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Comment by seancoleman | Hacker News Reader

My sister, 29, just got approved for the Waymo program in Phoenix. She has epilepsy and hasn’t driven in 10 years since she had a seizure while driving on the freeway and crashed. Miraculously she had no serious injuries.

We sarcastically joke about how Silicon Valley is making the world a better place, oftentimes for privledged individuals but Waymo is completely changing her life.

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One of the coolest jaw dropping examples of this I ran across not long ago, is Aira (https://aira.io/ - I have no affiliation with the company). First we had Google Glass, with the popularly derided "glassholes" (not a term I approve of using mind you, however it was persistently thrown about in media and on tech forums).

I've known a few people that lost their eyesight. What services like Aira could accomplish is nothing short of life changing for the blind. And it, in part, started out from a concept that was mocked as being representative of supposed obnoxious Silicon Valley priviliged types.

Aira seems a great idea.

New tech almost always starts out being available only to privileged individuals but then becomes commoditized and available to everyone.

Part of the reason is that new tech is always expensive and unreliable, so only the privileged individuals have money to burn on costly and risky experiments.

Actually often military first, then privileged individuals!

If the new tech is a robot that cleans your toilet, costs can come down until nobody ever has to manually clean a toilet again.

If the new tech is an on-demand market that hires a person to clean your toilet, the amount of manual toilet cleaning in the world is unchanged :)

Instead of working for a unionized cleaning company with a minimum wage, you too can be your own employer in the new app economy of toilet cleaning to order and be paid less, expected to buy your own equipment, and denied sick pay and holidays. But still subject to sacking if you don't put in 12-hour days, or get a sub-four-star review.

Per Gibson - The Future is here, it is just not widely distributed.

Evenly distributed

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