All other things being equal, this seems like a good investment. Investing $40k per single robo-taxi? I'd be confident that it would make much more profit than that over its lifetime. $40k is about the annual income of a human taxi driver, and a robo-taxi should have a lifetime of several years.

But there's a bigger-picture problem here. All other things are not equal. Each human job you automate away means one less person who can afford to pay for a taxi journey. When this happens at enough scale, suddenly your investment decision doesn't work anymore.

As AI & robotics get closer to being able to do all work, will stock market-funded companies be the economic medium through which they are managed and owned? Many people think so, but how is that supposed to work when there are fewer and fewer people with money to buy things? Isn't it more likely that this provokes an economic emergency where society adopts some state-run model for the economy?

Waabi raises up to $1 billion and partners with Uber to deploy 25,000 robotaxis as the race to dominate self-driving heats up