[paulette449]

The article infers, not unreasonably IMO, that the support for this push comes neither from citizens nor fellow lawmakers but from labor unions with whom the lawmaker (Councilmember Hug Soto-Martínez) is closely aligned.

> "This has everything to do with making sure that the streets of Los Angeles are safe ... It’s also about making sure that we protect jobs"

> "During the Q&A that followed, TechCrunch asked if any constituents had raised specific concerns about robotaxis. Soto-Martínez replied that he “would have to check,”

> "Just two LA lawmakers were present at the conference on Wednesday"

[rob74]

That sounds a bit short-sighted TBH. I am all for protecting "licensed" taxis from Uber et al, but the (long-shot) goal of robotaxis is providing a level of service that can't be provided with human drivers because it would be too expensive. If using robotaxis becomes cheaper than owning a car, that would get rid of most of the cars parked 95% of the time that are clogging up streets all over the world.

[dv_dt]

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).

[SkyLemon]

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

[guil177]

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

Any tools goal is to reduce work.

[vidarh]

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.

[Karellen]

The problem isn't that tools make jobs easier, it's that when jobs get easier the benefits accrue to the owners of capital - by erasing jobs - instead of to the people doing the jobs - by allowing them to create the same amount of value for customers/society in less time, improving their standard of living.

Luddites weren't against automation. They were just against automation being used against them by others, rather than for them, by them.

[cycrutchfield]

Have they tried smashing the looms yet?

[lo_zamoyski]

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.

[guil177]

Not every attempt is successful, but the overall goal of a tool is still to reduce work.

[wincy]

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.

[yowzadave]

The reason AI-generated art looks better to you is because it is cribbing from better (human) artists. Maybe D&D should just hire better artists directly?

[wincy]

Frank Frazetta is a little busy being dead right now, so unfortunately he’s all booked up.

[zip1234]

Honestly, there are so many places where art absolutely is terrible. If AI generation can make higher quality art more accessible to more areas then it is a huge win.

[wincy]

Our little Dungeons and Dragons campaign has absolutely exploded in quality and storytelling because our DM has been utilizing Midjourney for character tokens for the bad guys. I spent an hour or two on each person in the game’s character portrait with astounding results. It has been like night and day.

There is a 0% chance I’d pay the price this would have been a couple years ago. I can’t even fathom how much this quality of art would cost, probably tens of thousands of dollars.

Before the DM would just hunt and peck around for online images that sorta matched what he was going for, mostly rudimentary pencil drawings with some color fills.

To me the dream is saying “Elmo is king of a Mad Max style castle, please write a story and generate art assets” and in front of you on the tabletop your Apple Vision Pro tiles out a whole dungeon, does voices, you can go in and inspect and interrogate the pieces and make tweaks to get it just right.

[RHSeeger]

> our DM has been utilizing Midjourney for character tokens for the bad guys

I don't think, in all my years of role playing, I've _ever_ seen an image of one of the NPCs in our stories; at least outside of the rare store-bought adventures. Or, at least that I can recall, an image of _anything_ in our campaigns. Everything was verbally described.

I wasn't even aware people generated pictures for home-grown adventures/campaigns.

[itishappy]

When I was playing (about a decade ago) we made heavy use of static images. A few people drew their characters, others pulled images from online, and our DM would always flash an image of whatever boss we were about to encounter. These were all intended to be rough approximations, and were typically shared with deviations, e.g. "my character looks like this guy, but he uses a staff instead of a longsword, and he has a lot more hair!" My girlfriend plays with some artist friends, and they regularly doodle their character's escapades.

Art is nice. Customized art is nicer. Also, it's interesting that (as you note) it's far from universal. My group would likely have enjoyed using AI art for our campaigns, but my girlfriend's groups have completely rejected it.

[lelanthran]

> 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.

[RHSeeger]

> it's the exact amount of money that would stop the idle masses from burning down the city.

That seems awfully pessimistic. There's a couple different reasons

- To stop the masses from uprising (as noted)

- Because the health of the society as a whole depends on the health of the people in the society. And sometimes you need safety nets for the people in that society, because people can't always do for themselves. Fire departments, unemployment, health care, education; these all fall into that category in one way or another. Some places provide all of these, some provide none, and most provide somewhere in the middle. In the end, we provide for those that can't because it's better for the society that we live in if we do. And we are all served by a better healthier society.

