Self-driving AI attracts its fair share of nay-sayers. It’s typical to hear people say the technology is decades away, but the facts don’t back up these claims.
In fact, the opposite seems true - its widespread adoption is just around the corner. Here’s some data that seems to back that up. China is selling millions of EVs to the rest of the world, and in 2023 became the world’s biggest car exporter. It’s sobering to think about the world when it is selling millions of self-driving cars - does each one of these equal a job loss for a human?
This gets complicated too. Billionaires are not literally sitting on top of a giant pile of a billion dollars’ worth of goods and services that nobody else is allowed to make use of. Most of their wealth is in the form of shares of ownership of things that would be chugging along much the same as if the ownership was split up among lots and lots of less-wealthy people. It doesn’t generally make a huge difference to Amazon that it is owned in large part by Jeff Bezos rather than divided up among a million people.
That’s not to say that “trickle down” theory is correct - quite to the contrary, it’s been proven to be bunk repeatedly. But the problem of concentration of wealth among a few hands is IMO a separate issue from the issue of increasing economic efficiency. You can still get taxi monopolies whether the taxis are operated by human drivers or by robots.
Ideally what should happen if cabbies get replaced by cheaper robotaxis is that the price of taxi rides should go down, which would benefit society as a whole by letting everyday people ride taxis more or use the money they save on taxi rides for other things. The cabbies who lose their jobs suffer in the short term, sure, but that’s counterbalanced by the benefit that all the non-cabbies would see. The key to making sure that this happens is to ensure that competition remains a thing - if there are a bunch of independent taxi companies vying for customers then they’re more likely to pass those savings along rather than simply pocketing the excess profit.
They are though. Yes their wealth isn’t sitting on money in the bank. However they are able to leverage that valuation off them. They can take credit against their stock and use that at low interest. So in fact they are creating inflation. They don’t bring any wealth into the system but they magic money out of thin air. Majority of their valuation isn’t correct it’s purely speculation