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Labor is only costly when humans do the work.

But that will be less and less the case.

Waymo is doing 150,000 autonomous rides per week now.




That could also lead to a depression. I haven't heard a lot of politicians here (Andrew Yang in 2020? does he even count as "a politician"?) with good plans for what to do when automation hits jobs even harder.


A failed politician is still a politician.


In three cities with good weather and they don’t do highways.


And a year ago they did less than 15,000!

That is not even one tenth!

They clearly will not get anywhere with this.


Yes, just like every startup pitch deck.

“We grew from 10 customers to 100 customers in a year. At this rate we will have 20% of the world’s population in a decade!!!”

The first cohort of customers of any company is always the easiest to obtain with the lowest acquisition cost. You solve the easiest problems first.

This is Cohort Analysis 101. Not to mention Waymo still hasn’t shown to be able to operate in less than ideal weather conditions or proven that the unit economics will make sense or be economical especially taking into account maintenance, or utilization ratios.


It’s been operating safely in each market they’re in. The AI keeps getting better. They have no competition (please don’t bother mentioning Tesla vapor ware). Path to high growth seems pretty sure at this point.


And the markets they are in are low hanging fruit with good weather. I’m not saying Waymo is less safe than human drivers. I am saying that it will only take one fatal accident by any self driving car for people to lose confidence, investigations to start, rollouts to be paused etc. I’m also not saying that is a logical response.


> I am saying that it will only take one fatal accident by any self driving car for people to lose confidence, investigations to start, rollouts to be paused etc.

Uber and Cruise are both great examples of this, but it seems like the effect is mostly localized to the company itself that has the issue.

Uber hit and killed a jaywalking pedestrian, resulting in their self driving tech being sold to Aurora. [0]

Cruise hit a pedestrian that was flung into the cars path that a human driver hit previously. This resulted in GM completely abandoning Cruise and their future seems foggy at best. [1]

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Elaine_Herzberg

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cruise_(autonomous_vehicle)#Su...


Which is very very few markets, and all of them share weather patterns that are very similar.

When Waymo can demonstrate reliably going from Chicago to Ann Harbor in the middle of a snow storm thats when we can start talking about how its good enough.


It reminds me of the advanced ED209 robot in Robocop that was taken out by an inability to go down a flight of stairs

https://youtu.be/_MS4sLlBvbE


If robots can bring everyone to and from work it would be over for manual driving. People dont buy cars to drive in extreme weather in remote areas.


But they do buy cars that they can drive to work in the rain, snow, etc.


Neither area I referenced is remote.


Put it another way, would you buy a car if you cannot use it for daily work commute? I think for a lot of people the answer is obviously no.


Sure wouldn’t, and for what it’s worth that’s why the scenario is a great litmus test. If it can do that, it should be able to handle anything else thrown at it


Except we already do have that technology, its not a fancy robot, but trains. I wouldn't consider buying a car in Tokyo.


    we will have 20% of the world’s population in a decade
That is roughly what happened with Facebook, Google, the iPhone ...

None of these products were as good when they started as when they had a billion users.


https://www.scribbr.com/research-bias/survivorship-bias/#:~:...

Is that really what you want to argue in front of investors? That you are going to be the next Facebook, Google or Apple?

There was also MySpace, Friendster, Altavista, InfoSeek, RIM, Nokia…


Facebook was the next Facebook with Instagram.

Apple was the next Apple with the iMac. Then with the iPod. Then with the iPhone.

Google was the next Google with Android. With Chrome. With Gmail. With Google Maps. With YouTube.

Google becoming the next Google with Waymo would not be a black swan event.


Google also had literally hundreds of failures and Android is not an amazing financial success by any means and Google still ends up paying Apple over $20 billion a year because people with money buy iPhones.

Google is not exactly known for its success rate getting products out of the door that aren’t ad related.


Give stuff for free, ???, profit. It's kinda worked for them, but not as well as Apple's strategy.


You can’t give hardware away for free profitably.

You also have hundreds of failures

https://killedbygoogle.com/

Including Google Fiber.

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2019/02/googl...

Google Stadia was disaster.

In the phone market. The Motorola acquisition was a major failure and Pixels aren’t taking the world by storm.

The entire “Other bets” haven’t led to any major successes.

There are only two tech companies that have shown any ability to do hardware at scale as mass consumer products in the last 25 years - Apple and Tesla.




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