[AndrewKemendo]

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?

[gruez]

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

...which still only work out to 1-2%

[uoaei]

...which works out to roughly 3-7 million people. Unless you want to pay them UBI, you're going to have to help them find and transition to other categories of jobs.

[progne]

I used to drive a taxi. Now I write code. I paid for my own training. I'd expect to find that self-help is the most usual way to transition into other jobs.

[AndrewKemendo]

The reality is, this is just not a functional pathway for the majority of people. So it’s not a solution

It might be possible for some minority that has a particular penchant for this type of work, but neither the jobs nor the training exist at such scale that would be able to absorb the entirety of the driver workforce into the “write software for automated driving“ job.

[itishappy]

That would roughly double the number of tech workers.

[lo_zamoyski]

And 1-2% don't matter? That's an odd take. Whom do you serve?

[gruez]

That's 1-2% against the interests of almost everyone else that would benefit from driverless cars. Their plights matter, but at they same time they shouldn't have veto power over transformative technologies just because they'll be put out of a job.

[robg]

What’s your data to back that up? If truck drivers, there’s nothing close that would turn huge trucks robotic for the current generation.

[TeMPOraL]

Wait, aren't huge trucks slated to be the first ones to be replaced by autonomous equivalents? Making a self-driving long-distance truck is a simpler, more constrained, and easier to solve incrementally problem than making a self-driving passenger car.

[idopmstuff]

The part that's hard to understand is why we'd keep a job that kills people when it's no longer necessary.

[AndrewKemendo]

This is the equivalent of saying, we need strong protections on the Internet, because child pornography exists

It’s not an actual argument because it doesn’t have specific measurable distinctions between deaths related to driverless vehicles versus driver vehicles

We don’t have these types of measurable capabilities because we don’t actually have the data that shows what is the fatality rate per million miles at the scale of integration that an entire fleet they have supplanted the taxi industry would do.

You’re better off actually evaluating what is the death rate of taxis compared to individual drivers because the individual drivers are not going to be replaced at the same rate as taxi drivers and so the taxi drivers is the first more important number to evaluate with respect to traffic fatalities

Unless you’ve done that specific math, and walk the dog out, including the Wayno reports, some of the cruise reports, and some of the reports from Tesla (which killed a guy if you recall) then you might have an argument

As it stands, all I see with driverless cars is we’re trying to replace humans in an entire labor category, and we have nothing for those people to do

I suspect that is actually a much bigger problem than the theoretical reduction in fatalities on roads

[idopmstuff]

> This is the equivalent of saying, we need strong protections on the Internet, because child pornography exists

It's not remotely like saying this, and going straight to child pornography in is like going straight to the Nazis - the sign of an unserious argument.

> It’s not an actual argument because it doesn’t have specific measurable distinctions between deaths related to driverless vehicles versus driver vehicles

You're just not understanding the definition of the word argument if you think this is true. Also, these things are being measured, so we're getting to this understanding. If your argument is that we shouldn't put robotaxis on the road because we don't know if they're safer means that we can't measure if robotaxis are safer and thus regardless of their relative safety, we must ban them because we don't have measurements yet.

> I suspect that is actually a much bigger problem than the theoretical reduction in fatalities on roads

But that's not an actual argument because it doesn't have specific, measurable distinctions, no?

[guil177]

I mean longterm strategy is non sensical.

Why not ban personal car to make the demand for driver even higher?

[zztop44]

I’m not saying that’s not true. But the push to have them also doesn’t feel wholly organic. Robotaxis feel like one of those new technologies that we’re gonna have whether we like it or not, because enough very rich people want us to have them.

And I’m not saying we can or should try to delay the inevitable either. 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.

[RHSeeger]

> 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

[Spivak]

> restaurant, so many of them just don't care at all

I fell like this might be a generation gap but I much prefer it this way, they're contract workers that are paid like shit and also not paid by you. They don't get paid for getting your order right, or service with a smile or whatever nonsense, they get paid to deliver a package from a -> b. You don't get mad at the taxi for taking you to the wrong place, you blame the driver, and in this case the driver is DoorDash/UberEats/Postmates.

I had an older Papa John's delivery driver once tell me "Thank you for ordering Papa John's" and meant it and after being taken aback was like dude the amount of loyalty you have for a company that wouldn't hesitate to throw you in a dumpster for a fiver is too damn high.

[4k3aa4]

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