Anthony Levandowski (the Waymo guy) on the robot cabs: "You’re putting the power back into the people’s hands, where a small business owner could have, you know, a fleet of 10 cars or 20 cars that they run themselves as their business. It’s a great model for the future where it’s lots of mom and pops, rather than one mega corp that does that.”
Because that is EXACTLY what will happen and it will absolutely NOT be the case that megacorps will simply do exactly what megacorps do and flood cities with robotaxis running at a loss in order to control the market and then jack up prices. No siree, it’ll be all Mom and Pop’s Friendly Robotaxi Company.
finger curls on the monkey paw
Inspiring! Mom and Pop have started a small business and are now franchisees of Megacorp Robotaxi. After financing and purchasing a fleet of cars, they can enjoy a steady and reliable income while only having to take care of vehicle maintenance, autopilot software license fees, accounting, possible municipal taxi licensing and other legal and clerical duties and liabilities of running a business.
Thanks to Megacorp Robotaxi’s excellent reputation and customer loyalty and not at all because Megacorp Robotaxi has a de facto monopoly on taxi business, Mom and Pop are not worried about the competition, save for maybe some friendly and good-natured rivalry with other proud franchisees of the Megacorp Robotaxi family.
And even if that were true … There’s nothing virtuous about small businesses and I’m just aghast at this inane petit bourgeois vision for the future instead of, you know, actual public infrastructure.
I liked in his presentation how he mentioned how bad LA traffic was and how it takes hours to cross the city, then didn’t mention how all these robo taxis, if they ever become a thing, would just exacerbate the problem.
“Oh but while you wait in the deadlock traffic you can be on your phone instead of paying attention and stressing out” yeah, but I can also already do that on a bus / train and those actually help to alleviate traffic.
I know im a big nerd but "Musk also presented the Optimus robot, your plastic pal who’s fun to be with — “your own personal R2-D2, C-3PO!”.
Why would I need an astromech droid Musk? At least a GNK droid provides power. Stupid sexy gonk droid.
What I really need is a droid who speaks the binary language of moisture vaporators.
Considering the important parts of that, aka the languages can be done by your phone sure. But it would at least have a minimal use. R2 d2 needs special attachments to serve drinks.
The cybertray, competitively priced at 4000$ and the reported risk of it breaking when wet is fairly minimal.
Woah Elon invented busses, but worse! What a genious! Hopefully my city now stops investing in public transport immediately so we can wait for this cool thing to become market ready! /s
To the surprise of no-one: the robots were just mechanical turks.
https://jalopnik.com/teslas-beer-serving-optimus-robot-was-controlled-by-a-h-1851670923