If the personal owner of a car isn't going to pay for liability or medical insurance associated with a vehicle then either everyone will pay for that cost through higher taxes, higher medical costs, or higher cumulative cost of vehicles.
For things like insurance, the accident-with-damage rate is more important than the fatality rate.
The number of automobile fatalities per year in the US is already so small that every dollar we spend to reduce a US road fatality returns less than a dollar in benefit.
The cost of non-fatal accidents, though is enormous - especially for continuing medical costs. So, yes, I could see the cost of insurance pressuring people into purchasing autonomous vehicles if the non-fatal crash rate drops significantly, even if the fatal crash rate remains constant or even increases a bit.
Power supply cost: $0.002/kW-hr (price of fuel and generation)
Distribution: $0.054/kW-hr
Waste Reduction: $0.004/kW-hr
Nuclear surcharge: $0.001/kW-hr
Typically industrial solar capacity is quoted at $0.035/kW-hr, so that would at most reduce the capacity and non-capacity charges by at most about $0.04. And solar has no fuel... so that would eliminate a whopping $0.002/kW-hr from my bill (fossil fuels are cheap! that is part of the problem).
Ok, so maybe batteries at $0.07/kW-hr would only increase my bill $0.03/kW-hr, but that's still a 25% increase.
My residential retail cost TOTAL (including all fees, etc) for electricity is currently only about $0.162/kW-hr. An increase of $0.07/kW-hr would be a 50% increase in my energy prices.
Yes - to go fully cashless, society would have to first put in place the infrastructure necessary to guarantee everyone can have a bankable account and the tools to access it, regardless of address or education level or whatever, and deal with age (are we going to issue infants accounts at birth so Grandma can deposit gifts?).
I am cynical that this is possible - we have enough trouble providing universal <service> as it is, let alone guaranteeing universal banking.
The marginal cost of an extra passenger on public transport is roughly 0. The cost of public transportation scales with the initial capital cost, total miles driven, and total number of starts/stops. Once you have an established route, the costs are almost constant. Perhaps cabin cleaning scales as number of riders, I dunno. Weight - well generally a fully-loaded bus has only 1/3 of the weight being passengers, so maybe there is a factor there on fuel, but it's small (that is, at most 33% of the fuel cost is passenger-based; probably far less).
If I was setting up public transport, I really would just make it fully paid by taxes and never charge a ticket fee. Heck there's probably even slight environmental benefit by eliminating ticket-check delays while stopped: both in reducing idle time of the bus (say) itself, and because of reduced ancillary traffic hold-up by having shorter stop times. Less plastic waste by eliminating the need to print cards / tickets. Avoiding payment processing overhead.
I'll give you unknown actual value to the customer and no competing storefronts, but not zero overhead (servers and managing payment isn't free by a long shot).
But the 30% / 15% or whatever Apple or Steam or whoever charges the publisher isn't based on their cost, or even the value to the customer - it's based on the value to the person wanting to sell. That's what value pricing means.
If I was a content creator 5 years ago and my choices were to hire a place to press media and stock shelves, roll my own sales site including setting up merchant agreements, or just pay Apple or Steam 30% of the sale price, it's a no-brainer to go for the 30%.
Today it's a bit different - there are enough alternative distribution mechanisms that 30% is no longer the no-question deal. Bigger companies like Netflix can now afford the infrastructure at a lower cost, and alternative storefronts can now offer lower rates too. Even talking about the "Apple monopoly" I think is a red herring - nobody, even with all the lock-in efforts, truly has that much loyalty to not jump ship to other ecosystems (consider the recent revenue stuff in the press).
But if you're an indie game developer - tell me how you're going to get better total revenue than Apple or Steam or Google Play or whatever even with their 30% take. On how many storefronts do you want to have to ensure your product is up to date?
You must really hate buying anything from a retail store then. Typical markup in a retail store is "50%" - which is phrased to be purposely misleading. Markup in retail is "the percent of the retail price which is the markup." So retail markup is to double the retailer's cost.
30% originally was therefore a really good deal - a producer getting 70% of sale price rather than 50% is much better than putting stuff on a retail shelf.
