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PaperclipPerfector  2d ago (text post)   13539 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 11, 2024

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This video popped up in my feed and I hated it. It's not wholly bad, but NJB is arguing in bad faith, using the good old Gish Gallop to overwhelm the viewer. Here's how I would structure a movie about self-driving cars:

  1. Adding an auto-pilot to your own car will not change the cities much, so it's not really a qualitative change
  2. To replace private car ownership with a shared pool of autonomous cars, they have to be cheap, safe, fast, clean and ubiquitous. We'll examine the best-case outcome later, but here's why reaching it is a tall order:
    • it's hard to make them cheap: blah
    • it's hard to make them safe and fast: blah
    • it's hard to keep them clean: blah
    • it's hard to make the ubiquitous: blah
  3. But let's imagine autonomous cars are cheap, safe, fast, clean and ubiquitous. How will our cities be reshaped by them?
    • since cars drive at inhuman speeds, they need a grade-separated road network that excludes pedestrians and drivers
    • since they are ubiquitous, this road network has to reach all destinations to be safe
    • since they are cheap, this road network can't be built underground and will need to be based on the existing road network
    • etc.

Not Just Bikes's proposed solution is to completely ban anything related to cars from city centers

So it seems that they are effectively "Just Bikes" instead of "Not Just Bikes", right?

I would guess they’re into light rail and even buses.

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