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[forsaken1111]

Removing civilian cars will be difficult, to say the least, when there's around millions of them, some of which are luxury grades. Parting them with it is not a conceivable option.

I, for one, like this idea, but I'm more worried about the jobs it will displace. People, especially in the Philippines, where any job at all is important to the blue-collar workers, would lose their jobs because of this.

The good thing is that I'm pretty sure that this will happen gradually, not instantly. People will have time to adapt. Still, economic displacement...

Wouldn't this just shift jobs from 'make car' to 'make autotaxi'? And 'service car' to 'service autotaxi'? Hell you know these autotaxis will need maintenance, cleaning, and someone to supervise and run the network of computers running it all.

[Trapezohedron]

Removing civilian cars will be difficult, to say the least, when there's around millions of them, some of which are luxury grades. Parting them with it is not a conceivable option.

I, for one, like this idea, but I'm more worried about the jobs it will displace. People, especially in the Philippines, where any job at all is important to the blue-collar workers, would lose their jobs because of this.

The good thing is that I'm pretty sure that this will happen gradually, not instantly. People will have time to adapt. Still, economic displacement...

Wouldn't this just shift jobs from 'make car' to 'make autotaxi'? And 'service car' to 'service autotaxi'? Hell you know these autotaxis will need maintenance, cleaning, and someone to supervise and run the network of computers running it all.

True, but the vast majority of the conventional taxi drivers have limited education. They'd have to adapt, or be displaced. Concerning maintenance, it takes less people to clean and maintain whole lot of taxis than to drive them, and they have to specialize in their work. To note, however, I'm thinking that autotaxis need just as much maintenance as normal cars do, which isn't true, if it runs purely on battery power. Most likely more maintenance jobs would open as this progresses.

Well, I just hope the people will be able to cope with the changes concerning these things, as manual labor is getting outdated, and knowledge is getting more in demand.

[mainiac]

Wouldn't this just shift jobs from 'make car' to 'make autotaxi'? And 'service car' to 'service autotaxi'? Hell you know these autotaxis will need maintenance, cleaning, and someone to supervise and run the network of computers running it all.

This would be true if production was a perfect analogue to employment.  However the composition of service industries and manufacturing industries is dramatically different with regards to the production function.  That means that the composition of the economy changes vis-a-vis economic gains of capital and labor.  That isn't always a bad thing per-se (I doubt for instance that you begrudge the fact that one can buy a shirt for as little as 5 dollars instead of the several weeks of wages that it would take before industrialization).  But given the current economic trends there is reason to fear that we might enter into an economic era where such shifts in the composition of production factors would lead to a sustained decrease in output and long term decreases in economic growth.

It's hard to say how big this risk is and it occupies a lot of unknown territory, it supposes a shift in capital markets that is not unprecedented but is still quite exotic and it's very hard to understand the political aspect which occupies a much more central role then in most economic predictions.  Things considered remote possibilities five years ago are no longer considered remote but it's hard to be specific as to how likely.

Tl;dr, normally yes but we might be upsetting the balance too much.

[GlyphGryph]

It just means we'll have a lot of people getting jobs washing telephones.

[Tawa]

It just means we'll have a lot of people getting jobs washing telephones.

Pffft, that's what our ancestors did. We have much more useless jobs nowadays, like starring in reality shows.

[Propman]

When you live in an insignificant frozen island in the Aleutian Chain like I do, you can be quite sure that Google won't be showing up with their robocars to ferry me a ride anytime soon. Then again, I still have all the obsolete things mentioned by the OP sitting right next to me (sans the fact that the pager has been broken for years).

That's unless they're developing "fat" drones capable of flying and taking off in airports to ferry people. That would be sorta neat...well, up until the thing suffered a mechanical failure anyways.

[Muz]

I'm scared of robotaxis. I wouldn't want a robot driving something like a plane, which doesn't really run into anything and can be flown, landed, and navigated by robots.

A car is one of the deadliest machines known to mankind. What if a traffic light breaks? What if there's a car chase? What if a truck driver is talking on his phone and swerves into the wrong lane? Can a robot predict that the guy driving funny has some issues controlling his car?

Unemployment is really not an issue. Many jobs are underemployed these days. Does anyone really know someone who isn't "busy"? Fast food joints, cleaners, part-time maids in my country have trouble finding workers, and the minimum wage is rising fast as people compete to get unskilled workers. We NEED more robots running things.

[Putnam]

I'm scared of robotaxis. I wouldn't want a robot driving something like a plane, which doesn't really run into anything and can be flown, landed, and navigated by robots.

Better be afraid, since planes are driven by robots for pretty much everything except taxiing, which is where the vast majority of air accidents happen anyway.

