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The Members of the Moonshots Podcast Make the Case for Self-Driving Cars . . . See if you agree . . .

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Peter: I'm going to move us to the future of transportation. And this next story really pisses me off. So Paul Graham, founder of Y Combinator, put out the following tweet. Quote, trial lawyers are lobbying against self-driving cars because they're too safe. They need people to be killed and injured so they can have material for lawsuits. Just sit down with that one for a minute. Right. Insane. So Graham cites a report that the American Association of Justice, which is the trial lawyers lobby, has been the prominent opponent to autonomous vehicle legislation. Insane. Here are the numbers, guys. So 6.2 million motor vehicle crashes per year. 17,000 a day. 2.4 million people are injured annually, and there are 40,000 traffic deaths per year. 108 per day. The safety data from Waymo and Tesla is incredible, right? The data is very clear. Over, you know, tens of millions. Well, now probably around 15 million miles, that these vehicles are on the order of 8 to 10 times safer per mile than the, you know, two ton vehicle being driven by a 16 year old on a learner's permit.

Speaker 2: So we're 90 or.

Peter: 90 year old, right? So the whole personal injury legal industry has a financial incentive to slow down technology, whose entire purpose is to save people's lives. And this just is insane. Saleem, over to.

Speaker 2: You, buddy.

Saleem: Yeah, yeah. I've said a bunch of this stuff on the podcast, a podcast before, but it's worth repeating some of this. Uh, in 2011, BlackBerry had a three day data outage around the world and the accident when nobody could send BlackBerry messages. And the accident rate dropped 40% in those three days. So people should not be driving with terrible control systems for two ton cars. I actually want to be slightly defensible to the lawyers just for a second. Really, because they don't consciously. Yeah. Just for a second. Just for a second. Because they don't consciously want people to be injured. But their income depends on the legacy structure and the continuation of the existing system, right? So those stakeholders, whoever they are, will naturally resist any technology that removes those transactions. It's like the car dealers resisting Tesla because Teslas don't need maintenance, and electric cars need 100 X less maintenance than a conventional car. So they resist the electric cars and lobby against them, etc., etc.. This is the immune system. This is legacy thinking. It's like the. A few years ago, the Texas doctors lobbied and won and banned the use of telemedicine. Right. Because, you know, clearly you have to. So this is classic, uh, thing. And the statistic I love to, uh, quote is 50% of U.S. court cases are car accidents, 50%. This is just an unbelievable thing.

Speaker 2: Judges to work when we.

Speaker 3: I mean, it's a huge amounts of thing. All the judgments and cases we could be dealing with were not because of all of this stuff. But let's also note that autonomous cars don't just replace a driver. They reduce insurance claims and emergency responses, parking issues, accidents. There's like one technology can solve so many things. It's like really a big deal. And this is the immune system response that we talk about in our X.

Speaker 2: Alex.

Speaker 4: There's this whole sub economy that seems to be dependent in almost a quasi parasitic way off of inefficiencies of driving, of manual driving. I think it's not just attorneys. It's not just auto insurance. It's also parking meter fees that accrue to municipalities. It's also police departments that and municipalities. Yes. Speeding tickets. All of this is going to go away. And we're. And this is all well, before we get to all of the land that right now is wasted on parking lots and roads. All of this is going to shrink. And in the process, you're going to hear shrieks from probably trial lawyers and from police unions and maybe from other adjacencies that are being collapsed in the process. But again, I don't want to live in a world with buggy whips. I want to live in a world where this is all fully solved. And as Peter, you and I wrote and solve everything, where we have the quiet hum and there are no speeding tickets in the quiet hum.

Speaker 2: Yeah.

Speaker 3: The 60% of the land in L.A. is parking spaces.

Speaker 1: Or blacktop.

Speaker 2: At least.

Speaker 1: Yeah. It's insane. Um, a lot of transformation coming. Dave, any thoughts on this one?

Speaker 5: Well, I thought, I thought Saleem's defense of the lawyers is actually very well thought out because, you know, when you really drill in, these are families, you know, one parent is a lawyer. Three years of law school is never funded by anybody. You paid it yourself. You have a huge amount of debt. You get into an industry and there you are.

Speaker 2: Hold it one.

