There are those who love travelling, and those who don’t. I love riding motorcycles. I love the feeling of controlling a bike as it moves through space, and the feeling of being a part of the scenery I am riding through.
This is the polar opposite of how the vast majority of drivers experience car travel. For them, the objective is to get from A to B as quickly as possible and without experiencing anything of the intervening space. What most car drivers really want is the transporter technology from Star Trek: step in, and reappear instantaneously at your destination.
This is the problem which Silicon Valley types are attempting to solve with autonomous vehicles, more specifically with self-driving taxis. On the face of it, a straightforward, plug-and-play option. But give it a moment's thought, and you see this approach is attempting to answer the wrong question.
What car drivers want is for travel to be reduced, and preferably eliminated entirely. What techbro culture is doing is building another car.
It is a colossal failure of imagination. What drivers want is to spend as little time in a car as possible, and preferably none at all. Silicon Valley's answer is "what if car, but AI?"
Robotaxis such as those operated by Cruise and Waymo in San Francisco are an attempt to solve a social problem with software. The way to eliminate travel is not to make cars worse by plastering them with vulnerable and easily fooled technology.
The real solution is to change the urban environment to better fit the lives of ordinary people. Better to facilitate remote working. Build shops, leisure centres, public services close to the place people live. Provide cheap, frequent, clean public transport.
Walkable cities based on the 15-minute city concept solve the problem of unwanted car journeys by eliminating them altogether.
This is good both for people who don't want to drive and for people who love driving. For those who want to eliminate travel as much as possible, working from home, walking to work, walking to the shops is a blessing.
And for people who love driving, removing the unwilling drivers answers their most fervent prayers. No more getting stuck behind a clueless muppet who hates driving so much they spend the entire journey looking at their phone. No more getting stuck in traffic full of people who didn't want to be in their cars in the first place.
What's more, eliminating people who don't want to drive opens up the roads for people with restricted mobility who need to drive and can't walk or use public transport. Taking cars off the streets makes it safer for wheelchair users, for people have trouble walking, for people whose mobility needs are different.
The truth is, no situation has ever been improved by adding more cars. Cars take up a vast amount of space for limited transportation utility. Adding cars does not solve the problem of mobility, it actively makes it worse.
This is what I mean by autonomous vehicles being an absolute failure of imagination on the part of Silicon Valley. Simply adding cars to a deficient infrastructure makes that infrastructure worse. But adding software to existing objects is the only thing techbros know how to do. They cannot imagine a different answer.
There is also a perverse financial incentive to solve what are essentially urban planning problems with autonomous vehicles. AVs and robotaxis are a way of extracting rent from end users, rather than solving their underlying problems. It is part of the ongoing process of what Cory Doctorow has described as the enshittification of tech, of making users lease rather than buy, of making them pay each time they use a feature or product, rather than selling it outright and free of encumbrances.
If tech giants wanted to actually solve the problems surrounding mobility, they would be looking at the bigger picture, investing in urban planning, changing workplace attendance demands, investing in public transport and public services. Doing that would help to make the lives of ordinary people better, and make towns and cities much nicer places to live. It would also lower costs and provide both an economic and an environmental benefit.
But Silicon Valley techbros have no interest in making the world a better place to live. They have Atlas Shrugged themselves into thinking that the proles only serve to provide a reliable source of revenue for their social and intellectual betters. People are a resource to be exploited for short term gain, not a long term investment target.
So they keep trying to answer every question, address every social problem by adding algorithms and extorting rents for the privilege of using them. They lack the imagination to come up with real solutions, and the incentives to try.