There is a lot of hype about driverless cars swirling around the interwebs at the moment, but this piece of pseudo-utopian nonsense is ridiculous by any standards.
When he simultaneously talks about wholesale destruction of industries employing millions of people while declaring it’s a great time to be alive, it really does speak volumes about the combination of utopianism and sociopathy that Silicon Valley is notorious for. He does come over as someone who’s read way too much Ayn Rand.
For starters, the idea that driverless cars will make existing mass-transit obsolete and “release the prime real-estate occupied by bus stations for other purposes” suggests the author has not experienced any kind of urban environment other than the low-density suburban sprawls typical of much of North America.
The truth is that nobody really knows how soon this technology will be mature enough for widespread adoption, and what sort of economic impact it might have. We’ve had the technology for fully-automated trains for almost half a century now, but it’s not been adopted beyond a very small number of closed systems. Perhaps the evangelists for self-driving cars ought to investigate why?
Predictions of the future when potentially disruptive new technologies emerge usually turn out to be wrong.
The most ridiculous thing I’ve ever read on the subject has to be the idea that driverless vehicles will open up the industrialisation of sub-Saharan Africa through columns of automated trucks trundling across the Sahara delivering African-made goods to Europe. It never seemed to occur to them it would merely replicate what was feasible using 19th century technology in the shape of a railway. But no trans-Saharan railway has ever been built or seriously proposed, because there’s never been enough economic demand for one. It’s far easier to ship goods from Africa to to the nearest port and send it by sea.
