastructure to become even weaker?
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In many cultural contexts, I find that “modern” tends to be a euphemism for imperialism, Euro-colonialism specifically. Global markets are used as a way to normalize and create demand for conveniences and lifestyles as a means of cultural assimilation. IMO it’s only the friendlier 20th-21st century version of “civilizing the savages.”
Why pay to subjugate people by force when you can use psychology to have them pay you for the privilege of doing it themselves? It seems that some spheres of academia acknowledge how Eurocentric “modernity” is, but in many areas of life that realization is not very present.
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Anecdotally, I’ve owned cars for 32 years, since my sister and I purchased a station wagon from our mother for $700 when I was 16. Since then, I’ve owned, at one time or another, at least seven cars that, adjusting for inflation, would each cost less than half the cost of the phone I’m typing this on… and not because my phone is particularly fabulous. Rather, I’ve owned a lot of cheap-ass cars. Even gas and insurance cost less for me than my monthly carrier bill, which really kinda alarms me. (Gas was under 70 cents per gallon in my area back then, which certainly makes a huge difference.)
Anyway, I didn’t get a cell phone until around 2003, and I never owned a brand-new computer until 2005. I like having them and the improvements they’ve made to my quality of life. But those improvements pale next to the importance that car ownership has had in my life. I have never lived in an area with robust mass transit, but even if I did have a bus or train system that could get me to work in under an hour (with access points nearer to home and office than a half-hour’s walk on either end tacked on to the journey time), I’d still own a car or truck for all the utility I get out of it unrelated to commuting. I literally cannot remember the last day when I did not drive somewhere.
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Generally yes. The fact that it’s a fantasy on par with jetpacks or evacuating the planet with chemical rockets is something I thought would be more self-evident.
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I’ll buy that.
There are problems that self-driving cars can solve that can definitely be solved better with trains, buses, etc.
Considering how the existing transportation infrastructure was ripped up to support cars, I’m wondering why they’re making self-driving cars instead of some other kind of autonomous vehicle.
The problem with jetpacks is that there’s no escapability. If you have a problem with your car, you pull over to the side of the road. If you have a problem with your jetpack, you fall out of the sky 
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Monorail!
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I’ll take the risk.
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Why would that be self-evident? Cars, as a way to get lots of people from their respective points A to B, have had over a century of development and refinement, to the point that billions of people prefer to use them over the available alternatives, despite their manifold and well-documented shortcomings and perils. Rather than replacing the whole system wholesale, replacing and automating the control system doesn’t strike me as particularly pie-in-the-sky. In a relatively brief period of development, automated cars perform notably better than I would have predicted a decade ago. I don’t think any of their roadblocks are insurmountable at all.
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People need to not be afraid to dig into the fundamentals and try doing something different, instead of simply going along for the ride. Stopping to think about how one describes and symbolizes wealth in the first place is not some abstract diversion, it is prerequisite of any kind of economics or finance one might use. As Korzybski said: “Man’s achievements rest upon the use of symbols… we must consider ourselves as a symbolic, semantic class of life, and those who rule the symbols, rule us.”
And despite a considerable effort towards lock-in, it is arguably easier to break out from the hegemony of money now than it has been in centuries. Nearly all of wealth until recently has been based upon control of tangible resources which themselves as commodities are not directly subject to symbolic manipulation. Whereas now, most money - and so “wealth” by those who subscribe to it - is mathematical games which have been divorced from those resources. This is because psychologically, money does not accurately measure resources, rather it is intended to measure people. As cynical and misanthropic as that notion may be. And it is why I think there is a strong ethical imperative to not use symbolic systems which are designed to control and oppress people.
What that means is recognizing that wealth is largely subjective. And that you are negotiating its embodiment and value in the interactions of everyday life. From an egalitarian perspective, it is not unlike a vote, where how wealth might be measured by 0.001% of people is recognized as being not very relevant to most of us. That those people are, in a very real and immediate sense, marginal. And that we can put actual wealth in other people’s hands, not by taking the empty tokens from somebody’s hands, but rather by ourselves agreeing to symbolize it differently. Not in some abstract conceptual way, but in practice in daily life. Instead of trying in vain to convince a cheater to be fair, we leave them to play a different game ourselves. Indeed, many different games!
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Public transit is definitely one of the shady new technologies that isn’t amenable to automation at all. (sarcasm sorry not sorry… no mostly but not entirely sorry.}
I get it. I’ve heard the same received common sense platitudes myself over the last 30 years. I rebel, though, because just off the top of my head there are ways to change up the old tech.
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For starters, city-to-city light rail and long distance non-hazardous freight could be intregated with local bus and local short haul delivery. The lines would have to be two way, but light rail already does this. Large long-haul truck traffic will stop dumping crap in the air, destroying the highway surface, and murderbotting fellow traffic as much. And before picking the idea apart, think about the fact that only incremental change is needed to current tech to make it work. More substantial issues with making the network work offer a chance for disruptive innovation, as well as provided workable niches for analysis and operation by (BI) Bullshit Intelligence.
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Extending intercity crossover rail along existing interstate and major roads creates opportunites for local bus lines and car sharing. Drivers and private cars in cities and rural areas will still need to be accommodated.
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And self-driving cars are vaporware that the spec still hasn’t been filled out for. Just keep doing your reality check against that metric for the next 20 years. Hopefully it doesn’t take down all our investment portfolios along the way.
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I’ll meet you back here in 20 years, then. We’ll see who’s dropped off by a Johnny Cab from Total Recall and who’s still brandishing his buggy whip. 
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I think the proper equivalent is stick shift. Which I love.
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I can’t believe we’ve made it this far into a transportation discussion and no-one’s mentioned motorcycles?
The Third World runs on motorcycles. Few people may be able to afford a car, public transport disappears quickly outside of major centres, but everywhere are motorbikes and auto-rickshaws. When I was working in Mumbai I used to see the bread delivery person dropping off the bread for the hotel every morning via motorcycle – with a girl riding on the back seat. The loaves of bread were hung off the handlebars.
One morning there were no cabs or auto-rickshaw cabs to be found, so a teenage boy with two girls picked us up in his. Pink fuzzy dice bouncing off the rearview mirror, Hindi disco blaring from a portable speaker, pouring post-monsoon rain at 7am. One girl shared the front (bicycle-style) seat with him as he drove us to the office; the other one shared the back seat with us. The machine didn’t seem to mind having nearly twice its capacity riding in it.
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There’s no money in selling people on the idea that a BI could keep you alive on one.
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I still want one of these:
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