The market is currently in another price discovery stage, where companies are now able to put in place their own infrastructure or be able to support lower rates than 30%. Trying to vilify companies offering storefronts for using value pricing (which is what every sales organization ever does if they want to stay profitable) is disingenuous.
people who sell are getting a great return on an investment.
Only if they are moving somewhere else with even lower housing prices. If you live in an area where your house appreciated 50%...all the other houses are likely to have also appreciated by 50%. So all that's happened locally is that the price of home ownership has increased.
Removing responsibility for driving functions comes with the cost of lost freedom of the driving functions. You are now at the mercy of those who decided how things should function, rather than your own choices.
It doesn't even matter if the automatic choices are statistically better (e.g., lower crash rates, more efficient driving, etc.); they still impose a loss of freedom.
Which is better - safer but less free, or more free but less safe? I suppose society at large will make an aggregate decision there, but I'm guessing it will be an emergent choice rather than an informed one.
As an aside - those crash statistics aren't really comparable because there is inherent selection bias among the drivers. The driver population of Teslas is likely to be a lower-risk population than other vehicles in the first place. You also have to factor in that you're comparing a small number of vehicle models against all other vehicle models. What happens if you compare against other brands individually? Try this report for instance - there are 9 non-Teslas out there with zero deaths per million passenger miles (and several others with more than 100!). Interestingly it is "economy" cars that have higher rates than expensive cars - which supports my theory that the demographic is likely an important factor, not just the vehicle.
Even if there is no "labor" there are still services that can be performed by humans,
Umm... "services performed by humans" is the definition of "labor".
That said - yes, even in a "robot economy" there will still be some demand for human labor (call it "services" if you like). It's a question of scale - in a robot economy, there will not be enough demand for those services go maintain the type of economy we currently have. It's the exact situation of "where will the jobs come from?" You might have knowledge in your head you can sell to others - but the tens of millions of "service economy" laborers today almost assuredly won't. Put a slightly different way: just because you want to offer services, doesn't mean anyone will actually pay you for them.
Also - knowledge is not a means of production. Means of production in the economic sense is agriculture or manufacturing. Knowledge lets you know how to use or create means of production, or maybe trade production around in a way that gives someone a profit*, but it isn't a means of production itself - an important distinction.
*Note there are two types of profit in an economy. There are "accounting" profits, like some stock trader makes a lot of money by buying low and selling high. Then there are "real" profits, which is where an investment in labor and capital increases real productivity (goods and services per unit labor or input material - as opposed to accounting productivity, which is money per unit labor or input material).
Our economic system is based on the concept that a human who wants to work can find a job.
Which economic system is that? I can't think of any economic system based on that premise in all of history. People who want jobs but don't have them have been around for as long as there has been a concept of a "job."
The situation full automation brings into light is that the concept of ownership and the rights to profits of use of capital is breaking down. If human labor is not required to make productive use of capital, then labor cannot be the source of wage. The social upheaval will be because currently only money can be used to gain ownership of capital, and if you have no capital and nobody will give you money for labor, there is no longer a mechanism to gain capital.
This means either forcing a (larger) portion of the productive use of capital distributed to more non-owners (let alone employees!), or reducing the concept of private ownership of capital. Either of those would be a tenuous transition, if for no other reason that people are not used to anything else.
26262 is only functional safety though - it only covers "if some electronic part breaks, can the vehicle be made safe," and "have best processes to eliminate systematic errors been followed?"
Full autonomous driving has all those pitfalls of random hardware failure and systematic design errors, plus it has SOTIF - Safety of the Intended Function - concerns. Basically, are things safe (enough)when parts are not broken and if you had zero software bugs?
SOTIF is really hard, and we don't have time-test processes for it. Consider this: 26262 is based on around 50 years of aerospace and other industrial automation experience. We don't have that for SOTIF.
And yes, those that say ADAS level 5 is harder than aviation autopilot are correct: autopilot is essentially route following and very limited decision making in a highly controlled environment (autoland, for instance, is in a controlled airport with ILS...) it is not decision making and situational awareness in an uncontrolled environment which ADAS level 5 implies.