A car is one of the deadliest machines known to mankind. What if a traffic light breaks? What if there's a car chase? What if a truck driver is talking on his phone and swerves into the wrong lane? Can a robot predict that the guy driving funny has some issues controlling his car?

...yes, and better than a human does. You are seriously not giving robots credit. These are things specifically designed to drive. Humans are not. You think the people designing them don't think of these questions? Of course a robot can detect that. They can detect bikers giving hand signals, among other things.

[GlyphGryph]

A car is one of the deadliest machines known to mankind. What if a traffic light breaks? What if there's a car chase? What if a truck driver is talking on his phone and swerves into the wrong lane? Can a robot predict that the guy driving funny has some issues controlling his car?

All of these are really good reasons to want the robots to drive instead. They can react much faster than we can, and make much better decisions with significantly more precision. The most dangerous thing about cars, by far, is that they are driven by humans.

There are situations where you'd be better off with a human, sure - but the vast majority of the time you're going to be better off with the robot, and it turns out most accidents happen the vast majority of the time! I don't know why I'd be any more scared of robotaxis than I am of people driving cars. (Note, I am actually significantly more terrified of the second, and considering how many of your scary situations had the second as a problem...)

[Mech#4]

I'm wondering what the driver seat would look like. Would it be empty with the steering wheel moving, or would there be a box sitting there covering that side?

I'm assuming the normal controls would still be there, in case the passenger needed to direct the car if it went off course.

People might feel more comfortable if there's a humanoid robot sitting in the drivers seat. I'm sure there's similar examples of that elsewhere but I just can't think of one at the moment.

[Criptfeind]

That would be creepy as fuck to me. I expect that eventually all the steering and such will be in the mechanics of the car with all the other bits like the engine and the... Other. Car. Things. Transitionally I would expect it to look like a box and a ton of wires and stuff in the drivers seat.

[alway]

A car is one of the deadliest machines known to mankind. What if a traffic light breaks? What if there's a car chase? What if a truck driver is talking on his phone and swerves into the wrong lane? Can a robot predict that the guy driving funny has some issues controlling his car?

All of these are really good reasons to want the robots to drive instead. They can react much faster than we can, and make much better decisions with significantly more precision. The most dangerous thing about cars, by far, is that they are driven by humans.

There are situations where you'd be better off with a human, sure - but the vast majority of the time you're going to be better off with the robot, and it turns out most accidents happen the vast majority of the time! I don't know why I'd be any more scared of robotaxis than I am of people driving cars. (Note, I am actually significantly more terrified of the second, and considering how many of your scary situations had the second as a problem...)

Yeah. Thing is, self driving cars can figure these things out, and can do so much better than any human. All of those scenarios in your questions are already definitely covered by the current generation of self driving cars.

People swerving into the wrong lane? That's only really dangerous to human drivers. Automated drivers have a full 360 degree FOV with no blind spots, and so can spot and react to such dangers immediately. And not only react to them, but do a full physical simulation of that vehicle's likely and possible paths, along with those of all other vehicles, in order to avoid them in the most optimal way possible. And all within the first few milliseconds. On the other hand, last week someone swerved into my lane while commuting to work. As humans have at least around a 1 second reaction time to such stimuli, I very nearly got hit, and probably would have if the idiot didn't realize someone was in his blind spot.

Fact of the matter is, humans are terrible drivers. We have a small FOV, with only basic motion detection in all but around 20 degrees of that. We are easily distracted by really just about anything, as we find driving to be generally uninteresting. We get sleepy. We get drunk. We get angry. We have horrible short term memory, forgetting where nearby vehicles are almost instantly. We ignore everything which seems unimportant (up until that car you saw drive behind the bus comes out in front of it and you t-bone it). And all that's assuming we're having a good day and don't just fall asleep at the wheel. Annually, 1.2 million people die in traffic. Even in the US, a place with relatively good safety laws, it's the equivalent of the world trade center attacks happening once a month. Except with tens of thousands of non-fatal debilitating injuries to boot. One of the biggest names behind the self driving cars, Sebastian Thrun, specifically names safety as one of the biggest reasons he embarked on the (Stanford and Google self driving car) projects; he apparently lost a friend in a fatal car accident while in highschool.

The thing about this sort of software is that it really only gets better over time. I suspect there would be an immediate large drop in traffic fatalities, followed by years of steady decline towards 0. When driving quality itself is your product, every accident will result in an analysis as thorough as those of an airliner crashing (say what you will about irresponsible corporations, but they tend to react very intensely when their product leaves someone with an eviscerated corpse in a mangled heap by the side of the road). Even in the rare case of an accident, you can be damn sure that within 1 year, software updates resulting from the investigation ensures there will be no product on the market which makes that same mistake twice. Though really, even if you could only save 1 million people per year, that's still not too shabby.

