It’s the other way around. Waymo may do the job exquisitely, but exquisite is also expensive. Telsa has always constrained their system to lower cost hardware. It’ll be easier for Tesla to eventually punch through than for Waymo to cut their costs to that of a Tesla robotaxi.
I reckon a fleet operator would rather pay more for better self-drive reliability. If you can't make it a million km between human interventions, or doesn't matter if you're four or low-five figures cheaper. Remember that a taxi medallion is six figures in NYC.
YC is putting through 200+ companies per batch and making a tiny investment. It’s far more efficient to swallow the occasional bad bet than to do a lot due diligence… Now the VCs that came in after… that’s another story.
This is a great point. LLMs may flood an app with more features without making it better. At the end I do the day you still need to make something people love. AI may help you build that faster if you know what do build, but it’s not going to make a bad product great.
No, cars are still very space inefficient which is a big problem in the densest cities in the world. A train carrying a thousand passengers past every three minutes is much better than the capacity of a road, especially during congestion
Driverless cars could easily boost mass transit use by efficiently handling last mile problems. Although driverless short jaunt tuktuks might be better.
Bicycles (or e-bikes if you prefer) are far more efficient than cars for this purpose. Bike-share is also really helpful here, so you don't need to have your own personal bike.
Not if you have packages and such, you really need a cargo bike or something. Weather would also play a role. I don’t see bike share as very successful, but I guess with better security and places for the bikes to hangout it could work out better.
Bike-share works extremely well here in Tokyo. I see people on the red Docomo bikes every time I go almost anywhere.
For cargo, people generally pay for a delivery service if it's something too cumbersome to carry. In large cities like this, people don't buy a month's worth of groceries all at once; they only buy as much as they can carry.
This sits in a larger field of complexity theory and complex adaptive systems. There was also some interesting work on “Artificial Life” although that research program seems to have fallen out of favor. My introduction in 1995 was the book Chaos and then Stuart Kauffman’s At Home in the Universe. Wolframs New Kind of Science was also interesting.
I could have bogged the essay down with qualifiers to address all the potential straw man objections, but that didn't seem productive. It's easy to take an uncharitable view on this, but I do explain more about GRNs later in the essay. I worked with them for 8 years, and yes, they do act like the rudimentary brains of the cell, and that's the reason this system is selected again and again by evolution.
