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Comment by moxious | Hacker News Reader

It speaks to the trends of the day that an article which says something patently obvious to people in the tech field is considered news.

This reality seems like it may pose a problem though, as some people's business models and valuations depend on this article being wrong.

The thing is, we don't need full level 5 to get useful stuff out of this line of tech development. But in terms of the futurist vision of driverless cars everywhere, fleets of cars replacing private ownership, etc -- hard to see that happening. If the tech takes more than 10 years to develop, it's very likely something else will develop in the meantime which will essentially invalidate all of those earlier visions, as the world will have gone in a different direction in the meantime.

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You're right, and we're already benefitting and have been for years: basic electronic cruise control saves a ton of fuel just by taking the job of maintaining highway speeds away from the human.

We'll continue to benefit at each level: speed match, safe-distance maintenance, emergency brake, lane follow - there are already people alive who would be dead without them - you can find them in 5 seconds on youtube. The fact that articles have to keep trotting out same sad story of the bloke who drove into a truck while watching movies when he should have been driving tells you a lot about how safe these systems actually are - if there were dozens of counter examples, we wouldn't be hearing from the head of Toyota's RI, we'd be drowning in dashcam snuff films.

All that said, yes, I agree it's obvious that level 5 is a different beast to all of the 'easy stuff' that we have now: classic case of where the edge cases cover more area than the core of the domain does.

Exactly. I park in a very small space in a busy city. While backing out I must monitor the street, pedestrians, and the cars parked to the front, back, and side of me.

Just this week, I missed one of those variables and cost myself $500 in damage. This is something a backup camera and automated system can and already does easily help with, and is a major efficacy leap. Small steps like this can really add up.

What I would like to see next is a system that alerts the driver when the light in front of them turns green. I feel like I lose 5-10 minutes a week sitting behind people who are checking their phones unaware the light has changed.

> What I would like to see next is a system that alerts the driver when the light in front of them turns green. I feel like I lose 5-10 minutes a week sitting behind people who are checking their phones unaware the light has changed.

I wish I could upvote this idea straight into the car manufacturers inboxes. Nothing more frustrating than having to sit through multiple light cycles cause the dipshit in front of you is taking a nap, conveniently waking up with enough time to get themselves through the light but not any of the people behind them.

Use that horn ;)

You have one. It's called eyeballs and a horn.

It works really well when it's the person right in front of you, because you can see that they aren't paying attention. Put a few cars between you and them, and all of a sudden you don't really know the reason they aren't moving and there is a significant delay before you can infer that they aren't paying attention. It would be so much better for their own car to recognize that they are in la la land and remind them asap.

> I feel like I lose 5-10 minutes a week sitting behind people who are checking their phones unaware the light has changed.

A quick blip on a set of train horns can quickly change that behavior.

Audi is trying to integrate red light timers into their cars. Of course this requires cities to integrate their traffic light control systems so it won't happen soon.

https://www.extremetech.com/extreme/240264-hands-audis-excit...

>in terms of the futurist vision of driverless cars everywhere, fleets of cars replacing private ownership, etc -- hard to see that happening.

Please tell this to city governors who are so keen at throwing money to stupid start-ups peddling this nonsense at the expensive of other things, like proven public transport, for example.

Stuff like this being "patently obvious" to you should be an impetus to get the word out, because those for whom is isn't are the ones making dangerously imprudent policy decisions.

Again, not to invalidate the use of level 4 automation and such, but ya'll need to crush this fantasy of level 5 in 2 years, for all our sakes.

> throwing money to stupid start-ups peddling this nonsense

And this is why god invented short-selling. If startups were openly traded instead of privately funded, I think we'd see a lot of technologists setting up massive bets against "full automation" and "solve everything with AI" projects.

It's not easy to get people (especially politicians) to listen to bad news, no matter how loudly you shout it. But in a lot of markets, downward pressure comes from the ability of cynics to enter the market and get payouts from guessing (or knowing) that some promise is impossible.

In the meantime, I suppose we'll all keep yelling. But when trigger-happy investors and unaccountable state funding are shaping the market, I'm not sure how much good it'll do.

> It speaks to the trends of the day that an article which says something patently obvious to people in the tech field is considered news.

Yes and no. In any given Tesla article here you can also read many people claiming that "it's basically a solved problem and Tesla and Uber will be fully automated in just a couple of years", too.

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