Sad times when readers cannot detect sarcasm without it being made explicit...
My personal view is that we should have a wealth-based income tax, not a consumption, income, VAT, or property tax. What I mean by that is income is taxed, but at a rate determined by total asset value owned, not by the income rate. So if you have property but no income, you have no tax (so you don't "lose your house" if you have no income and can't pay property tax); if you have no property but suddenly have income, no tax (so you can afford to buy property).
There are implementation details, of course, like the pesky definitions of how you compute property value, what tax rates to assign, and how to prevent "hiding" property ownership like one company owning the property and the other having the income but not owning anything.
Why would a tariff make a good no longer available at all? This is an honest question - if consumers of goods to which a tariff apply are willing to pay the higher cost to have it imported, why would there be a shortage? If there are shortages due to an imposed tariff, what causes the shortage? Is the assumption that the reduction in demand for affected goods will cause the foreign suppliers to simply close up shop?
Yes, tariffs are a tax. But they are a consumption tax - consumers only pay them if they buy the affected products. I thought we were all for consumption taxes instead of income taxes?
That said - "local" companies that cannot afford to stay in business due to a tariff on some of their material inputs means they are producing a good with a very elastic demand curve and these businesses would have had trouble if there was an input price shock due to any cause, not just a tariff. So the tariff in this case weeds out economically tenuous businesses. I don't have a metric for determining if that is good or bad.
Close but not quite - it's not the students that need to do the ROI, it's the people offering the loans. College loans really should be issued on the basis of ability to pay it off -and they are not.
This will mean that medical, engineering, and other "high-value trade" students will get loans and other students will not - because as a society we are not willing to pay for those "other" degrees.
If we want to have some portion of the population having the intangibly-beneficial professions (which is not a bad thing actually), then the solution is to give grants or scholarships, not loans.
The thing people have wrong about software is that it's not the copy of the executable that is the scarce and valuable resources - it's the programmers (although, decreasingly so; actual coding is indeed becoming a commodity) and, more importantly, the expertise of knowing what kind of software to make and the knowledge of how to best use that software.
There is still supply and demand in an "information economy" - it's just that people tend to misidentify the thing that is scarce.
Demonizing individuals doesn't help - most individuals in the US are not "the biggest cause" because they choose to be - they just happened to be born into an area with a huge industrial base which is mostly early-industrialization, not rebuilt after wars, so has a high CO2 output.
Asking people to reduce their standard of living is never a popular proposition - you have to give them a way to maintain or increase their standard of living simultaneously with reducing emissions.
The cries to "go vegetarian" or "stop driving" or "just turn off your AC" cause people to stonewall; it's a psychological reality that needs to be considered instead of just berating everyone.
Don't forget to include refueling time. That's going to be a major thing preventing commercial aviation going full electric for a while. Even if you need 1/3 the stored electrical energy compared to hydrocarbon due to higher on-ship conversion energy, the "recharge" time of hydrocarbon fuel is orders of magnitude faster than electrical recharging.
Take something like a small CRJ200 commuter jet, with a fuel capacity of just about 6500kg of jet fuel. At about 12 kW-hr/kg, that's (rounding) 78,00 kW-hr stored energy. Dividing by 3, that's still about 26,000 kW-hr. At a megawatt electrical charging rate, that would take over 24 hours to refuel. Even if that's off by a factor of 2 - you're still looking at over 10 hours with a megawatt charging system.
Yeah, it's closer to this. Americans generally don't care if Chinese or Saudis or Turks or Venezuelans have enough wealth to buy all the kind of luxury goods we buy.
What people care about is being made unemployed or being employed at a lower standard of living than they currently enjoy.
As far as carbon taxes go you can pay now to help mitigate the effects of global warming and the climate change it causes or you can pay later for the massive amount of adaption that will have to take place for adjusting to the effects. It's possible the effects could get bad enough to cause the collapse of our global civilization. How much would that cost you?
This is the core of the debate on global warming I think. Nobody knows exactly how much it will cost in the future, as it is a probabilistic cost. The costs today are real costs.
