When he talks about "what if you don't have to worry about driving," what I hear is: what if your car is one more place where we can show you ads?
Right now we can't show you ads in your car, of course, because you're in command of two tons of steel moving at high speed, so your attention needs to be fully concentrated on that task. But if the car could drive itself, think of all the ways we could monetize that newly tappable reservoir of attention! It'd be a gold rush!
He doesn't say that, of course, because the vision of a world where you can spend your commute playing with your kid is a much easier sell than the vision of a world where your car becomes a kind of rolling Skinner box, with you a literally captive audience (what are you going to do, step out of a moving vehicle?) to be bombarded with messages by the highest bidder. But... yeah.
Wait, what's the medium for these ads? Audio? Video? If you're watching tv in your car, sure there might be ads but are you saying that if you're reading a book you won't be able to turn off the radio or tv? That seems a bit extreme.
I'd say initially the medium is the one that many of us already use whenever we find a spare moment: mobile phones or tablets. A self-driving car will just be one more setting in which we can view ads, play pay-to-play games, and so on.
You don't really own the car though. You own steel and plastic and all that sure, they haven't figured out how to erode ownership of that yet. It's all worthless without software though and you don't get to own that. Now you are just licensing it. Now they can slap all the conditions they want on it. They fucked up and people died? Well enjoy your arbitration clause because that was a software issue. That dream of using your self driving car to make money, well you can do that on their network only with their rules.
Right now we can't show you ads in your car, of course, because you're in command of two tons of steel moving at high speed, so your attention needs to be fully concentrated on that task. But if the car could drive itself, think of all the ways we could monetize that newly tappable reservoir of attention! It'd be a gold rush!
He doesn't say that, of course, because the vision of a world where you can spend your commute playing with your kid is a much easier sell than the vision of a world where your car becomes a kind of rolling Skinner box, with you a literally captive audience (what are you going to do, step out of a moving vehicle?) to be bombarded with messages by the highest bidder. But... yeah.