I had an epiphany about self driving recently late at night on the streets of San Francisco. It was a somewhat deserted part of town, and the roads were empty. There was a lone Cruise car chugging along and constantly stopping at red lights. The signals were so badly optimized that the car would be the only one waiting at a completely empty intersection for minutes at a time, only to be stopped again at the next one, and the one after that. A single mile of empty road must have taken this car 15+ minutes to traverse. All the top engineering, sensors and ML algorithms in the world and the car was still at the mercy of a basic city planning failure.
We have been conditioned to think of autonomous driving as the answer to the traffic nightmares in every city, but tech will never ever be able to solve a social problem (just like how building a wider road will never ease congestion). Had even a fraction of the hundreds of billions of dollars that have been poured into self driving so far been spent towards, say, improving sidewalk quality, making traffic lights smarter, putting sensors along roads, coming up with a standard communication protocol for these sensors, building out public transit, improving urban planning etc. over the last 15 years, we would all be living better lives today. But a VC would rather set that money on fire to have a small chance at a 100x return.
We have been conditioned to think of autonomous driving as the answer to the traffic nightmares in every city, but tech will never ever be able to solve a social problem (just like how building a wider road will never ease congestion). Had even a fraction of the hundreds of billions of dollars that have been poured into self driving so far been spent towards, say, improving sidewalk quality, making traffic lights smarter, putting sensors along roads, coming up with a standard communication protocol for these sensors, building out public transit, improving urban planning etc. over the last 15 years, we would all be living better lives today. But a VC would rather set that money on fire to have a small chance at a 100x return.