this post was submitted on 20 Jul 2025
210 points (96.9% liked)
Technology
73129 readers
3732 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
If the bots are required to have paid transit passes and if they're confined to off-peak hours when the subways aren't full anyway, this could actually be a net win for mass transit: they're putting money into the system while consuming relatively few resources, so the bots can fund improvements that benefit humans.
Yeah. Just need to make sure that sensible restrictions are in place to prevent the creep into turning a public service into primarily a commercial one. Starts out only running during off hours, then running during active hours at a reduced rate, then it's got dedicated cars for the robots, then it overflows into passenger cars... you see where it's going. Best to set up guard rails before it's a problem.
This is China, not the US. They're not as greedy and disgusting.
Just because it's the US doesn't mean it's not bigoted to generalize people, especially with such insulting and hateful generalizations. And Chinese companies are as motivated by profit as any company is, which means they would be interested in maximizing cost efficiency by scaling up services like this. Putting policies in place to protect other priorities for the public good is sensible no matter where you are.
I actually thought a dedicated car would be a good solution. Of course as an additional car, not as a replacement for a passenger one. Then you could optimize the interior for these robots
Good point. If trains are empty might as well use them.