Can any one explain the Si Valley fascination with (driverless) Automobiles? | Hacker News Reader

Can any one explain the Si Valley fascination with (driverless) Automobiles?

4 pointschrodobert5 comments

Having read a lot about the technology I think that true, SAE level 5 driverless cars are not on the near horizon. Maybe they will never come to pass. If and when they do it seems that current industry leaders such as GM, Toyota, etc, will have the economic comparative advantage starting from integrating incremental automation features (e.g. lane tracking assist, etc), into mass produced auto-mobiles. What explains the SV tech industry's fascination with driverless cars over the past 5-10 years? Where did it originate? It seems that there about 100 other areas where silicon valley could innovate, why did the SV big companies choose this seemingly quixotic quest? I am interested in what is behind it from an economic history perspective. You may disagree but it seems to me that silicon valley expectation and hype are even further diverged from reality now than they were during the dot-com boom 20 years ago. Is it a problem of too much easy money to fund Juicero-like startups? What explains it?

Wouldn't Alphabet shareholders prefer a dividend to wasting money on projects outside the company's areas of core competency on dubious products? Surely people understand that exponential growth can not continue ad infinitum and that it may be better to take profits than just piss away money.

Two things

1. Economic productivity gains are measured in trillions per year globally. Expected value for the research is good. Transportation costs are significant bottleneck in the economy. They make up roughly 8-9 percent of GDP. Wages are becoming the bottleneck in transportation costs. Internet economy can increase productivity but but if the end people who deliver packets, move pizzas, or transport anything have hourly wages.

2. R&D into autonomous cars is related to autonomous robots, robot vision etc. Google is betting heavily into AI and driversless cars can be seen as one piece of the puzzle. Navigation in real environment and spatial understanding of surroundings is core technology in many other things.

40,000 people in the US were killed in car accidents in 2016. Millions more were injured. Seems like a worthwhile thing to disrupt.

Does silicon valley think they can do anything, regardless the industry, better than the incumbents? It is easy to disrupt (when capital is cheap) but harder to improve. I think expectations of technological progress have become untethered from reality (as happened in the last dot-com boom and bust 20 years ago). This time the bust may be even worse.

It also seems to me that improving public and mass transit would be a more proximate solution to traffic deaths. Every one will die of some cause or another. as medicine improves the share of deaths due to accidents should increase. Even with increasing medical capacity to treat diseases traffic deaths only account for 1.5 % of all annual deaths. Maybe silicon valley would be better to spend its talents improving health care and preventative medicine. But that is not as sexy to pitch to wall street and the public as Jetsons fantasies. Recently Silicon Valley's contribution to healthcare was Theranos, who Tim Draper still believes was unfairly maligned by the press.

Tesla cars are a reality and continue to improve self-driving, efficiency and safety. General Motors and Chrysler went bust a few years ago and had to be bailed out. VW cheated on diesel emissions. The incumbents suck.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com