Robotaxis 'do not belong in the city of Los Angeles,' lawmaker says (opens in new tab)

It’s not clear to me that reliable autonomous driving wouldn’t instead clog up the streets with continuously roving robot taxis or parked autonomous vehicles that came from an even longer commute distance (because it’s easy to work or sleep during the robot drives).

Long term planning in politics is often only as far as the next election.

It's very simple: Lots of people have those jobs, and they either like those jobs or have no confidence that having to find new jobs won't end up as a net loss for them.

Because people need to eat. If you make their jobs disappear, they need to find news jobs, and that's not necessarily an easy transition. In the short term, and people's lives are short, it can be painful. That, at least, is the understandable motivation.

> Any tools goal is to reduce work.

I'm not sure that's entirely true. Yes, a dishwasher reduces the work you have to do washing dishes. That is true. But is also creates an entire economic ecosystem to support the existence of that dishwasher. You have the entire supply chain, the manufacturer, the repairmen, etc, etc, etc; the dependencies are vast. Technology is always thoroughly embedded in a living culture. It is a product of that culture and an instrument of that culture. It is just a dead and empty husk without a culture to breathe life into it and make it what it is, like a severed finger. A 21st century smartphone beamed to 5th century Arabia would be worthless.

That's also why all sorts of initiatives in places like Africa have often been boneheaded. Someone from an NGO decides that farmers in Africa need tractors, or a water pump, or whatever. So they bring these things to a remote rural village somewhere, thinking that with this tractor, they'll increase agriculture yields and free up children from having to work the fields so they can go to school, and with this water pump, they'll relieve these people of drought. They show the villagers how to drive the tractor, how to turn the water pump on, and so on. So they use these things for a couple months. Something breaks. Nobody knows how to repair the tractor. Nobody has the parts needed to repair the tractor. Nobody has the tools to repair the tractor. Things go back to the way they were and the tractor is left to rust behind a shed somewhere. You need an economic ecosystem (and economies are a part of culture and a reflection of culture) that supports the existence and usefulness of the tractor and that water pump.

But transitioning to that ecosystem can be uncomfortable, even painful, especially when done too rapidly.

There was a big kerfuffle in the D&D community the other day about an artist using AI art tools to augment his drawing in one of the new books. Guy had his whole process documented and just used AI as a final postprocess step. I can’t help but notice how bland the art in D&D books looks vs what I’m seeing daily on AI art groups.

I’ll be glad when the dust settles as it’s really limiting what’s possible since Steam is also outright banning AI art tooling.

> I never understood the longterm logic of protecting jobs by not using tools.

Ever read thelastpsychiatrist? The website is dead now (and he may be too, for all I know), but he was on the money when talking about why a specific amount is paid by the state to the unemployed - it's the exact amount of money that would stop the idle masses from burning down the city.

You don't understand it now, but you will if we had a transition to completely automated driving in a short period - those millions of unemployed drivers, that are now never going to be employed, are a risk to the city.

The whole point of robot taxis is to eliminate the job “driver”

“Driver” happens to be the most popular job in the United States

What exactly is hard to understand here?

> But the people who are pushing these timelines are basically the same people who just finished up spending tens (hundreds?) of billions of dollars making the food delivery industry worse, more expensive, and probably less profitable overall.

I've stopped ordering delivered food all together. I just go pick it up now. Everything about it has gotten worse

- More expensive

- Delivery people don't work for the restaurant, so many of them just don't care at all. We had one deliver someone else's food to us, and tell us it's not their problem when we informed them of such.

- Tip must be up front, so not based on performance

I dunno I can think of a couple of ways to make them economically nonviable...

Drivers who kill pedestrians or cyclists don't consciously decide to murder them (at least not in 99.99% of cases), they do it out of negligence - opening a door without looking into the mirror, turning right at an intersection without looking for pedestrians or cyclists, not stopping at pedestrian crossings etc. etc.

At least in Chicago - if you kill some cycling and it's an accident - it's just an insurance payout. You don't even lose points on your license.

Unless you literally run someone over intentionally - you won't even lose your license. And if you do that, I bet you wouldn't even go to jail most of the time.

Can't tell you the amount of cyclists I know that have been hit by cars (and myself) and I don't know a single driver that had any real consequences (beside their insurance paying out a tiny sum that doesn't even cover half of your damages).

Not to mention, it's quite common for cyclists to get hit by cars and they hit and run (just happened to me a couple of months ago). Can't do anything if you don't have a full match on the plates. And even if you do have the plates - despite the fact that a hit & run is a pretty big deal if you hit a car - if you hit a cyclist - at least according to the police officer I filed a report with - the driver is unlikely to lose points - and almost certainly wouldn't lose their license. I could be entirely wrong - hopefully someone will correct me if so.

With Robo Taxis - no chance of that. The company will know which car was there when you got hit.

We know from decades of safety research that threatening to ruin people's lives doesn't prevent accidents. All it does is make people lie about why the accident happened.

I feel like nuclear energy is a bad example, because when it goes wrong it's "one big scary thing" as opposed to the papercuts that would add up with dangerous robotaxis. Also the benchmark for car danger is already so incredible low. You can see in this thread the argument that "cars are already killing people, so we as a society just have to decide how many it's ok to have die while we figure out to make them work."

As far as "objectively safer" - not sure how that works (or matters). Since when has safety actually mattered in terms of public opinion? If safety mattered we wouldn't have cars on city streets at all, all last mile would be slow & public and we'd have built our towns & cities to support that.

Counter take is that it's the perfect environment from a learning perspective: if you succeed there, you can succeed in easier conditions.

I'm not saying it's happening now, but a shift might occur.

You're correct when you say

>we have numerous companies testing autonomous vehicles in the states

The article we are responding is is about increasing political pressure against that practice.

Yes, and the article to which we're replying is a story about political pressure to STOP that testing.