There is something i'm really struggling to understand, what is with the facination of self-driving cars...

not everyone lives in the inner city, driving a buss out to rural areas every time one person needs to go somewhere is inefficient and wasteful, limiting rural transportation to a few times a day is impractical.
Sometimes people in the city need to move stuff that is not themselves, like furniture, having at least some cars available for that purpose is probably gonna be a good idea.

I like it, the less human labor needed the better.

The robots, after they start paying them. The robots will then donate part of their goods to lumpens and burn the rest.

We already have self-driving trains, they're great! However trains have many limitations, they require huge infrastructure investments and the routes cannot be changed without a shitload of money. Your local grocery store cannot be supplied by a train unless it has rails running alongside it. Building tracks in rural areas is utterly wasteful.

A self-driving bus is a type of self-driving car, it would be great!

Buses are typically more wasteful than cars, obviously if they are full they aren't, but buses are only full on certain routes at certain times of the day, they are usually mostly empty.

Imagine a socialized transportation system where people enter their destination and the system calculates the most efficient way to deliver everyone to their destinations. Someone on a farm could be sent a small car for a few people, which would take them to town and a van would take them to a major artery and then a megabus or a train would take them to the city.

Stop letting your imagination be clouded by stupid liberal "so wasteful" values. Iron and rubber is not limited on this planet, and with driverless cars safety is not going to be a big issue anymore so they could be made of plastic or whatever cheap material we come up with. Oil is certainly limited, but despite capitalism we have electric cars which can be powered by effectively limitless resources like nuclear, solar, or wind power.

Why wouldn't you just pay someone else to move your furniture? God your so wasteful.

Are you jesting me? And leave my Edwardian mahogany furniture in the hands of some person so unskilled he has to move furniture for a living? Last time we tried that they chipped the ebony inlay in my cake stand. No good sire, somethings are best done yourself.

I would never hire some scum off the street do it. I get my loyal assistant to do it. I tell him that if he even gets the tiniest scratch on my furniture I won't give him recommendations anywhere and his unpaid internship would be for nought.

It is a troubling situation though. We need to focus less on wasteful robot cars, and more on robot furniture movers.

self-driving cars are going to annihilate the economy when some 20 million people lose their jobs in the US and EU alone.

There is this whole cult of SCIENCE and futurism and the future is nao and it's great and so on.
"Self driving cars! 3D printed food! VR! AR! Manufactured organs! Robors doing everything!"
It's stupid. Everyone is getting hyped and noone thinks about "ok.. but how will this affect society and how could this go worng?". It's the reason we don't have good sci-fi any more. Black Mirror is an exception.

Let's see.. So you have a self driving car and if you want to go somewhere tha you are not allowed, I don't know.. cross the border or something, you cannot. It could even be programmed to only get you to work or whatever. And it can track where you go. Planned a revolution? NOPE! They know where you got those guns!
And what if the car got hacked, or those in power decide you are dangerous and your car "malfuncions"?

Selfdriving busses would be easier, but they wouldn't make as much profit.

This is the only argument for them I accept.

Don't you want society to go wrong? Why are you posting here if you don't want the end of Capitalism? It will affect society by creating so many contradictions that it will gloriously fail leading to the opportunity to build a society based on human desires instead of irrational lines on a spreadsheet.

The government already knows where you are at all times, and our cars can already be hacked and made to do whatever the hacker wants. You seem to think that these cars are linked to some central network, they're not, if they were they wouldn't work in areas with no wireless internet. You can do everything you said already. Fearing change when you live in the worst of all possible worlds is irrational.

You gain a lot of time if you don't have to steer the wheel anymore.

How many people commute to work for more than 1 hour everyday by car?

I surely as fuck would rather do something else like reading a book or anything else if I could(like jacking off and browsing chanz). What about old people? Disabled people? They would gain a lot of mobility and wouldn't have to rely on pain-in-the-ass services.

Didn't Hotwheels almost freeze to death and had to call the police because of one incident like this?

It's dumb.
We could have had a great public transportation system across the U.S. so we wouldn't have to drive ourselves.

Full automation of cars are probably at least 50+ years away. You can't retrofit cars to be self driving and a complete renewal of a country's car fleet is a massive endeavor. They haven't even started producing them commercially yet. Transportation services will be the first effected since they renew their cars often and have a lot to gain. Personal cars in urban and suburban areas will be next, and personal cars in rural areas will probably never go away.

I think we've been invaded by liberals. They see something that will eliminate human suffering and all they can think of is "muh public transportation". I don't know why I'm surprised but they are too stupid to realize that driverless transportation effects public transit as well.

Where the fuck do you get 50 years from? Tesla's cars are already autonomous, they have been for almost a year now, and they were retrofitted. Any car made since 2000 is completely computer controlled, it's just a matter of interfacing with that computer and adding the sensors. It'll probably take some time for it to trickle down to economy vehicles, but no where near 50 years. And what do you mean it's a huge endeavor to completely renew the country's car fleet? The average car is on the road for 11 years, how many cars do you see over 20 years old on a daily basis?

You hear about self driving cars because people are paid to talk about it, from "journalists" to online shills.

Google isn't dumping billions of dollars into this technology for its health you know.

I can answer this one pretty authoritatively having worked in IT and around start-up culture for 10 years.

It's all a put on by a new class of porky called venture capitalist.

Old money porkies don't start investing serious money into anything until it's already making money to a very high degree. They have an entrenched enough position to get a way with it though.

Venture capitalist are just a touch smarter then them. They realized that if you invest in an IT tech a little before it's making a ton of money you can make bank.

BUT, it's super hard to predict what technology will ultimately create new markets, even venture capitalists can't predict the future.

