Books

This article says virtually nothing, giving examples of how automated systems have human backups (no shit) and mostly focusing on two fiction novels where those backup solutions are hidden to the public. It doesn't really make any kind of a statement about how automated transportation solutions are inherently bad, it just pretends that having a human operator backing up the system somehow changes or reduces the value of it, and insinuates that we shouldn't make any kind of attempt at technological innovation because fiction novelists were able to show how it could look dystopian if you construct the narrative in such a way as to make that happen. As if black mirror hasn't already illustrated that it's possible to do that with virtually any technology.

The conceptually simple possibility that better transit options could be provided by government, as a collective undertaking for the public good—and that this might be preferable to developing a radically new technology—is treated as an obvious non-starter.

Ah, here we go. The whole article could have just been this one sentence, as it's the obvious focus of the message.

1. The government doesn't do anything. When it has a need for say... Construction of a new transportation system, they hire a private company that does such a thing and uses taxpayer money to accomplish this. We refer to it as "public" due to the source of the funding being from the taxpayer, but the government doesn't usually do that work themselves, they simply contract it out.

2. Once more with this idea that alternatives to vehicles are somehow "simple" or "preferable" to developing new technology, as if that's ever a question someone asks when they try and create something for the consumer. "Does this fulfill a need that the government could do for us instead?" Absolute nonsense. Refer to point #1, all government projects are just private industry operating on taxpayer money. Even if you asked the government to accomplish this task, there's no telling what the solution would be. It could be that it's cheaper to develop self driving cars than it is to construct a national high speed rail network, or alter city design to accommodate a light rail system where it wasn't included initially.

3. No one asks if developing any given technology is good/bad, we just do it and then let society decide if it has value or not. To ask why we attempted to create self driving cars instead of something else is to completely misunderstand how and why new technology gets created in the first place. We do it because we can, and because there's an obvious use-case.