Comment by WhyNotHugo 3 days ago
Replacing 100% of cars with self-driving taxis are definitely the future. In this context:
Corporate owned for-profit self-driving cars are the mark of a dystopian.
Publicly-owned or non-profit self-driving cars are the mark of a utopia.
Obviously the opposite. Competition keeps prices low and quality high.
"Publicly-owned" would be expensive and low quality, and would make the people running the operation filthy rich. Non-profit would mean that whoever is running it would increase their salaries until there's no profit. There would be no reason to lower prices or increase quality, if competition is non-existent.
> "Publicly-owned" would be expensive and low quality, and would make the people running the operation filthy rich.
By publicly owned, I mean “owned by the public”, not “owned by a publicly traded company” (which is, ironically, private property). You’re thinking the latter, which counts as corporate-owned.
I used a bad choice of words. In most of the world “public owned” means the former, whereas in the US it means the latter. The exact opposite, ironically.
No, I really did mean "owned by the public". Which means that the company is actually 100% owned by the state and they would have a monopoly, assuming that you'd want to ban commercial operators. This is the usual interpretation of "public ownership".
This would be extremely bad compared to a situation where there's a dozen of companies competing in the same market.
I'm not sure I see why. If hailing a publicly-operated waymo equivalent is as convenient as going to the DMV or making a withdrawal from a treasury direct account, I don't think anyone is ever going to use it. From my perspective, waymo is the private sector solving a problem that was largely created by the government (zoning → lack of density → needing to drive everywhere).