lots of dead ends are a sign of *healthy* innovation. If you look at the last 20 years of solar panels you can see the same cycle of hundreds of proposed new types of cells and variations. The result is that many of those have useful understanding of what *not* to do, that corpus of information guides the research that allows for cheaper/better production over time.

There are some externalities to project here. If this happens AFTER full self driving, then everyone that has a car is likely paying 1/4 the price for regular transportation (no car payments, insurance, fuel, maintenance). I expect self driving taxis to happen before humanoid robots. I am in the US top 20% (but not in the top 10%).

1. $20-30k being able to automate *simple* gardening, some cooking, and regular housekeeping (cost of housekeeper is 200-300/month and they do less, gardening is 100/month ). I do these things myself because it's (barely) worth it, but a 20-30k robot would cost 300-500 a month. That would relieve stress.
2. For me there's no extra value in this, I'm assuming self driving taxi BEFORE this robot exists. I also believe that since we crossed the 20% threshold for shopping online we'll rapidly go to 80-90% over the next 5 years (5 years is the minimum time I think we have before level 1 appears).
3. I don't think this is feasible in the next 30 years, but it would be worth as much as a modest house.

While this is true for Musk (who has started a list of innovative companies) it is not true of most ultra-rich billionaires. The top 20 list (the top 20 of the Fortune 400) is the Mars, Walton, and Koch families (all inherited wealth, all funding reactionary political agenda), Serge Brin and Larry Page (no longer with Google), Bill Gates (no longer with Microsoft), Larry Ellison, Phil Night (no longer with Nike), Micheal Dell, Micheal Bloomberg, Steve Ballmer, Jeff Bezos and ex-wife Mackenzie Scott and Warren Buffet. As a group, they ARE 100% "sitting on billions of cash" (most have largely divested of their initial companies) and choosing not to use it to help people (with the notable exception of Mackenzie Scott). Musk via SpaceX/Tesla/Boring company/Neuralink IS the only one creating additional value to society...the rest are just milking their wealth via financial advisors and buying yachts/mansions/sports teams/congresspeople to show other wealthy people how wealthy/power they have.

Thanks for the pro-train perspective.

1. agreed
2. America was built on the railroad because cars didn't exist. Changing cities from un-walkable to walkble is infeasible, cities are not readily re-configurable.
3. No it's not silly, trains have much simpler steering, stopping and starting requirements, they travel along pre-determined paths only. Cars are substantially limited to roads, but the construction of those roads can be relatively scant.
4. Most of the car industry will be dead before the decade, they're badly in debt and won't make the transition to EVs. EVs are a substantial step forward for the environment vs ICE cars. Cars provide time-freedom while trains constrain travel to predetermined schedules.
5. With self-driving cars vehicles can be shared as a service that doesn't provide a barrier to entry for poor folks. This is a predictable outcome of moving from a car-ownership model to a transportation as a service model.
6. Yes, hydroponics/aeroponics/precision fermentation will enable urban compression (and free up enormous previous agricultural land)... but MOST people want more space not less. I expect that the transition to a transportation as a service model will displace 2/3 of all car ownership along with 90% of urban parking spaces, this will free up about 1/3 of urban areas (where parking takes 1/3 of available space.

Suburbs don't exist without cars. Turning existing cities into walk-able cities is a non-starter...cities are not re-configurable. European cities that leverage public transportation well are dense. European cities have a density greater than about 5k per square km and are closer together than American cities. There is a population density threshold for trains becoming reasonably efficient. In the 1950s, when Americans moved from cities to suburbs that population density went away... and so did trains. In the US there 14-16 million people living in dense (>4k per square km) urban areas, that's about 4-5% of the US population. For the rest of the US trains are not cost/time effective.

When I have vacationed in Japan and Europe trains work GREAT (it was as faster than driving). When I've experimented with rail transport in the US outside of a handful of dense corridors (DC, NYC, next to BART lines in SF area), it sucks. The US does not have the geographic constraints that require Japan and Europe to have dense urban areas.