The end of public transportation. The future of public transportation.

I'm not actually seeing why this post is purely an instance of conjunctive fallacy. A lot of the details he describes are consequences of cars being autonomous or indirect effects of this. And that's not to say there are no errors here, just that I don't think it's merely a list of statements A,B,C,etc with no causal relationship.

Most status symbols I have known are not customized. I don't see why status symbols and luxury cars wouldn't be subject to the same economic pressures to lease.

A case could be made for ownership when the car owner has extremely specific needs. Hmm, which user cases does that apply to? I can kind of imagine use cases where a specialist car would be rare enough that it would be inconvenient to share it, I find it hard to think of a scenario where a car cannot be shared. Generally that's the role of static buildings.

I hope that in these cases, it will be easy for an end-user to connect a car they own to a fleet- and that the cars wont be prohibitively expensive to own. This is one of the reasons we need public coordination protocols, and a competitive manufacturing industry.

Could you be more specific?

If this is somehow avoided, then the interiors of the shared vehicles will literally be smeared with shit.

The system would work like this: If a car arrives and a user finds it's smeared with shit, they report it, it goes into the depot for a check. Since the record tells us how long they were with the car, we know it wasn't them who applied the shit[1]. We infer that it was the person before them. We get a license to decrypt their name and address. We fine them. I don't know why you would think this was unsolvable.

[1]: it's possible a person could, in the two seconds after opening the door of a clean car, throw in a bucket of shit, close the door, then report the damage. People don't generally do that.

Hmm. It occurs to me that this behaviour looks a lot like someone using the cars as a garbage can, which some assholes might legitimately want to do. Someone would have to be a sociopath to realize that they could do this and get away with it. It would be rare. If they're using it for regular trash disposal, that could probably be proven in court. Look at them, look at the person they're accusing. You can probably figure out which one is the motherfucker pretty easily in most cases. The incentive to do this isn't there.

If they can, are pedestrians biologically capable of avoiding massive stress from being "woven through" by large fast-moving objects?

Are people biologically capable of sitting in a theatre in front of an image of an oncoming train? I think for anyone with mental fluidity, it will be hard to avoid coming to relate to cars... sort of in a similar way to how we relate to cattle. A single cow could kill you. They're enormous, heavy, they run faster than you. But they're afraid of you. They refuse to touch you.

There's still a point there, though. In many cities, a lot of people will want ot be on the road. That will be annoying. See any intersection crossing in a major city, it gets crowded. I think retaining the same laws for pedestrians might be the best solution... traditional pedestrian crossings do slow down urban traffic, yeah? But are they the bottleneck?

I can't work with this resignation to the code not being public. That would be an awful awful outcome. The cars wouldn't be able to coordinate, they'd just end up having to drive mostly like humans. It would be hard to guarantee public safety. There would be huge political pressure for the code to be public. It might not amount to anything in america (though even that claim seems diliriously cynical to me), but elsewhere, it would amount to plenty, and once, EG, Germany did it, the pressure to copy it would be overwhelming. It wouldn't be hard to do, because it's an open system.

ad hellscape

I don't believe these are really possible. Advertising garners the advertiser very little value per-user. It economically cannot be netting the advertiser service so much that you couldn't just pay them a nominal fee to have them stop advertising you if it was bothering you. All that's needed is a good, low-friction payment platform. We don't have one, right now, so we still see ad-funding everywhere. If BAT takes off, it'll end. Small donations will more profitable than advertising and any user with any taste will prefer paying 4 dollars a month (not per service, distributed between all services) over seeing ads.

The poor, at least under complete information, would not need to pay as much to offset the value of advertising to them, because advertising to them is not as profitable.

And if some way were found to increase the profitability of advertising, to make it more likely to change your behavior... the only way to do that to you is to make the information seem useful to you, and unless you've abdicated from faith in talking and critical reason, that seeming can only be sufficed by making it actually useful to you. This outcome could not be described as a hellscape. That would be an efficient information routing system and it would be extremely helpful.

The only remaining case for awful advertising that I can see just collapses to a case for arbitrary extortion... which is just... okay you don't believe there will be open code. Well. Fight. You've seen what will result from a closed marketplace. Fight it.