It also doesn't help that countries are all blaming each other instead of working together. Telling someone they are the problem generally causes them to stonewall. Give people good incentive - concrete incentive - to change, not threats or belittling comments... that's a better approach.
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If the personal owner of a car isn't going to pay for liability or medical insurance associated with a vehicle then either everyone will pay for that cost through higher taxes, higher medical costs, or higher cumulative cost of vehicles.
For things like insurance, the accident-with-damage rate is more important than the fatality rate.
The number of automobile fatalities per year in the US is already so small that every dollar we spend to reduce a US road fatality returns less than a dollar in benefit.
The cost of non-fatal accidents, though is enormous - especially for continuing medical costs. So, yes, I could see the cost of insurance pressuring people into purchasing autonomous vehicles if the non-fatal crash rate drops significantly, even if the fatal crash rate remains constant or even increases a bit.
My actual costs:
Typically industrial solar capacity is quoted at $0.035/kW-hr, so that would at most reduce the capacity and non-capacity charges by at most about $0.04. And solar has no fuel... so that would eliminate a whopping $0.002/kW-hr from my bill (fossil fuels are cheap! that is part of the problem).
Ok, so maybe batteries at $0.07/kW-hr would only increase my bill $0.03/kW-hr, but that's still a 25% increase.
My residential retail cost TOTAL (including all fees, etc) for electricity is currently only about $0.162/kW-hr. An increase of $0.07/kW-hr would be a 50% increase in my energy prices.
Yes - to go fully cashless, society would have to first put in place the infrastructure necessary to guarantee everyone can have a bankable account and the tools to access it, regardless of address or education level or whatever, and deal with age (are we going to issue infants accounts at birth so Grandma can deposit gifts?).
I am cynical that this is possible - we have enough trouble providing universal <service> as it is, let alone guaranteeing universal banking.
$1000 a day for medication isn't an insurance problem, it's an FDA and/or USPTO problem.
The marginal cost of an extra passenger on public transport is roughly 0. The cost of public transportation scales with the initial capital cost, total miles driven, and total number of starts/stops. Once you have an established route, the costs are almost constant. Perhaps cabin cleaning scales as number of riders, I dunno. Weight - well generally a fully-loaded bus has only 1/3 of the weight being passengers, so maybe there is a factor there on fuel, but it's small (that is, at most 33% of the fuel cost is passenger-based; probably far less).
If I was setting up public transport, I really would just make it fully paid by taxes and never charge a ticket fee. Heck there's probably even slight environmental benefit by eliminating ticket-check delays while stopped: both in reducing idle time of the bus (say) itself, and because of reduced ancillary traffic hold-up by having shorter stop times. Less plastic waste by eliminating the need to print cards / tickets. Avoiding payment processing overhead.
I'll give you unknown actual value to the customer and no competing storefronts, but not zero overhead (servers and managing payment isn't free by a long shot).
But the 30% / 15% or whatever Apple or Steam or whoever charges the publisher isn't based on their cost, or even the value to the customer - it's based on the value to the person wanting to sell. That's what value pricing means.
If I was a content creator 5 years ago and my choices were to hire a place to press media and stock shelves, roll my own sales site including setting up merchant agreements, or just pay Apple or Steam 30% of the sale price, it's a no-brainer to go for the 30%.
Today it's a bit different - there are enough alternative distribution mechanisms that 30% is no longer the no-question deal. Bigger companies like Netflix can now afford the infrastructure at a lower cost, and alternative storefronts can now offer lower rates too. Even talking about the "Apple monopoly" I think is a red herring - nobody, even with all the lock-in efforts, truly has that much loyalty to not jump ship to other ecosystems (consider the recent revenue stuff in the press).
But if you're an indie game developer - tell me how you're going to get better total revenue than Apple or Steam or Google Play or whatever even with their 30% take. On how many storefronts do you want to have to ensure your product is up to date?
You must really hate buying anything from a retail store then. Typical markup in a retail store is "50%" - which is phrased to be purposely misleading. Markup in retail is "the percent of the retail price which is the markup." So retail markup is to double the retailer's cost.
