The road toll is pretty bad at the moment, I think it is an issue for self-driving cars. I can see merit in a bald numeric safety argument if it can be clearly and independently established: if fewer people die, it is better. But yes, I also recognise the problem that self-driving cars will introduce different safety challenges. If your child is killed by software it won't be any consolation that two other people's children didn't die because the stats are better compared to deaths caused by human drivers. So I think you are spot on, let's go all-out to reduce ALL road deaths, whatever the cause.
I'm also concerned about the disruptive effects. The futurist scenario is that a robo-taxi will be a fraction of the price of a current ICE car. The cost of labour to operate it, compared to a taxi or an uber, will be zero. This will result in an explosion of autonomous cars, similar to those e-scooters and bikes that sprout like weeds all over the city from time to time. It will be so easy and quick to summon a robo-taxi, many people won't need to own a car. It will mean than living close to a road is the same as living next to a metro station. Combined with the greater longevity of EVs, it will reduce the number of cars sold by 75%. I welcome any corrections if I have misrepresented the predictions of futurist Tony Seba. I'm not saying he's right, but that we need to think about it.
We need to learn from the bad outcomes of previous technological disruptions and anticipate them more effectively. Surveillance capitalism is one of the worst. Google started it. The massive invasion of privacy and the subsequent exploitation of it has been a disaster. I would argue that it is responsible to varying degrees for things like the demise of local media outlets, poor literacy outcomes, neo nazis sieg heiling in our streets, and the recent outbreak of misogynistic murder, to pick a few examples. It has also funneled massive power and wealth from countries like Australia into the hands of a tiny number of tech oligarchs.
Uber is one lesson in the threat caused by enshittification. The goal of business models like this is to own the platform. You don't actually provide a service, you suck money like a vampire from both the drivers and the passengers, and everything else is done by computers ultimately controlled by Uber and its CEO. There is a sovereignty issue here. Who owns the value that is extracted from the behaviour of you, me, my family, citizens of my town, state and nation? Or do we blindly hand it over to villains like Musk, Bezos, Zuckerberg? I like to include people like Sam Bankman Fried, Martin "Phama Bro" Shkreli, and Ross "Dread Pirate Roberts" Ulbricht in that ugly list. They generally hate government, and not in the same grumpy way that normal people do, they want to transfer power and wealth from us to them, and governments stand in their way.
Sorry, this is veering off the topic of lithium and EVs. But now is the time to think about it. Maybe it doesn't seem to be in the time frame of relevance for the impact it will have on our investments, but these things are flying at us from the future head on and maybe they are closer than we think.
(20min delay)