I’m guessing they did at least a minimal assessment of that. :)

Oh yeah, that could be pretty amazing. It would really be strictly superior to actually owning a scooter since you wouldn’t have to worry about having a parking space and stuff. This is also a great illustration of the direct benefits of collective ownership.

From what I’ve seen the driving culture in China does seem to be a lot more relaxed than in western countries. I’ve seen lots of videos of people driving scooters on sidewalks and so on. The legal responsibility is a good question, I would assume the company making the scooter would be responsible since they’re making the self driving system for it.

If this tech works well I can see it making things incredibly convenient. You could just leave your scooter somewhere, and then have it come find you, or you could even share a scooter with a friend this way.

The catch is in justifying spending the resources needed to take this from the lab to mass production. No company is willing to invest hundreds of billions that would be needed when they can keep squeezing a bit more performance out of silicon at a lower investment. That’s why this sort of stuff requires state level funding, and now that US is cutting China off from western chips, there’s a really big incentive to provide that sort of funding.

I’m simply amazed by your amazing and well argued counterpoint. Bravo champ.

So, the whole anti-AI movement is deeply reactionary as I explain in detail here https://lemmy.ml/post/29190434

I very much agree, the platforms have to be qualitatively different in nature to make it worth moving.

coming full circle given that German nazis used US as their model

I mean once you switch off from key things like email, calendar, and cloud storage, then it’s a lot easier to move over to a different device.

lol

Getting off US services is probably the more important part.

Zelensky just sold off Ukraine’s natural resources to the US https://apnews.com/article/ukraine-us-rare-earth-minerals-deal-8566241ea0e121a30437d845357055d8

I’d argue this is a good example of LLMs being used by artist to create nice looking art https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=envMzAxCRbw

Amusingly, people who promote capitalism have clearly never read Smith either. Marx wasn’t a departure from Smith, he built directly on the work Smith started. Smith talked about division of labour, and Marx initially used the same term before he started calling it socialized labour. I suspect if most people in the west read Smith today, they’d label him a communist. Consider the following Smith quote as an example:

In the progress of the division of labour, the employment of the far greater part of those who live by labour, that is, of the great body of people, comes to be confined to a few very simple operations, frequently one or two. But the understandings of the greater part of men are necessarily formed by their ordinary employments. The man whose whole life is spent in performing a few simple operations, of which the effects too are, perhaps, always the same, or very nearly the same, has no occasion to exert his understanding,or to exercise his invention in finding out expedients for removing difficulties which never occur. He naturally loses, therefore, the habit of such exertion, and generally becomes as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human creature to become. The torpor of his mind renders him, not only incapable of relishing or bearing a part in any rational conversation, but of conceiving any generous, noble, or tender sentiment, and consequently of forming any just judgement concerning many even of the ordinary duties of private life.

Given the sheer scale of state investment, that seems all but inevitable https://www.reuters.com/technology/china-seen-leading-chipmaking-investment-again-2025-semi-group-says-2025-03-26/

Oh yeah, I completely agree that AI is a convenient excuse to do layoffs companies were doing anyways.

Of course, the long-term goal of automation is to reduce labor, but current AI is nowhere near replacing human workers. Right now, it’s just a tool that speeds up certain tasks with, as the article notes, very mixed results. That said, we’ve seen steady increase in automation since the Industrial Revolution without mass unemployment. Instead of work disappearing, it is merely transformed. Portrait painters fade out, camera operators emerge. The jobs shift, but the need for human labor persists, just in new forms.

Sure, but these companies just serve as a warning to others, and the hype is already is already dying down. This happens every time new technology appears. There is no structural shift happening with AI meaningfully replacing human labor.

The article talks about a study analyzing the impact of AI on jobs. And what they find is that AI in its current form is not capable of replacing human labor.

The anxiety over job loss actually seems like one of the main reasons. Another big reason seems to be that people are feeling threatened by machines doing things that were thought to be inherently human, which means there’s nothing magical about human cognition.