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.
“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]
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.
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
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.
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.
But that will be less and less the case.
Waymo is doing 150,000 autonomous rides per week now.