So with the online media acting as their lap dogs they hype up whatever tech they hold an interest in as the next big thing. Dumb proles or 401k retirement managers on behalf of dumb proles dump their money into it then said porkies get the fuck out with their fat stacks.

All the IT stuff we have now like online marketplaces for media, video on demand, ect was all predicted by be just around the corner by a ton of companies you never heard of in the early 2000's. All their predictions ultimately did come true over a decade later but not by any of the companies that were see stupid high market capitalization in the early 2000's with a handful of exceptions.

You instinct is right, it's just more capitalist inefficiency throwing tons of money to come up with a ridiculously complex solution to a problem we already have a solution too.

I don't think the average prole even cares about this shit. But the media makes it seem like everyone is salivating for this technology. The one poll I've seen about this actually shows most people are apprehensive about giving up control of their cars to computers.

They're not autonomous homie. Their semi-automous with an emphasis on semi. They can do very very limited things like maintain distance from other cars on the freeway.

Very neat, very convenient, no where near autonomous.

I want capitalism to go wrong. I even want posadism. But I don't want to live in a society where I have to think and do as ordered or else.

But you may be right…Though I think there is worse.

I remember when I heard about non monochrome cell phones and was like! DAMN! They'll be too expensive though.. And now we have portable computers with AR pokemon, that we also use for phone calls.

Tech is moving faster than you think. TOO FAST!

I fucking love this maymay.
The more people unemployed and desperate for a work that will pay anything the better, because this will somehow bring the revolution instead of just making people suffer and giving an excuse for porky to depress wages.

You seem to be missing the point if you think we're being invaded by liberals. The point is that people are going "holy shit i will be able to get to work without getting into a deathtrap and i can do useful or fun things while doing it" while that is already possible if you take the fucking buss, but the busses suck because there is more money in cars and making busses suck than making busses not suck.

The whole idealogy of the personal car seem to be so ingrained in western culture by profit motives to the point of it being completely ridiculous. Not even critics of the system here at Holla Forums seem to be able question if a product society revolves around is actually necessary.

The car was "the american way" that killed the railroad for highways.
It's actually neoliberalism at it's core.

nigga can't even spell bus XD

Like wtf, its the same word in every language, how could someone fuck that up.

Don't be shitty.

I mean, Bus and λεωφορειο are the same!
I mean.. c-come on!

What the fuck do I care about if it's a driverless car?
Isn't like most people are going to be able to afford it when it releases. You sound like the liberal with your mouth around googles cock.

Not for a long time. Also, trucks gon' get hijacked a lot more in the near future. Fun times ahead.

Truck will be sealed down. Also, products will not be able to arrive earlier and the company will have loss.

Fun indeed.

It's simple.

Public transit = no profits
Self-driving cars = boatloads of profit

Privatized public transit = profit

It also wouldn't work because it would end up as a clusterfuck, like "privatized roads".

because buses and trains are not very profitable, whereas if everyone has to buy their own car, pay for fuel, etc you can turn a big profit

Capitalism will become unprofitable. Full automation=no profit.

JUST WALK YOU LAZY FUCK

They weren't retrofitted, they where built with the required hardware and then got a software update. And they aren't autonomous. Anyone driving a tesla on autopilot right now are basically doing beta-testing for advanced cruise control, RIP harrypotterfan68.
50 years is pulled mostly out of my ass, but this is my thinking. Fully autonomous cars will take another 10 years to develop, then another 10 years before the majority of cars are fully autonomous, another 10 years before it's required in all new vehicles, another 10 before the last of the unautonomous cars reach their expected lifespan and another 10 years before unautonomous cars are banned from public roads.
Honestly, I felt I was being optimistic.

mass transportation is neat, OP
it's not a solution for everything though
while you're right that autonomous cars are a waste of resources, individual transportation is still needed, making it comfortable isn't a bad thing

Uber + self driving cars + social ownership = fully automated luxury travel

Nobody would ever need to have their own car again

Also, a bus is slow as fuck and neither a bus or a train takes you exactly where you want to go, and sometimes you gotta change several times. Unless u live in somewhere as well connected as London you will probably need a car to get to work, and not many places are as well connected as London.

The bus doesn't go fucking anywhere. It goes along a preset route and has fuck all storage space. I can't take the bus to my grandparents, who live 150km away.

Seriously how shitty is the public transportation where you live? You can't even seem to fathom public transportation that accounts for everyone, and takes you most places except for people out in bumfuck nowhere whom understanably would still use trucks whatever may happen. I feel sorry for you comrades.

I live in the fucking netherlands. The trains are expensive as fuck and the bus networks are extremely localized. The trains don't even go to most places. Perfect public transport with reasonable prices and good travel time is a fucking pipedream in capitalism.

Not one of those anons, but here in the socdem utopia of norway public transportation is horrendous outside of metropolitan areas, also we only have one metropolitan area.

I guessed i have been spoiled by the suprisngly decent now privatized public transportation in western sweden where i can get most places 3~hours away relatively easily and cheaply although they have been raising the prices constantly and it's like twice as expensive now than it was four years ago with more and more zoning. Actually going to Oslo might be the biggest problem. When in Gothenburg you can pretty much ride for free on the trams since they rarely check people.

I'm guessing you see mostly older people getting excited about self-driving cars. Science fiction was once more popular in the US than it is now.

the only problem with public transportation is that it's underfunded tbh

Long commutes can be pretty stressfull for people. This might help with that.
The worry is that after they take off the standard distance from home to work becomes even larger.

You have to understand that in ALOT of places in America, for example where I live, public transportation is absolute shit. America is really really really spread out and not owning a car pretty much makes almost everyone doomed to joblessness and disaster because unless you live in the middle of a metropolitan area there is no public transport.