[amelius]

A robot that prepares my dinner is more valuable to me than a self driving car.

Why? Well, when I leave work, I spend 45 minutes in the car, and another 45 minutes preparing dinner. With self driving cars, that will not change. But with self cooking chefs, that would add 45 minutes of quality time to my day.

[bradleyjg]

According to the most recent data from the Department of Transportation, there are 11.3 million motor vehicle accidents a year in America, with 2.4 million people injured in said accidents. 2016 was the deadliest year in almost 10 years, with about 40,000 traffic deaths—up about 2,000 over 2015.

The economic impact of car accidents is almost as staggering as the numbers of injuries and lives lost. The total economic impact of car crashes is a whopping $871 billion in the U.S. (http://www.thedrive.com/sheetmetal/13792/car-accidents-cause...)

The revenue of the entire restaurant industry is less than that total economic impact ($799 billion http://www.restaurant.org/News-Research/Research/Facts-at-a-...)

[greeneggs]

The correct source is:

The Economic and Societal Impact of Motor Vehicle Crashes https://crashstats.nhtsa.dot.gov/Api/Public/ViewPublication/...

Note that these numbers are made up to a certain degree, much more so than the restaurant industry numbers, and so they are not necessarily comparable. The NHTSA puts the value of one life at $8.86 million (in 2010 dollars) [p. 114 of the report]. For 40,000 deaths, that's already $354 billion. They then add other costs, too, which are also hard or impossible to measure.

[lsc]

Things like this make me wonder if I just have an extreme lack of... grit, or tolerance for risking other people's lives or something. I mean, the idea of spending an hour and a half a day driving, experimentally, means I break after a few months even if the job is relatively stress free. (now, experimentally, I can ride a lot longer than I can drive, but I'm one of those people who can read while in a moving vehicle.)

I know this is a normal thing that normal people do; I know people who do it, but it is something I personally find incomprehensibly difficult.

[regularfry]

I bought a house to cut a 45 minute commute down to 15. I don't want to imagine commuting any further than that. It's just such a waste of time.

[Eridrus]

You can already buy prepared food, the same way you can already get a taxi.

The difference is that a self driving taxi will be far cheaper than a taxi, partly because it can be shared.

A robot that prepared food already exists, it's called a factory, but food is far more variable in terms of people's desires.

[anindha]

The self driving car brings you dinner at an affordable price.

It makes more sense for the dinner cooking robot to be making thousands of meals a day than just two for you each day.

[petepete]

What you really need is a car oven and dashboard hob in your self-driving car.

[contingencies]

Thank you for this inspirational quote, which I distributed to the team at Infinite Food this morning to start our week! http://infinite-food.com/

We are building a network of automated food preparation and retail service locations for high density mainland Chinese cities, with a view toward international expansion.

Your statement concurs with the results of a study published in PNAS and reported in NYT recently regarding cross-demographic improvements in happiness resulting from increased spending on time-saving - http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2017/07/18/1706541114.full and https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/27/science/study-happy-save-...

[curun1r]

Your car isn't the sum total of what you spend on transportation. Every loaf of bread and gallon of milk was also transported a fairly long distance to arrive at your local supermarket. All the Uber stories here would lead you to believe that the initial thrusts for self driving cars will be in transporting humans, but I find it much more likely that the initial rollout of self-driving technology will, instead, be focused on moving stuff.

Truck driver is, IIRC, the largest single job description in the US. That's a huge target market for self-driving technology and a massive societal problem that's looking when so many people are left jobless.

[seanmcdirmid]

Or you could just order delivery? Sometimes I miss living in china for this reason.

[chrismcb]

Self driving cars should reduce your commute significantly