30% originally was therefore a really good deal - a producer getting 70% of sale price rather than 50% is much better than putting stuff on a retail shelf.
The market is currently in another price discovery stage, where companies are now able to put in place their own infrastructure or be able to support lower rates than 30%. Trying to vilify companies offering storefronts for using value pricing (which is what every sales organization ever does if they want to stay profitable) is disingenuous.
Only if they are moving somewhere else with even lower housing prices. If you live in an area where your house appreciated 50%...all the other houses are likely to have also appreciated by 50%. So all that's happened locally is that the price of home ownership has increased.
That is not a good thing.
Removing responsibility for driving functions comes with the cost of lost freedom of the driving functions. You are now at the mercy of those who decided how things should function, rather than your own choices.
It doesn't even matter if the automatic choices are statistically better (e.g., lower crash rates, more efficient driving, etc.); they still impose a loss of freedom.
Which is better - safer but less free, or more free but less safe? I suppose society at large will make an aggregate decision there, but I'm guessing it will be an emergent choice rather than an informed one.
As an aside - those crash statistics aren't really comparable because there is inherent selection bias among the drivers. The driver population of Teslas is likely to be a lower-risk population than other vehicles in the first place. You also have to factor in that you're comparing a small number of vehicle models against all other vehicle models. What happens if you compare against other brands individually? Try this report for instance - there are 9 non-Teslas out there with zero deaths per million passenger miles (and several others with more than 100!). Interestingly it is "economy" cars that have higher rates than expensive cars - which supports my theory that the demographic is likely an important factor, not just the vehicle.
Umm... "services performed by humans" is the definition of "labor".
That said - yes, even in a "robot economy" there will still be some demand for human labor (call it "services" if you like). It's a question of scale - in a robot economy, there will not be enough demand for those services go maintain the type of economy we currently have. It's the exact situation of "where will the jobs come from?" You might have knowledge in your head you can sell to others - but the tens of millions of "service economy" laborers today almost assuredly won't. Put a slightly different way: just because you want to offer services, doesn't mean anyone will actually pay you for them.
Also - knowledge is not a means of production. Means of production in the economic sense is agriculture or manufacturing. Knowledge lets you know how to use or create means of production, or maybe trade production around in a way that gives someone a profit*, but it isn't a means of production itself - an important distinction.
*Note there are two types of profit in an economy. There are "accounting" profits, like some stock trader makes a lot of money by buying low and selling high. Then there are "real" profits, which is where an investment in labor and capital increases real productivity (goods and services per unit labor or input material - as opposed to accounting productivity, which is money per unit labor or input material).
Which economic system is that? I can't think of any economic system based on that premise in all of history. People who want jobs but don't have them have been around for as long as there has been a concept of a "job."
The situation full automation brings into light is that the concept of ownership and the rights to profits of use of capital is breaking down. If human labor is not required to make productive use of capital, then labor cannot be the source of wage. The social upheaval will be because currently only money can be used to gain ownership of capital, and if you have no capital and nobody will give you money for labor, there is no longer a mechanism to gain capital.
This means either forcing a (larger) portion of the productive use of capital distributed to more non-owners (let alone employees!), or reducing the concept of private ownership of capital. Either of those would be a tenuous transition, if for no other reason that people are not used to anything else.
26262 is only functional safety though - it only covers "if some electronic part breaks, can the vehicle be made safe," and "have best processes to eliminate systematic errors been followed?"
Full autonomous driving has all those pitfalls of random hardware failure and systematic design errors, plus it has SOTIF - Safety of the Intended Function - concerns. Basically, are things safe (enough)when parts are not broken and if you had zero software bugs?
SOTIF is really hard, and we don't have time-test processes for it. Consider this: 26262 is based on around 50 years of aerospace and other industrial automation experience. We don't have that for SOTIF.
And yes, those that say ADAS level 5 is harder than aviation autopilot are correct: autopilot is essentially route following and very limited decision making in a highly controlled environment (autoland, for instance, is in a controlled airport with ILS...) it is not decision making and situational awareness in an uncontrolled environment which ADAS level 5 implies.
