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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   2928 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for July 12, 2026

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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What are some of your predictions for the five years, and why do you think you're going to be right?

Hard mode engaged

  1. No politics
  2. No war
  3. No AI
  4. No immigration

I'm confident that low waisted jeans are going to make a raging comeback in the next couple of years. Not only is the cyclical nature of fashion heading in that direction, but the prevalence of GLP-1 products and will negate the unspoken reason that high-waisted mom jeans got popular.

I think self-driving cars will become a massive new culture war battleground. Industries that stand to benefit from human drivers (e.g. taxi drivers, Uber drivers etc.) will be relentlessly pushing every story they can find about how dangerous self-driving cars are, and we will see "scientific" "studies" with the headline finding that self-driving cars actually get into more accidents than human-driven cars per mile driven (and then you dig into it and you find that the severity of the accidents in the former case is vastly lower than in the latter). Meanwhile, Waymo et al. (along with car insurance providers) will be relentlessly touting the safety of their own vehicles and pushing stories about other kinds of dangers associated with human drivers (e.g. expect to see a lot of stories about women getting raped or sexually harassed by Uber drivers).

Eventually some city will experiment by rolling out self-driving taxis and refusing to issue any new taxi licenses for human drivers. This city will have a vastly reduced rate of automobile deaths and insurance payouts compared to peer cities, and the battleground will be quietly ceded in self-driving cars' favour.

along with car insurance providers

It's not fully clear to me that self driving cars are a net benefit to the car insurance industry.

It probably is a net benefit at some point in time to insurers, if it isn't already true. Humans are only getting lower IQ in western countries, and smartphone distraction makes driving worse.

Self driving cars can get slowly better with time due to better AI or programming.

But that's why I'm not sure it's a net benefit: insurance provides coverage against risk, if the risk is lowered, the market shrinks. Also, it moves ownership and liability from individuals to companies (ride-sharers, whoever is responsible for the self-driving software) who are more sophisticated and solvent, and have better negotiating power for rates, or might forego insurance altogether (via self insurance).

I would say we don’t have this self driving car pushback from the groups you speak. A big reason is that no one views themselves as a member of the uber driver union except maybe some semi-legal immigrants. No one views it as a career versus something they just do for money which absolute kills the ability to unionize. Taxi-cabs had medallion investments which 10k or so people viewed as a huge asset to protect and gave them somewhat of a union.

we will see "scientific" "studies" with the headline finding that self-driving cars actually get into more accidents than human-driven cars per mile driven (and then you dig into it and you find that the severity of the accidents in the former case is vastly lower than in the latter)

100% this, and the way they measure this will be the number of incident reports available in some database, where self-driving cars automatically and electronically send a report every time they bump someone even if there is no visible damage, including someone opening their car door into another car parked next to the, while human driven cars only count if there is a police report or insurance claim.

I very nearly took a job with a self driving car startup a decade ago. After seeing a little about how the sausage was made, I've been happy to live so far out in the sticks that it'll be decades before self driving gets any traction.

Tell me more about this?

The NDA has expired, so what the hell.

The startup in question was heavily funded by a consortium of automakers. Unlike some of the other shops, their plan was to heavily geo fence their operating area and build models for individual cities. They also freely admitted during the interviews that this was never going to work well enough to work on its own, and the bulk of it was actually going to operate via regular nudges from a call center in the Philippines. They wanted to hire me to write the software for that part of the stack.

Some people here are probably going to reflexively say "well that's not a big deal - Waymo has a human fallback too*, but that's not what they were planning. The actual plan was to regularly have call center workers provide feedback and instruction during live rides "until the ML team can catch up". They figured that they could fake it until they made it, and everything would just work out in the meantime.

Jesus. Did they take the playbook straight from Amazon Go? I'm surprised the NDA wasn't longer.

It will probably be very easy on a long-enough timescale to mostly eliminate driving. Your kids won’t want to learn. Governments will make licensure increasingly onerous. The economics will lead to many people selling their cars and giving up driving altogether. In certain places.

There will also be a geographical and class component here too. Self-driving cars that work well for urban commuters will not reliably serve rural folk with big trucks and cargo towed up on the back. Imagine the city folk who control all the laws trying to make it difficult for move your RV or boat between your house and your cabin. I expect there will be a lot of that.

I'm uninformed about youths these days. How do young men pick up women and go on a date in non-urban areas if not with a car they drive? Call an uber for a multiple pickup? Maybe the uber driver is like a third wheel?

I see. In my time, the girls who met me at a location instead of me picking them up weren't seriously interested in me. Things are different now I suppose. I feel that if the guy picks the girl up the start of the relationship it just feels more normal/correct, it's a sign of female interest and trust in the guy with her physical safety. How times change.

Imagine the city folk who control all the laws trying to make it difficult for move your RV or boat between your house and your cabin. I expect there will be a lot of that.

From the rural perspective, it's all the "city folk" (well, suburbanites anyway) who actually have RVs and boats they transport between the house and the cabin. If anything, it'll be city folk mandating regulations forcing rural communities to spend even more money accommodating them while pricing the locals out even further.

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