A big part of the actual value of "driverless" to :porky-happy: is using it as an extension of the privatized surveillance state. I've even had bazingas tell me directly that they want their future magic car to be "rented out" when they aren't using it so it's constantly making revenue for them as some wasteful version of mass transit with extra steps. They seem to want centralization through corporations and seem to want to be monitored and directed through the same but want that "freedom" illusion all the while because mass transit that does better for cheaper with a lot less waste involves being around the poors, and they can't have that.
Is that really all it is? Some techbro hangup about seeing poor people?
A lot of the attraction of futurism is actually conflict-avoidance. The belief is that new technology will make everyone's lives better, avoiding the need to confront power or to work through a nonfunctional legal system. How much we invest in trains is a political question, and political questions are unsolvable from their PoV. But that's OK because you can just invent your way out of problems, and everyone will like you because everyone likes scientists and anyone who doesn't is a luddite or an ideologue and not worth listening to.
To say that we already have the solutions to public transit or to climate change or to whatever else, and that they're just not being implemented for political reasons, and that the same political reasons will likely apply to future technologies that attempt to reinvent the wheel - that flies in the face of their whole worldview.
I've argued until I was seriously and truly exhausted with bazingas, offline, that kept saying "asteroid mining" as the answer to everything. Everything. Water scarcity? Yes. Carbon dumping in the atmosphere? Somehow, also yes. The pinnacle of the delusion was that just having more stuff around would mean more exciting bazinga toys and not a lot more industrial waste and further environmental destruction if nothing else was changed except more resources were allocated to the current system.
People often turn to magical thinking because the reality is we're all fucked.
You don't even need to be a communist or an environmentalist to understand that bringing more shit from outside earth with no clear plan to take out shit out of earth will just bury the crust in shit. You just need to understand basic mass and energy balances, but apparently the 1st law of thermodynamics isn't STEM(TM) enough.
I've even had people here on Hexbear tell me that being opposed to asteroid mining treats in the current sociopolitical and economic systems is some sort of quaint Luddite primitivist stance and not opposition to that much more pollution and waste dumped everywhere under capitalist systems.
They believe their magic car will someday make them rent money. I don't know how far they'd believe me if I told them otherwise.
To be honest i would much rather pay per use to go hiking or to the beach than just have a car I don't use 80% of the time because i'm either using transit or :sicko-biker:. Of course, if short-term rental becomes more popular, the renting companies will just gouge the same way they do now, but now I won't even be able to have my own car.
How fucked is my brain that my immediate thought when I think of a driverless future is not owning a car and just having like a subscription based Uber.
I didn’t even think about how there would need to be some shitty capitalist who owns all the cars.
It doesn't need to be like that, but since we live in the worst possible world, it will most likely be like that.
people who express themselves through consumption seem to look at avoiding a purchase like failing to live your life
I’ve even had bazingas tell me directly that they want their future magic car to be “rented out” when they aren’t using it
I am going to become the Joker
They specifically compared their theoretical bazingamobile to NFTs, specifically that they believed that owning the bazingamobile would earn them revenue over time in the same way they believed that owning NFTs would earn them revenue from royalties or other weird rent seeking activity. :agony-minion:
This is what happens when your entire education system is built around trying to obfuscate and direct people away from labor theory of value.
Yep. A similar uneducated delusion lead to a bazinga ex-roommate to declare he'd make a living grinding in Diablo III when the "auction house" grift was still a thing there.
Narrator voice He didn't. :surprised-pika:
Scenario: your driverless car is stuck in traffic while hired out to Uber or whatever. It was supposed to be back 30 minutes ago, but it's gonna be a while. Meanwhile, you need to go somewhere. Do you A) Hire an Uber so you're paying someone for the use of their car while someone pays you for the use of your car, or B) Command your car to ditch the rider by the side of the road and return home immediately?
they dont want to be around poor people, yes.
i think another reason for carbrain is that they hate their job and hate their wife/family, so the only time they get to seethe in private is during their hellish daily commute. they need it. it's their little bit of peace.
That might explain why so many chuds take their selfies while in their wheeled overcompensation device, and some even record video in there rambling about SJWs and wokeness.
Is that really all it is? Some techbro hangup about seeing poor people?
yes
They're literally making the assumption that many people are duped by under capitalism - that they are actual parties to the wealth and prosperity generated by it, while they are in fact the ones who get the wealth extracted out of them - in that sense the 'buy a Tesla and rent it out' people are essentially the distribution points for Tesla cars and not really their "owners" in the sense that the majority of profits paid from such a service will go to the car manufacturer/system maintainers. They simply possess the resource and rent it out (and will always be X number of rides away from defaulting on their payments).
Also the people who are renting out their autonomous vehicles will be on the hook for liability 100% of the time.
They think about the stuff they like and don't think about the rest. It truly isn't more complicated than that for nearly all of them.
They like cars, they like greenwashing to feel superior to the masses, they like fantasies of buying into the :my-hero: brand of Singularity(tm) promises, they like rubbing one out in a magic vehicle that makes fart sounds. Sounds about right.
I think it boils down to loving the tech but being unable to see past the current system.
The tech could be good. There are issues with cars of course - individual maintenance, tire pollution, and combustion if not electric. But buses are the same just for more people and everything else has steep infrastructure requirements.
Cars are the minimum product for hauling people and things under nearly any circumstance. I think taxis will always have a place in society, especially in low density areas like rural mountains. A fleet of a dozen cars would probably be just as if not more effective than two or three buses for a sparse region in say Appalachia or the Andes.
As with most tech, it would be great if it were publicly administered and owned with serving the community as the central goal.
Very true yes though the same rule applies somewhat - individual transit that can be publicly run and prob autonomous for less populated areas is critical and cannot easily be filled by traditional public transit. Be it a car or lorry or tuk tuk, people need to move heavy things to specific places sometimes.
I think the freedom part of cars is taking it to specific destinations at whichever time. Not direct ownership of the car. I think the bank still owns a leases car. So a driverless car would still do that
Even if the "driverless" promise wasn't just euphoria and hype at this point that is literally getting people killed recently, what's to stop Tesla or some other bazinga company from deciding which destinations aren't available, or aren't available at whatever time? There's already artificial bullshit built in which deliberately hampers performance of the engine unless a premium is paid.
Yeah there absolutely are more complications that they are not considering. Sponsored suggested gas stations or some shit like that. Or paying more for going through traffic
which destinations aren’t available, or aren’t available at whatever time?
And we're back in rural hell where buses aren't available or are available once a day.
I think it's just brainworms from that message being hammered in to people since the day they were born. By any objective measure, the whole thing of owning and driving a car and transportation is encridibly fickle. Remember when the UK had a sort of petrol crisis? It wasn't even that there wasn't petrol, they just lacked the people to ferry it to where it's needed. That's all it takes for the whole thing to come crashing down. Or maybe whatever energy you use to propel the thing becomes too sparse to comfortably support everyone and their grandma using half an appartment to get places. Or maybe there's just nobody or not enough people with the needed technical equipment around to fix it for you. Or maybe the roads just sort of wash out and everything that's not an actual off road car is now pretty much stuck because they're designed for roads. LIke even if everybody takes the hypothetical alternative dirt road, that's gonna become unuseable within 2 weeks because it's not meant to take that abuse.
Conflating personal "freedom" with personal "convenience" is the best guess I've got.
