The Future
kurtsp.com
The Future
1–10 of 44 posts
Re: The Future
#2"Almost-free on-demand point-to-point public transit. Combine UberPool and self-driving cars and this is what you get. It could be actually free with ads..."
I don't see how self-driving car services could be "almost free". Self-driving cars cost money to manufacture. Like all mechanical equipment, they have finite lifetimes, so their purchase cost needs to be paid back over that lifetime. They need to be maintained, e.g., tires and shocks don't last forever, and metal corrodes over time (especially in environments where roads are salted for de-icing). Someone will need to clean the interiors every day (or more often), since people tend to leave messes (sometimes really disgusting ones).
The power for them isn't free. Even if they're solar powered, solar panels have to be manufactured, installed and maintained (e.g., cleaned off periodically to maintain maximum efficiency), and they need to be replaced after their finite lifetimes expire. Rechargeable batteries need to be replaced after a certain number of recharge cycles.
Roads, bridges and tunnels cost as much to maintain for self-driving cars as for conventional cars. There will still be tolls and taxes. As gas and diesel vehicles die off, the revenue from the taxes on their fuel will need to be replaced by other taxes, such as per-mile taxes on electric vehicles.
I doesn't seem that merely showing ads to passengers could pay for all these capital, labor and tax expenses. And if the cars are owned by a for-profit company such as Uber, there has to be enough income for the company to have a profit after paying their operating costs and taxes.
Re: The Future
#3"Almost-free on-demand point-to-point public transit. Combine UberPool and self-driving cars and this is what you get. It could be actually free with ads..." I don't see how self-driving car services could be "almost free". Self-driving cars cost money to manufacture. Like all mechanical equipment, they have finite lifetimes, so their purchase cost needs to be paid back over that lifetime. They need to be maintained,…
Let's make some generous assumptions -- a taxi costs $20K, lasts 300,000 miles, gets 50 miles to the gallon and fuel costs $2.00 a gallon. (Or equivalent, electrically, I'm easy.) Then fuel is four cents a mile and depreciation is seven cents a mile for a total cost of eleven cents a mile.
In the future, running an ultra-efficient electric car we can imagine the fuel price could be lower and the range before replacement even higher.
Is eleven cents a mile "almost free"? It's certainly a lot cheaper than the vast majority of public transport trips I've taken in recent years. Could it be ad-supported? Well, maybe. How much would advertisers be willing to pay to captively monopolise the attention of someone whose individual tastes and spending habits were already well profiled? Quite possibly more than eleven cents a mile (a few cents a minute in traffic).
(Personally I'm more than willing to outbid the advertisers in order to get peace and quiet.)
Re: The Future
#4"A good segment (30%) of the world barely works" - and behaves exactly like disgrunted arabs in poor muslim countries?
I.e. radicalize, want to blow up the world, ready to take arms for $150/month?
Another role model for those people is 1st world ghettos. We're not doing it better than that yet. "The cost of subsistence has been driven down significantly", that's nice if you actually have some independent source of income. Otherwise you're a slave of someone who has it.
"Solar panels are everywhere" - making electricity out of rain, darkness and misery anyone? Not every country in the world has enough sunshine (however, most do)
Not a world of explaination why India is superpower. Not a word about Europe.
Re: The Future
#5"A good segment (30%) of the world barely works" - and behaves exactly like disgrunted arabs in poor muslim countries? I.e. radicalize, want to blow up the world, ready to take arms for $150/month? Another role model for those people is 1st world ghettos. We're not doing it better than that yet. "The cost of subsistence has been driven down significantly", that's nice if you actually have some independent source of i…
Anyway, that's not "future". That's more of "now". Can we please have some real future sometime?
With, I don't know, space travel, teleportation, telepathy, nanoassembly, digital democracy, aliens?
Re: The Future
#6"Almost-free on-demand point-to-point public transit. Combine UberPool and self-driving cars and this is what you get. It could be actually free with ads..." I don't see how self-driving car services could be "almost free". Self-driving cars cost money to manufacture. Like all mechanical equipment, they have finite lifetimes, so their purchase cost needs to be paid back over that lifetime. They need to be maintained,…
Let's make some generous assumptions -- a taxi costs $20K, lasts 300,000 miles, gets 50 miles to the gallon and fuel costs $2.00 a gallon. (Or equivalent, electrically, I'm easy.) Then fuel is four cents a mile and depreciation is seven cents a mile for a total cost of eleven cents a mile. In the future, running an ultra-efficient electric car we can imagine the fuel price could be lower and the range before replacem…
This is pretty close. Benedict evans did a more accurate calculation , and got ,for electric self driving cars, 14-19 cents/mile:
https://twitter.com/benedictevans/status/636684338352951297
One thing he forgot - what about shared transport - say sharing with 3 people could offer ride time relatively close to a car. That gets us to 4.5 cents/mile. That comes about to $50 a month/american-person(avg 13.5K miles/year) , less for a kid, surely less for people in dense cities(say $25) .
