A critical issue is that such vehicles will displace millions of people who now earn a living driving.
More and more jobs, at higher and higher required intelligence levels, are being filled by computers instead of people. Cost and reliability are enormously better.
But what are we to do with the millions of people who are displaced? Up till now, the Luddites have been generally proven wrong. But there is no scientific law that this will always be the case.
The big question facing our society, and one almost nobody mentions, is what do we do with redundant people. Those people for whom there is no economic demand. Their number is increasing, as is the rate of this increase. Extrapolate that out a few years and it becomes frightening.
American Plains Indians were free and proud peoples till confined to reservations. By any rational standard they are much better off economically now than when they were nomadic. (Nomads, by definition, own only the stuff they can carry on horseback, which isn’t much.)
But the free Indians had a purpose and role in life they don’t have now, so alcoholism, drugs and despair dominate many of the reservations. No purpose, no roles, no self-respect. Same in the underclasses of USA and UK. Nobody is starving, but social pathologies run amok.
What do we do with the people who have no role in society?
“American Plains Indians were free and proud peoples till confined to reservations. By any rational standard they are much better off economically now than when they were nomadic. (Nomads, by definition, own only the stuff they can carry on horseback, which isn’t much.)
But the free Indians had a purpose and role in life they don’t have now, so alcoholism, drugs and despair dominate many of the reservations. No purpose, no roles, no self-respect. Same in the underclasses of USA and UK. Nobody is starving, but social pathologies run amok.”
Hahaha! Go back to Berkeley with that story.
The American Plains Indians (read Commanche) were like a Biker Gang in an area with no law enforcement, killing every man or beast that gave them pleasure and subjugating anyone who could be useful to them including their own women.
They were called “savages” for a reason.
And, no they are not better off today on reservations than they were in say 1600 when they had what probably seemed like an endless supply of food, populations of other Indians to kill rape and enslave and no one to tell them no. American Plains Indians were a people who worshiped spooks, feathers and ghosts. Not a gentle bunch of folks, they killed each other for no good reason (ask an Apache about a Commanche) and not a people one would want to know.