According to author and transport researcher Paris Marx, governments and the public shouldn't trust Silicon Valley billionaires when they promise to solve climate change.
Marx told Insider that Musk is a self-interested billionaire who wants to push a naive idea of what the future should look like.
Marx believes that technology is the sole solution for inner-city traffic and climate change in a way that does little to help society.
If you switch to an electric car like the Model 3, it might be cleaner than driving a petrol car, but its batteries have their own environmental impact and do not solve the problem of traffic or road deaths.
Flying taxis may sound cool, and help people move around more efficiently than helicopters, but will create noise pollution and require a complex remodeling of infrastructure to make them work.
Marx points out that neither example is feasible as a mass market solution, yet companies continue to promote them as such for their own benefit.
Musk pushed the idea that electric cars are the solution to transport emissions and that computers should drive cars instead of humans.
Getting people out of cars is what a sustainable transportation system looks like.
"Elon Musk's contribution in this space is to tell us that we do not need better public transit." He said that public transit is unsafe and could be used by a serial killer.
Musk said at the tech conference that he loved public transport, but that it didn't solve the traffic issues in major cities.
Marx has a masters degree in urban geography and is interested in the future of transportation.
The publication of the "Uber Files", a trove of 124,000 documents leaked by a formerUber lobbyist, came weeks after Marx's conversation with Insider.
According to the documents, executives dismissed driver safety concerns, paid academics to write positive studies, and blocked incriminating data from law enforcement to circumvent labor laws.
Marx said that the type of people who would benefit from this kind of service, who are pushing it on the public, are the kind of people who would benefit from it.
He argues that technology is the solution to these visions and that it is one of the reasons that tech companies have been so successful. Marx believes it is necessary for political action and commitment to deliver the reinvestment in rail systems, better cycling infrastructure and sustainable transport.
People can join organizations to try to pressure governments to make those sorts of changes, instead of just being distracted by the tech industry's ideas that don't solve any problems.
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