Sad times when readers cannot detect sarcasm without it being made explicit...
My personal view is that we should have a wealth-based income tax, not a consumption, income, VAT, or property tax. What I mean by that is income is taxed, but at a rate determined by total asset value owned, not by the income rate. So if you have property but no income, you have no tax (so you don't "lose your house" if you have no income and can't pay property tax); if you have no property but suddenly have income, no tax (so you can afford to buy property).
There are implementation details, of course, like the pesky definitions of how you compute property value, what tax rates to assign, and how to prevent "hiding" property ownership like one company owning the property and the other having the income but not owning anything.
Why would a tariff make a good no longer available at all? This is an honest question - if consumers of goods to which a tariff apply are willing to pay the higher cost to have it imported, why would there be a shortage? If there are shortages due to an imposed tariff, what causes the shortage? Is the assumption that the reduction in demand for affected goods will cause the foreign suppliers to simply close up shop?
Yes, tariffs are a tax. But they are a consumption tax - consumers only pay them if they buy the affected products. I thought we were all for consumption taxes instead of income taxes?
That said - "local" companies that cannot afford to stay in business due to a tariff on some of their material inputs means they are producing a good with a very elastic demand curve and these businesses would have had trouble if there was an input price shock due to any cause, not just a tariff. So the tariff in this case weeds out economically tenuous businesses. I don't have a metric for determining if that is good or bad.
Close but not quite - it's not the students that need to do the ROI, it's the people offering the loans. College loans really should be issued on the basis of ability to pay it off -and they are not.
This will mean that medical, engineering, and other "high-value trade" students will get loans and other students will not - because as a society we are not willing to pay for those "other" degrees.
If we want to have some portion of the population having the intangibly-beneficial professions (which is not a bad thing actually), then the solution is to give grants or scholarships, not loans.
The thing people have wrong about software is that it's not the copy of the executable that is the scarce and valuable resources - it's the programmers (although, decreasingly so; actual coding is indeed becoming a commodity) and, more importantly, the expertise of knowing what kind of software to make and the knowledge of how to best use that software.
There is still supply and demand in an "information economy" - it's just that people tend to misidentify the thing that is scarce.
Demonizing individuals doesn't help - most individuals in the US are not "the biggest cause" because they choose to be - they just happened to be born into an area with a huge industrial base which is mostly early-industrialization, not rebuilt after wars, so has a high CO2 output.
Asking people to reduce their standard of living is never a popular proposition - you have to give them a way to maintain or increase their standard of living simultaneously with reducing emissions.
The cries to "go vegetarian" or "stop driving" or "just turn off your AC" cause people to stonewall; it's a psychological reality that needs to be considered instead of just berating everyone.
Eh, the biggest loss in my mind is still MagSafe... that was a truly useful connector.
Don't forget to include refueling time. That's going to be a major thing preventing commercial aviation going full electric for a while. Even if you need 1/3 the stored electrical energy compared to hydrocarbon due to higher on-ship conversion energy, the "recharge" time of hydrocarbon fuel is orders of magnitude faster than electrical recharging.
Take something like a small CRJ200 commuter jet, with a fuel capacity of just about 6500kg of jet fuel. At about 12 kW-hr/kg, that's (rounding) 78,00 kW-hr stored energy. Dividing by 3, that's still about 26,000 kW-hr. At a megawatt electrical charging rate, that would take over 24 hours to refuel. Even if that's off by a factor of 2 - you're still looking at over 10 hours with a megawatt charging system.
Yeah, it's closer to this. Americans generally don't care if Chinese or Saudis or Turks or Venezuelans have enough wealth to buy all the kind of luxury goods we buy.
What people care about is being made unemployed or being employed at a lower standard of living than they currently enjoy.
This is the core of the debate on global warming I think. Nobody knows exactly how much it will cost in the future, as it is a probabilistic cost. The costs today are real costs.
It also doesn't help that countries are all blaming each other instead of working together. Telling someone they are the problem generally causes them to stonewall. Give people good incentive - concrete incentive - to change, not threats or belittling comments... that's a better approach.
IP law