We can drive people and goods around without having a human waste his time driving stuff around.
Not wasting money paying people to do stupid stuff is gigantic gain.
The person the tech is replacing will still need to work and earn a wage to afford the goods the system that replaced them is delivering. It's not replacing a relatively high risk job or allowing that driver to scale themselves and improve their efficiency in any way. It's just eliminating their job, because.
As a passenger in a driverless taxi, instead of having someone in the car who might improve the journey slightly by being an interesting person to chat with, I'll likely sit in the car all alone. Worse, I'll probably be shoved ads in my face. So, this new taxi doesn't really add anything new of value to me as a consumer.
I know automated systems have replaced all kinds of jobs, and the closest analogy I can think of is self-check out lines at grocery stores, or ATM machines before that. However, those actually did free up cashiers so they could wander the store and help out in other ways, or restock, or funny enough, help someone self-check out.
Taxis are kind of an island to themselves, and not only will this impact the driver who won't have anything related to jump to, it will hurt the businesses who rely on drivers waiting for the next passenger. Then there's the urban centers these cars are zipping around in. These cars have no employee to generate business tax revenue from, so the cars are consuming infrastructure for no benefit to the cities.
Anyway, thanks for reading my random thoughts. I'm sure things will balance out in the end, but if you work in the industry and have some cool insights, feel free to share.
> As a passenger in a driverless taxi, instead of having someone in the car who might improve the journey slightly by being an interesting person to chat with, I'll likely sit in the car all alone.
This sounds like a feature to me. Include a minibar and it’ll be my own personal limo.