Speaker 1: Second, guys. I cannot respect that as an argument. You know, if the data comes out that we can save 100 lives a day by having autonomous vehicles, I think we get into a situation where if a if a city makes Avs illegal and your son or daughter dies in a car accident because they couldn't use an autonomous vehicle, you've got a lawsuit in your hands. I'm sorry, I cannot, I don't yes, we're going to have disruption. We're going to lose lots of jobs. You know, AI is going to transform law, medicine, every field as well. It's not a reason to stay in business as a as a, you know, putting up the signs injured in an accident. You know, you know, call us.

Speaker 2: We'll do better.

Speaker 3: Better call.

Speaker 2: Saul. Yeah. I mean, well, I.

Speaker 3: Was, I was driving.

Speaker 5: Through. Right.

Speaker 3: I was driving through Phoenix and I saw a similar sign said, better call Paul.

Speaker 1: My favorite. My favorite road sign. Roadside sign is in Boca and it says your wife is hot. Call the air conditioner repairman.

Speaker 5: Well, look, look, you know, the reason this is a story is because it's such an obvious case where we need to save those lives. You take the exact same story and you say it's an accountant, not a lawyer, and they're doing work that is completely meaningless. Filing a form on your behalf in 83 B election on your behalf. But that's their business. And now I can just make that completely irrelevant. Do we do it or do we not do it? Well, we should do it, but that's another voter. So here in the real world, these are all voters. And you already know 70% of Americans think AI is terrible.

Speaker 1: Of course. I mean, listen, my dad, God bless him when he was, you know, uh, had, uh, vascular dementia and he was laid up at home, you know, he had his, his driver's license ordering food in Florida, you know, received in the mail. Why? Because there the voters. And they wanted the right to drive instead of having the logical situation was, you know, at age 80, you know, the driver's test at 85, you know, the driver's test and so forth. Anyway.

Speaker 5: Uh, well, where the puck is going right now is AI is going to create incredible amounts of abundance, just like Elon said. And the labs, you know, Anthropic and Dario in particular that were saying, we can eliminate all these jobs next year, are now starting to say, you know what? I don't want to perturb the world that much that quickly. All these votes, 70% of voters can wipe me off the face of the earth. I don't need that. So AI is starting to grow and self-improve within itself very quickly, and it's kind of trying to leave a lot of things alone. You know, teachers unions, police unions, this one, you know, you got to make the cars safer. You're totally right, Peter. These are actual lives. You got to do it. But there's a lot of other edge cases that are very proximal to this one where they're starting to say, you know, let me just leave those.

Speaker 1: Salim, do you have something to say? You're chomping at the bit, buddy.

Speaker 3: Well, you mentioned the accountants and we're talking about the future of jobs, etc. let me mention an analogy I've been using that seems to work really well. If you went back 100 years ago, accountants were doing double entry bookkeeping manually in ledgers. Right? And you'd like write down this in the debit column and this in the credit column. And when we got slide rules and calculators that accelerated it made it faster and adding up the columns, but it didn't change the work. Once you had accounting software, the software did all of the ledger entries, and the accountant lifted above the loop and started categorizing the transactions, handling month end, reconciliation gaps, etc., etc.. That's the best analogy we found because the number of accountants hasn't changed at all. It's actually gone up quite a bit because there's so much other work to be done in analysis, etc. so when people get freaked out about the jobs, no, the jobs will transform. But we found much more higher value work. Every time we have a technology injection, it takes out what Erik Brynjolfsson calls white collar drudgery and you get more value added. You use your judgment a lot more. That's what's going to happen. The problem is that human beings this is the biggest insight I've ever had about human beings. We would much rather be comfortable than happy.

Speaker 1: And we don't like changing our lives.

Speaker 5: If you if you like this story, there's videos that go with the story. You can find them online easily. But you know, Peter said a 16 year old on a permit is a dangerous driver. I said a 90 year old could be a dangerous driver. But when you look at those videos, you realize that the car can way outperform the best driver in the world because it has information that you wouldn't have. It has vision in every direction concurrently. And, and so it sees things that a human being just can't see. And when you look at the videos, you're like, oh, okay, I get it. There's no way I don't care how good.

Speaker 1: My mom, God bless her, is 90 years old living in Florida. She's great shape and she's driving well, but I want her to get a Tesla. I want her to get used to full self-driving. So at some point when she's not able to drive, her vehicle can drive her around. Um.

