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Comment by maxharris | Hacker News Reader

Reminds me of this famously wrong column dismissing the Internet back in 1995: https://www.newsweek.com/clifford-stoll-why-web-wont-be-nirv...

> How about electronic publishing? Try reading a book on disc. At best, it's an unpleasant chore: the myopic glow of a clunky computer replaces the friendly pages of a book. And you can't tote that laptop to the beach. Yet Nicholas Negroponte, director of the MIT Media Lab, predicts that we'll soon buy books and newspapers straight over the Intenet. Uh, sure.

Takeaway: people expect way too much out of next five years of the future, and typically it takes twenty years for those expectations to become fully realized. (I believe there is an Andy Grove quote to the same effect, but I couldn't find it in time.)

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However, there is a difference, and I think an important one. With the internet, every piece of needed technology was either in place or easily imagined; with driverless cars, I don't think anyone can claim that is true. While ML/deep learning have made impressive strides in the past years, it is still a big leap to say these same technologies are enough to drive a car in the wild. They may be, but it also may be many years until such a technology is realized.

But ML and DNNs are not supposed to be driving cars. The big players (Waymo and Cruise) are using DNNs only for perception.

Isn’t perception necessary for driving?

It is not sufficient.

The comment to which I replied has been edited. Originally, it said ML & DNNs are neither necessary nor sufficient for driving, then proceeded to say they are only used for perception--hence my question that perception was necessary for driving (but obviously not sufficient).

We still don’t have flying cars nor self-conscious robots, things that have been prophetized 100 to 50 years ago. Going back more in time we still don’t have a philosophical stone. The idea is that some technological prophecies are indeed wrong.

The former were pure prophecies with no viable, known methods to achieve them at the time. Self driving cars are in active development, and look to be within spitting distance of full autonomy at least for most driving scenarios. It's possible that last % of situations will be super hard to solve, sure, but it's still a very different thing than someone just going, "oh man it'll be cool when".

>We still don’t have flying cars

Why does no one consider a helicopter to be a "flying car"? What can a flying car do that a helicopter can't? The only difference I see is that a flying car would be cheaper and owned by more people, which a helicopter could easily be if people actually wanted a flying car. Helicopters are expensive because they're very niche devices.

The fact that almost no one owns a helicopter proves that people don't actually want flying cars.

Helicopters do not, in fact, do what people want flying cars to do. The fact that the masses are not using helicopters to go to the mall shows this, and by reflecting on what would happen if this were tried, you can figure out why helicopters are not flying cars.

But that doesn't answer the question of "what do people want to do with flying cars that can't be done with a helicopter"... it only answers the question "are people using helicopters as flying cars". You're making an extremely false assumption that "because people aren't using helicopters, that means helicopters aren't flying cars, and we all know people want flying cars". Extremely faulty.

Let's beg the question and assume people want to go to the mall with their flying car, that's their primary use case. They can't do this right now because there are no parking spaces at the mall for their helicopter. There are no parking spaces for their helicopter because no one is flying to the mall with their helicopter. If people did, the mall would build parking for them. This is shown by the fact that places where people regularly fly helicopters, there is dedicated helicopter parking. It's just as valid for me to say "the fact that helicopters exist but are uncommon proves people don't want flying cars" as it is for you to say "helicopters are not flying cars".

I'll ask the question again: why do people not consider helicopters to be flying cars? They do exactly what people want a flying car to do: they take off and land vertically, they can fit in a reasonably sized parking space, they can easily maneuver in three dimensions, and they hold passengers and cargo. I argue that helicopters are flying cars, and they're proof that most people don't actually want flying cars.

Helicopters are complex machines that require lots of maintenance and significant training to fly safely. It's hard to see how you would reduce even the maintenance costs enough to make them practical for universal use.

To your second point, people with enough money and training do commonly buy them for personal use. (I know this anecdotally from a relative involved in sales of Airbus helicopters.) If you addressed the cost and safety issues no doubt more people would buy them.

