Because in all of human history humans have shown zero interest in depriving themselves of things they want.
I want transportation. You want transportation. Everyone wants transportation.
You, me and everyone else wants to go to the beach, get food delivered, get 1 day shipping from Amazon, eat bananas grown in Chile, drink coffee harvested in Africa, drink wine grown in France, go to a baseball game or visit relatives for Thanksgiving.
All are optional activities you can do without. Are you doing without them?
I need transportation. You need transportation. Everyone needs transportation.
You, me and everyone else needs to go to work, go to a hospital etc.
Reducing transportation is not an option. You'll not give up on things enabled by transportation.
So the next best thing is making transportation cheaper and more efficient.
We've optimized food production to produce 10x more food using the same amount of land. It was a good thing because the option of starving or killing 9 out of 10 people is not very appealing.
Robotaxis will allow us to optimize transportation to better use the roads and cars. High utilization of the roads (as long as it doesn't become a crippling congestion) is a good thing. It means we're using a fixed resource to provide as much of what people want at the lowest possible price.
And since people bring buses as some alternative to robotaxis: a self-driving bus is also vastly superior to regular bus and when we have density of 100k robocars in a city the size of SF, it'll be a no brainer for fleet operators to have part of the fleet be minivans and buses, taking 16+ people, for the times of congestion.
> Because in all of human history humans have shown zero interest in depriving themselves of things they want.
Any malignant cancer shows zero interest in moderating its growth, until its host dies.
I agree with your description of reality, but I think fundamentally we need to price in ecological and medical externalities before I can be quite as optimistic as you are.
I want transportation. You want transportation. Everyone wants transportation.
You, me and everyone else wants to go to the beach, get food delivered, get 1 day shipping from Amazon, eat bananas grown in Chile, drink coffee harvested in Africa, drink wine grown in France, go to a baseball game or visit relatives for Thanksgiving.
All are optional activities you can do without. Are you doing without them?
I need transportation. You need transportation. Everyone needs transportation.
You, me and everyone else needs to go to work, go to a hospital etc.
Reducing transportation is not an option. You'll not give up on things enabled by transportation.
So the next best thing is making transportation cheaper and more efficient.
We've optimized food production to produce 10x more food using the same amount of land. It was a good thing because the option of starving or killing 9 out of 10 people is not very appealing.
Robotaxis will allow us to optimize transportation to better use the roads and cars. High utilization of the roads (as long as it doesn't become a crippling congestion) is a good thing. It means we're using a fixed resource to provide as much of what people want at the lowest possible price.
And since people bring buses as some alternative to robotaxis: a self-driving bus is also vastly superior to regular bus and when we have density of 100k robocars in a city the size of SF, it'll be a no brainer for fleet operators to have part of the fleet be minivans and buses, taking 16+ people, for the times of congestion.