EDIT:and if you're willing to ride an on demand bus/minibus , maybe it could go to 1/2-1/3 of that , so maybe your monthly transport demands could be met by less than $10.
Re: The Future
#7"Many people live throughout their life in campus environments similar to college campuses of the early 21st century. These campuses were seeded from the ruins of cities ravaged by crisis (Detroit), the transition of festivals to sustained existence (Burning Man), and around the headquarters of major companies. These mini Utopias on earth are small, high density villages with everything a person wants. A high density of friends, intelligent people, exciting activities, all in walkable or bikeable distances. Importantly, there is high mobility between these campuses (changing companies, new research projects), but little mobility from outside to inside."
This one got me because this is not the future, this is the past, a lot tried it in the 60s and 70s, I tried it with the punks in the 90s, it didn't work, I still don't want it to work, this concept goes against the privacy feature these cultures want to provide so it fails in the end.
Re: The Future
#8"Almost-free on-demand point-to-point public transit. Combine UberPool and self-driving cars and this is what you get. It could be actually free with ads..." I don't see how self-driving car services could be "almost free". Self-driving cars cost money to manufacture. Like all mechanical equipment, they have finite lifetimes, so their purchase cost needs to be paid back over that lifetime. They need to be maintained,…
Let's make some generous assumptions -- a taxi costs $20K, lasts 300,000 miles, gets 50 miles to the gallon and fuel costs $2.00 a gallon. (Or equivalent, electrically, I'm easy.) Then fuel is four cents a mile and depreciation is seven cents a mile for a total cost of eleven cents a mile. In the future, running an ultra-efficient electric car we can imagine the fuel price could be lower and the range before replacem…
The advertising is going to be extremely targeted too. If person is going to the shopping mall to see an optometrist then the stores at the same mall could bid to pitch to them. They would literally be showing their ads to someone who is about to be a short walk away and trump even Amazon on how quickly a product can be in the hands of the consumer: "press purchase now and we'll have it waiting for you at the front desk for pickup". Doing a late evening airport to hotel journey? Ads for takeaway food to be delivered to your room or ads for tours and events in that city. Not on the same level of annoying as audio ads for something I don't want playing while I am trying to read an article. I am sure they will figure out a way to be extremely annoying though; I can easily imagine poorly targeted ones that play automatically and so loud you can't have a conversation in the taxi.
Re: The Future
#9Earlier quoted context omitted.
Let's make some generous assumptions -- a taxi costs $20K, lasts 300,000 miles, gets 50 miles to the gallon and fuel costs $2.00 a gallon. (Or equivalent, electrically, I'm easy.) Then fuel is four cents a mile and depreciation is seven cents a mile for a total cost of eleven cents a mile. In the future, running an ultra-efficient electric car we can imagine the fuel price could be lower and the range before replacem…
This is pretty close. Benedict evans did a more accurate calculation , and got ,for electric self driving cars, 14-19 cents/mile: https://twitter.com/benedictevans/status/636684338352951297 One thing he forgot - what about shared transport - say sharing with 3 people could offer ride time relatively close to a car. That gets us to 4.5 cents/mile. That comes about to $50 a month/american-person(avg 13.5K miles/year) ,…
Sharing rides with strangers is precisely the kind of thing that I'd hope to avoid by replacing public transport with self-driving cars.
But anyway, yes, it does appear that the economics of the self-driving taxi beat the economics of the bus or the train, especially given that buses and trains generally operate at a large loss and still charge people, on average, a higher fare than what they'd pay for a self-driving taxi.
A self-driving bus that operates a route could be even cheaper, but why bother when you can hail a cab to take you straight to your destination without stops for just a few tens of cents more?
Re: The Future
#10Secondly, most companies have now realized that disruption is the way of the world, and thus most have become 'venture builders' that continuously run experiments and attempt to disrupt themselves, thus permanently remaining on top.
I'm pretty skeptical of this one, but I am curious to see how that plays out. I suspect there are some inherent, systemic rigidities that develop in large companies, that will prevent this from coming (entirely) to pass. If so, small companies / startups will continue to emerge with some technological innovation (or business model innovation) or other and "disrupt" existing models.
That said, an interesting related question would be "will be actually reach 'the end of technology' at some point?" That is, will we reach a point where we have mastered all of the technologies that can exist, given the constraints of the laws of physics? I mean, if we assume a fundamentally unchanging universe (unchanging in terms of the fundamental laws) then human / technological progress has to stop at some point, no? The question is, how far from that point are we?