[Greiger]

The big problem when the most accidents will happen will probably be during the transition.  The biiggest chance an automated car has of making a mistake is when a human is involved.   Once there are fewer people driving manually everything will be far smoother, everything is far more predictable when the computers don't have to go into their "What if the guy in front of me does something stupid" routine.

But even during that transition phase I wouldn't be surprised if traffic accidents still go down.  Even when the unexpected happens computers have far far better reaction times than any human in the world, and they will almost always react in the most rational way possible where a human in a quick reaction moment may make the wrong choice.  Only times a computer would react incorrectly is when something it wasn't programmed to react to happens.

Current google cars according to statistics seem to be able to respond to basically everything already, and when some edge case does come up the situation will be patched into the system's memory along with what to do probably within a day of it being made public.

And as for jobs lost, it may seem a bit cold but that is one of the costs of progress.  People need to adapt to a changing world. Does anybody still cry for all the scribes who lost their jobs when the printing press was invented?

[freeformschooler]

2035. Your personal hologram of President Honey Boo Boo farts by your bedside, shocking you awake. It is fifteen minutes before work, but no worries: your SmartHouse, Gertrude, is preparing breakfast. Gertrude asks how you want your eggs. You say scrambled. Gertrude does not respond, and puts a Sunny Side Up Vitamin on your plate next to your Bacon Pill. You choke both down with some Brawndo (it's got electrolytes) and punch yourself in the face to activate Google™ BrainWave™ which you ask to call up a Zuckerberg™ FaceCab™.

The FaceCab™ arrives in two seconds. You get in, and your grandmother appears on-screen to tell you she recently "Liked" Mountain Dew: Dorito Blast. Before the car drives off, your wife runs out, waving her arms hysterically. She says she needs you to "Like" her photo of your own child for a chance to win some Google™ Diapers™ with built-in SEO and analytics. She says she needs these to boost her search ranking while Gertrude changes your son. You joke about Yucca Mountain erupting (originally intended to store radioactive waste, Yucca Mountain was repurposed in 2019 after the first fifty-pound baby was born, requiring drastic changes in global diaper disposal infrastructure).

The FaceCab™ drives off, and a soft voice says: "Greetings, [name]. We have calibrated your advertisements for your attention span of 0.21138 seconds. Enjoy your ride." You would ignore the advertisements, but last time someone did that, their FaceCab™ stopped in the middle of the road, causing the single bloodiest automatic pile-up in Human history. 0.2-second advertisements flash before your eyes like subliminal messages for the hour-long drive.

You arrive at work. To combat rising unemployment from automation, President Boo Boo has mandated all citizens of the United Nations of China be paid to dig holes and bury excess McDonalds kids' meal toys. You worry about the environment, but your coworkers assure you there is a night shift paid to dig them back up again. You break your plastic digging spoon around noon and are forced to bury it and use the spoon from your lunch for the rest of the day. It is horrible.

You take a FaceCab™ back home, and your grandmother berates you for not getting a real job like quantum plasmoid engineering. You say you're sorry, sorry grandma. Of course, this is only a brain simulation of your grandmother, but your shame is real. You make a note in your Google™ BrainWave™ to take out a student loan for 5,000,000,000,000 Yuan, the price of one community college class.

You arrive home. Your neighbor Bradley asks you if you want to go bowling. You say you'd love to. You both head inside, go in your respective bedrooms, put on your Zuckerberg™ FaceTimes™, and make limp bowling motions. Bradley comes out just 20 points ahead of you. Damn. You've really gotta find some better virtual bowling shoes.

You lie back on the pillow, activating your Google™ BrainWave™, and briefly wonder how all this could have turned out different before settling in for eight hours of simulated Coca-cola™ dreams. Nighty-night.

[Greiger]

I suppose that is indeed a possibility.  But you know, things are already heading in that direction, automatic cars or no.  I'm not a fan of ALL of the technology being thrown out there. 

Hell I hate this whole new trend of security companies allowing you to control your house from your cell phone.  With how people currently secure their networks, and how the networks are run by ISPs instead of the security company that's a security nightmare.  Theyre opening their houses up to any script kiddie with a laptop that knows how to guess wi-fi keys. 

The same thing may indeed happen with automated cars (other than the people in charge of the car's security also being in charge of the car's network equipment which is a massive security improvement), but automated cars clearly can save lives.  an automated house just saves you the trouble of having to turn yer AC on when you walk in after work.