Speaker 3: Just think of the mobility will give all of those millions and millions of people when everybody's using FSD, unbelievable.

Speaker 4: Or robotaxis in general, cyber cabs and windows for everyone.

Speaker 1: And your and your AI is ordering your cyber cab for you. Okay, our next transport story is a short one, but it hit me because I had this experience. I'm driving through Hollywood Hills. I can't get a damn signal any place, you know, and I've got a clear sky above me. So a gentleman by the name of Sawyer Merritt, uh, just reported that all cyber cabs will have Starlink built in. Um, he saw this in an in showroom infographic. And for me, the two points here are number one, I love the way Elon sort of coordinates across all of his companies, all the technology. Right? So Starlink is in Starship. Starlink is in cyber cabs coming now. Um, and, you know, it's literally integration across it. I can't wait till he combines the companies. The second thing is I can't wait till Starlink is retrofitted into every car. It should be right. When you have gigabit connection speeds to your car, it's going to be extraordinary. And this goes back to the idea we've talked about in the past of distributed computing, right? Where, again, these vehicles that have GPUs on board and Starlink are going to be inference edge computing.

Speaker 4: I think putting aside the corporate governance issues of how Elon, given that Tesla and SpaceX have not yet merged, how he treats them as basically one company and technology passes back and forth.

Speaker 1: I do think as engineers.

Speaker 4: As well as engineers, all sorts of stuff. Um, I would say direct to cell technology from Starlink is going to make all of this possible. And it won't require big over the medium term big pizza dishes or even a tiny dish dish. Face dishes, which is, I think.

Speaker 1: Going to comments on that one. Did she face.

Speaker 4: Dishes? Dish face is is the term of art.

Speaker 3: Do you know the do you know the source of this. What the British Navy announced a new, um, brand new, uh, warship. And they decided in a gesture rather than having somebody name it, they said, we're going to crowdsource the name and let the population vote on what the name should vote on. And the winning, because the British have the most ridiculous, the most ridiculous sense of humor. The winning name was Boaty Mcboatface. Yeah. And and they couldn't they kind of like it was such an obvious winner. They finally had to override and say, I'm sorry, we have to go back to the old way of doing things. So that meme is continued. It's been fantastic. The British. God help them. Can't play soccer and football to get it in the final, which killed me. But damn the sense of humor.

Speaker 4: Yeah, the first. The first few generations of Starlink terminals were dishy dish faces, and now with direct to cell, you won't even need that. It'll just be like a cell phone antenna that can be built into everything.

Speaker 1: Um, I want to just show a quick video. Uh, and this is China taking the lead in autonomous transportation, in particular in trucks. So check out this video. Uh, so describing it, this is a 18 Wheeler, but the cab where the driver goes is basically like a flat board. It's got it's got lighter on the front and, uh, and headlights and that's about it. It got rid of the entire cab, reduced it to a 10th of its size. And we're seeing these all over the roads in China. So just, uh, interesting. The new, this is like instead of a two armed humanoid robot, um, this is a new form function for, for, for trucks.

Speaker 4: Thoughts, Peter, on how the American truck drivers unions are going to react to those.

Speaker 1: Uh, with great love, they're going to get a chance to vacation.

Speaker 4: I'm sure.

Speaker 3: I'm actually. Can I have some a little bit of data on this? You know, there's, there's a kind of some stats that 3 million jobs in the US are based on trucking, etc., etc.. I actually went and talked to a trucking company to just look into this and they're like, are you kidding? We'd hire a thousand more truckers if we could. We can't find anybody that wants to make take the work. I would, I would have a thousand trucks. So I think autonomous trucking is going to fill that gap of all the boring stuff. And then the trucker, the you'll have like a drone pilot, a truck will drive along when it needs to pull over to recharge or swap a battery or something. You'll get that happen done. And then for difficult maneuvers, you'll, you'll have somebody human figuring it out. And I think this is going to be amazing when it appears. And I don't think there will be job loss for the. For the very reason that very few people want to do it.

Speaker 1: I'm looking forward to seeing autonomous trucks on US roads. It's just again, you know, China is pushing this out. They need the infrastructure support and they've got incredible government.