>Helicopters are complex machines that require lots of maintenance and significant training to fly safely.

So did cars when they were first introduced. Since they solved a need, there was a great incentive to make them easier to use and easier to repair. That incentive doesn't exist for helicopters because most people don't own helicopters.

>To your second point, people with enough money and training do commonly buy them for personal use.

I'm glad you pointed this out, I didn't make that argument because it would ruin the surprise, but yeah. People do use flying cars, and they're called helicopters. They're just used by very rich people or people with enough training to operate them. But think in cities like NYC, helicopters are used just like cars would be, because using a car can be unpractical. Functionally there is no difference between Michael Bloomberg traveling to Newark via a limo versus via a helicopter: both park at his building and can transport him from his home to his destination. It's a flying car.

>If you addressed the cost and safety issues no doubt more people would buy them.

The incentive to improve cost and safety only exists if demand exists. Cars only got cheaper and safer when the public began buying them. Flying cars (helicopters) will only become safer and cheaper if people start demanding them as well. The fact that they're not, IMO, proves people don't actually want flying cars.

There is plenty of incentive to make helicopters cheaper to own and operate, have simpler and less frequent maintenance requirements, to be easier to fly, require less space to take off and land, be quieter and safer. It hasn't happened so far because these are genuinely difficult problems, not because of lack of incentive.

No one in NYC, not even Bloomberg, is landing, let alone parking, his helicopter at his office. It is completely impractical in terms of safety, space and noise, even if it were just one person doing it, and absurdly infeasible to think it could be scaled up to, say, just the number of people using the Lincoln tunnel in any given half-hour. There are a few helipads around the edges of the city (a number that is likely to decrease on account of noise), that cater to some of the transportation needs of a number of people that can be counted in the hundreds per day, not hundreds of thousands.

The idea that if there is a wish, a solution would have been found by now, does not stand up to the most cursory examination - for one thing, if it were so, not many people would be dying.

I like your point about the number of people in the Lincoln Tunnel and people dying in crashes.

I agree it's a genuinely difficult problem, but we might agree for different reasons. I think it's a genuinely difficult problem because there is no way to make a flying car as safe as a car that is stuck to the ground. There's just not. Normal cars break down, they run out of gas, they stop working all the time. You coast to a stop and call a tow truck. Flying cars break down and you plummet to your death. Normal cars crash into each other in just 2 dimensions. Flying cars crash into each other in three dimensions, and then you plummet to your death. Normal cars get stuck in traffic and sit with their engines at idle, producing small amounts of pollution, noise, wind and heat, yet still contribute substantially to global warming. Flying cars sitting at idle in a traffic jam still have to hover above the ground, which means they're running their engines almost as hard as if they were actually moving, producing tons more waste byproduct than even the most gas-guzzling SUV.

Of course, my argument isn't "flying cars are a bad idea", so all of those points might seem offtopic. But it links back to the idea that we already have flying cars and we've already realized that it's a terrible idea. Short of true anti-gravity, a flying car is always going to be less safe, more polluting, more complicated mechanically, and is always a bad idea. If people actually wanted flying cars, we would deal with the downsides long enough for smart people to overcome the reliability and price issues, but overcoming "plummeting to your death" is a genuinely difficult problem that only has one solution: true anti-grav that works even when the power is disconnected. Since that's a far-future sci-fi plot, the closest thing we have to flying cars is a helicopter.

It just turns out that using them as reliable daily individual transport is a really bad idea.

Flying cars are a bad idea, but that hasn't stopped a lot of people wanting them. The vast majority don't give it any thought beyond 'that would be cool', but a few are putting a lot of time and money into trying to make one. It's my opinion that the hardest of all the hard problems is noise, because there aren't many things that can be changed in how lift is generated, and rotors/propellers are intrinsically noise-generating.

