Besides what the other user pointed out, there are tens of millions of people driving an hour or more every day just to get to work, and that time sink might feel a bit more bearable if you could relax and do whatever you wanted during that time rather than focus on all the obstacles around you. I don't know that the state of self-driving vehicles will be quite there in my lifetime, but some time in the future they will be, if we keep making progress on them.
You might like driving. For many, driving is stressful.
This is besides the point someone else brought up about how notoriously bad at driving humans can be, and the capacity for how much safer an automated car could be when the tech is matured.
Public transit like efficient railroad infrastructure across the US would be even nicer, but I've about given up on that for the USA. They're doing self driving cars because we sunk too much money in roadway infrastructure (sunk cost fallacy.)
> that time sink might feel a bit more bearable if you could relax and do whatever you wanted during that time rather than focus on all the obstacles around you
We could use... trains & buses. Self-driving trains and buses!
But self-driving individual cars, because they will make the time more bearable, will induce even more driving, which is the opposite of what we want.
Oh, I completely agree. This is big tech solving a problem for humans, but ignoring a larger problem for humanity.
To give the benefit of the doubt, my assumption is that they're solving it this way because the road infrastructure and market for cars already exists. You'd see big tech working on automating public transit if states actually started improving their public transit infrastructure.
You might like driving. For many, driving is stressful.
This is besides the point someone else brought up about how notoriously bad at driving humans can be, and the capacity for how much safer an automated car could be when the tech is matured.
Public transit like efficient railroad infrastructure across the US would be even nicer, but I've about given up on that for the USA. They're doing self driving cars because we sunk too much money in roadway infrastructure (sunk cost fallacy.)