Self-driving taxis have a big advantage over self-driving self-owned-cars: they can operate 24-7 and never have to park. If you can switch half the car-using population to robotaxis, you can convert half the parking lots into green space or homes. Nobody wants to ban self-driving car ownership, but some people do want to nudge the marginal commuter into robotaxis so they can reclaim slightly-more-than-half of the parking lots instead of slightly-less.
I predict that there will be a tipping point at which driving your own car will be considered a scary thing to do relative to riding in a driverless car.
are ideas getting harder to find? Packy McCormick… highlighted the argument that ideas themselves are not scarce, but that many past innovations remain untapped due to regulatory, economic, and cultural barriers.
This is a very real thing. Earlier this week, I met with Tyler Hayes at Atom Limbs to see the robotic prosthetic he and his team are building. After he slipped the cuff on my arm and as we were waiting for the system to boot up, he asked what I was working on. I told him about this essay, and the ideas from the 1950s and 1960s idea. He laughed. “A lot of our work,” he said, “is based on this book from 1967.