Before I jump overboard, let me say uber is testing autonomous evs as we speak, sans blockchain. Teslas latest offering is also of the same vein. No company in this space has the r and d or capital expenditure to compete with either of these behemoths.
Blockchains are publically verifiable ledgers. If you don't really need a public ledger, you don't need a blockchain.
If the technology existed (these vehicles), I could simply call up an agent that owns these vehicles, rent the same fleet with my credit card, and flirt merrily from point A to point B. After which the car could return to its point of origin, or blow up, I give a wit either way. Simply trying to convey there are myriad more mundane and recognized technologies that don't need to be developed in order to do this. Some of the use cases seem almost a stretch to implement blockchain technology.
It's not that I'm not passionate about what bitcoin means to the future. It's just tempered with practicality.
Also, from experience, you don't want code spending money for you. You want code to indicate to you how or when you should spend your money. So that you can weigh variables outside the code, and use your intuition to decide.
Oh yeah. That swim.
splash
First of all, private blockchain exists, they don't have to be all publicaly verifiable ledger.
There in your uber or tesla example, it would be incredibly more expensive to use such cars than one provided by an autonomous organization (please do not mistake it with a DAO) because of centralization, it's like comparing actual credit card fees and bitcoin fees. Moreover, in this case no code spend money for you, car choose through their code how they need and want to spend money, this is the whole point of an AO, no human needs)
Who decides how and which issues are organized and presented to the voters; and is that influence effectively centralized control?
The algorithm does. Any token holder can submit a proposal and open proposals are displayed in descending order by the amount of deposit paid.
To release the agreed bounty, a quorum of neophyte investors will vote to on whether the pull request submitted by the contracted programmer meets the requirements of the specification we originally approved by a prior vote? We will not depend on any experts to advise us? This will magically all coordinate itself in a decentralized manner without any de facto leaders emerging?
Whomever designed the DAO doesn't comprehend the how and why politics doesn't work.
“An elephant: A mouse built to government specifications.” — Lazarus Long
“A Snail: Monero built with decentralized donations.” — SOMAcoin
You are right Eca.sh aca Shelby, and this subject of political game has already been discussed on the Daoslack. It will be very interesting to see how the dao works in the future.