Personally I’d stick with Tesla’s nav and use CarPlay for media and messaging, and that’s the optionality and user choice I think this post is trying to get at.

If productivity can increase significantly per worker, the result will be major overall economic growth.

It might be sold to consumers the way vacuums and washing machines were. With these automated modern conveniences you'll spend less time working and have more time for leisure.

Of course the reality for the actual workers on the line is that their job and industry may be disrupted and the overall benefits of that economic growth may not reach them during their lifetime. The Industrial Revolution was followed by a century of major and sometimes violent disputes over the relationship between corporations and labor and the rights of workers.

The post-WWII promises of convenience and leisure were replaced by the reality of the baseline adjusting and households needing to work the same or even more combined hours to make ends meet.

Even if the optimistic levels of economic growth occur, the benefits are unlikely to be evenly distributed.

The AI promoters are themselves saying these things because it is the positive case for their business, that other businesses can pay them for AI services that are cheaper and better than keeping existing jobs.

> Speaking at the Capital Framework for Large Banks conference at the Federal Reserve board of governors, Altman told the crowd that certain job categories would be completely eliminated by AI advancement.

> “Some areas, again, I think just like totally, totally gone,” he said, singling out customer support roles. “That’s a category where I just say, you know what, when you call customer support, you’re on target and AI, and that’s fine.”

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/jul/22/openai-sa...

There will be increased competition for job openings, reductions in real wages, or increased expectations of productivity. Probably some combination of all three.

That has always been the question since Elon started making self-driving claims back in 2016. If you believed him any time up until now you'd have been wrong and potentially own a car that will never drive without a responsible human in the driver's seat.

Another question is how many resources each "self-driving" car needs to complete its task. All of the major self-driving taxi providers do have monitoring staff who need to intervene occasionally to get the car unstuck from some situations.

If you need to pay one monitor per 10 cars you can run a taxi service in specific markets but it's pretty hard to roll that out to a fleet of millions of personally-owned cars.

https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/tesla-...

Tesla's recent annual car sales:

2023: 1.81M

2024: 1.79M

2025: 1.64M

Elon's failed timeline predictions about self-driving and Robotaxi fleets are too numerous to attempt to cite here.

What has mostly exceeded expectations about Tesla is their stock price compared to actual productivity.

Of course that energy generation comes with the caveat of being variable with sun and wind. It can still be a net benefit to the grid but the variability means alternative energy sources are still needed.

The cost trend of installing solar/wind plus enough storage capacity to provide steady grid power will eventually cross over to also being cheaper than other sources of energy. At which point the only reason to be against it is if you prefer artificially subsidizing another energy source.

If these features were so useful, the internet would be full of articles and viral videos about how to turn them on and use them.

Instead, every single software service you sign in to now has to stop you with popups, chat windows, and sparkle animations to show you all of the shiny new AI features they have added, like they're all Microsoft trying to convince you to switch your browser to Edge.

Most people could pick up a modern Windows ARM laptop and everything they do would work just fine, just potentially with less heat and longer battery life than their older Windows laptop.

The primary annoyances would be Windows itself and its ad and engagement driven UI reminding you about Copilot and Edge every chance it gets.

A closer analogy would be ""Chicago O'Hare pauses flight departures due to a winter storm after 3 planes slide off the runway due to ice"

Absolutely I think there will be a disconnect between when people think they should be able to drive somewhere (ie to work in a no-visibility blizzard) and when ideal self-driving cars would allow themselves to operate. Maybe society will adjust to be more flexible to natural conditions, or maybe people will get frustrated and drive themselves into the poor conditions as always.

That's kind of similar to written content being posted and linked. There's an expectation that you are asking someone to take time to read it, and with LLMs now the cost to generate things to be read is a lot lower but our attention and capacity to read them remains the same.