I think you may be misinterpreting my last sentence. What I mean is that, just because medical science has not delivered immortality, it doesn't mean that there aren't lots of people who would prefer not to die. You could substitute specific causes of death, such as cancer or alzheimer's, into that argument, if you think that most people have come to terms with their mortality.

Re: We still don’t have flying cars nor self-conscious robots

But the proof of concept of auto-cars generally works. The kinks don't seem insurmountable, just a series of incremental improvements and economies of scale.

Flying cars on the other hand have some really big problems to tackle, such as noise pollution. And robots with "common sense" still seem a long ways off. There is no proof of concept that's even close.

I think the quote is along the lines of people tending to overestimate progress in the next 5 years but underestimate it in the next 25.

However they also get it wrong. It's hard to predict. Others in the thread have pointed out Asimov's stories that featured FTL warp drives and computers that fit in only one room.

One thing I've noted from observing 20th century progress is that progress is much, much faster for things that are less capital intensive per iteration. It's one reason I've been predicting that solar power will eat the world. Nuclear power is capital intensive per iteration (per power plant or research reactor), so even if it's superior in some ways it has a longer iteration time and so it will lose the race. I think this neatly explains why space tech stagnated and computer tech zoomed way ahead. So today we still have chemical rockets and still get most of our electricity globally from burning coal and gas (100+ year old tech), but we have supercomputers in our pockets.

Several people have formulated the same idea.

Bill Gates:

> We always overestimate the change that will occur in the next two years and underestimate the change that will occur in the next ten.

Roy Amara:

> We tend to overestimate the effect of a technology in the short run and underestimate the effect in the long run.

Kurzweil has called it ”the intuitive linear view” vs ”the historical exponential view”:

> Most technology forecasts ignore altogether this “historical exponential view” of technological progress. That is why people tend to overestimate what can be achieved in the short term (because we tend to leave out necessary details), but underestimate what can be achieved in the long term (because the exponential growth is ignored).

To be fair, one of the main things Stoll was critiquing at the time was whatever the educational tech hype du jour was which he was more right than wrong about. And twenty years later there's still a huge amount to criticize about how little tech has transformed education, especially in K-12.

ADDED: One thing Stoll did get quite wrong was missing the utility of mass amounts of often uncurated information. Though, in this regard, he has a lot of good company among science fiction authors who mostly envisioned centralized encyclopedias created by experts, not Wikipedia or the Web generally.

He wrote a great book "Silicon Snake Oil" that is full of things just like this he was so very wrong about, it's a great read still. He complains about how bad things were in the late 90s, but somehow misses how things will get better. It's really worth reading.

Somewhere there's a great review, written somewhat recently, on all the things he had wrong. I can't seem to find the one I'm thinking of. I guess he was correct about how things on the web are never permanent.

Well, much like in buying options, you have to guess both the outcome of a bet and the time at which it happens.

The author right, in 2003, I doubt you saw many people reading books on the beach with a clunky laptop or whatever version of kindle existed back then. So, from the mid 90s to mid 2000s, the author was decidedly right for 10 whole years, which is a long time.

Now, if he continued to say that not many people would read ebooks on the beach from 2008-2018, he would have been wrong about that bet. But I doubt he would have felt that way, because by 2008, it was much clearer where the internet was headed compared to in 1998

And, on still the other hand, I daresay a lot of the books read on a beach are still in dead tree form. Not that I really sit around beaches reading much, but I'd probably take a paperback over a Kindle for a variety of reasons.

I remember at the time he was always touted as a "futurist", but he didn't ever seem to get the "future" part of that word

To be fair, I find the experience of reading a book or newspaper on <insert your favorite E-reader here> at the beach is still inferior to having the dead tree version.

> To be fair, I find the experience of reading a book or newspaper on <insert your favorite E-reader here> at the beach is still inferior to having the dead tree version.

Oh, yes, sitting on a wet and windy beach trying to read a newspaper sounds superior to reading it on an e-reader in every conceivable way.

A book or magazine on the other hand.. I definitely prefer in paper.

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