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Comment by DanielBMarkham | Hacker News Reader

This is a great article. Every now and then Matt can really knock one out of the park.

Of all the tech that we talk about on here, there are only a few items that really catch my attention. Christmas tree machines are one of them. Auto-drive cars is the other.

These two inventions, when complete, will massively change things. Good luck guessing when they'll be complete, though. Could be a decade. Could be a couple of hundred years.

If cars could become more like rooms that automatically go places, instead of complex machines that require constant care and oversight, vast amounts of productivity and leisure opportunities would open up.

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It's a little strange, because another trend directly competing with automatic cars is telecommunications. If it were possible and culturally acceptable for all white-collar workers to telecommute full-time, all of a sudden there would be half as many cars on the streets. If there were efficient, cost-effective, and prompt delivery systems for local goods like groceries, there would be half as many again. It's conceivable that there won't be much private driving for reasons besides pure leisure 15 years from now.

So it's not clear to me whether automatic cars or "rooms that go places" will always remain as useful as they sound today.

(Practically speaking, though, I'd bet on it, since cars are pretty ingrained into American culture and since the auto industry is large and very committed to keeping individuals on the road.)

"If there were efficient, cost-effective, and prompt delivery systems for local goods like groceries"

Wouldn't trucks work? It sounds crazy at first, but I suspect one truck making the rounds every day, like the postman, would still be more energy efficient than hundreds of cars going back and forth to the supermarket?

Sure, that's more or less what I was thinking; UPS or FedEx, but local. Obviously, that would save a lot of time and energy. It's non-trivial, though, since the stores would suddenly need EDI systems that could communicate orders and shipments and statuses to these delivery guys. Big chains do this sort of thing all the time, but some local businesses would probably have a hard time making this suddenly happen out of the blue.

Offices are cheaper per person to run and provision than individual dwellings due to the extra density of workers, so this trend depends on the tradeoff between the energy saved by reducing travel and the energy spent heating/cooling/running individual home offices.

On the other hand, many countries are dealing with ageing populations. Self-driving cars will give the elderly and the disabled a level of autonomy that we take for granted. That's my bet on the big win.

But given that the homes exist anyway, from a pure monetary basis the home office ends up winning pretty much every time. (To be sure, not everyone has a home office they'd be comfortable working in full-time.) The issue, one of them anyway, is that F2F communication is a lot more interactive, higher bandwidth, and encourages unstructured interaction. I do a lot of conference calls and other forms of telecommuting but it's still enormously useful to go into the office a good chunk of the time.

I take major issue with his prediction that driverless cars would subsume subway usage - at least, in cities where mass rail transit is the norm instead of the exception. Five million ride on NYC's subway every day. No matter how good the algorithms, an additional 2.5m (riders typically ride twice a day - to and from work/school) cars on the streets of Manhattan and the boroughs would be catastrophic.

Not so sure I agree. When I try to think of the core difference between subways and robotic vehicles, the only one I can think of is the relative lack of stops and the absence of cross-traffic.

With a serious and reliable driverless car system, stops could be integrated in a way which made them minimally impede traffic flow and the cross traffic optimized to maximize the flow over the whole road network.

Keep in mind we are talking about (in the limit at least) a network of driverless cars which can communicate. If traffic signals are in on the deal, I see no reason we shouldn't be able to do far, far better than a subway system.

The time-frame for auto driving cars is actually more difficult to predict than that for general adaptive robotics because of the regulatory and social issues involved. I'm sure it will be decades not centuries though.

My prediction is that robotic servants will be common place in homes by the 2020's and that almost all manual occupations will be replaced with automation during that decade. I have no idea how society and the economy are going to adapt to that reality however.

Decades I can accept, centuries seem a bit too pessimistic. If we really need centuries I would expect technical and not social issues to be the holdup.

Automation has slowly been creeping into cars over the last decade or so. Lights and wipers turn on and off automatically, cars brake and belts tighten when danger is detected, systems help you keep the lane and cars can park all by themselves (brake and gas are controlled by the driver, the car steers).

All of this is a far cry from a truly self-driving car but all of this has been implemented without much fuss. All the imaginable horror scenarios did not scare citizens or politicians. I think that’s good sign and I also think that many debates about potential social problems of the introductions of self-driving cars are driven by overly negative stereotypes of political systems.

I also think that it doesn’t really matter all that much if the US doesn’t want to do it. There are more than enough other rich nations out there.

I pretty much agree with you. I just think that acceptance of automation in non-life critical situations will come easier and probably first.

It's also true that we already depend on many life-critical software systems, in aviation and medical devices notably. In a rational world all that one would need to show is that statistically a self-driving car is safer than a human driver. That bar is probably not that hard to achieve. I'm just not sure how to predict how the general public will react to automated systems that can and will kill people in rare circumstances and whose correctness can at best only be defined in probabilistic terms.

> almost all manual occupations will be replaced with automation during that decade

Unions will just go quietly into the night?

If we can make food, medicine, and shelter almost free with the help of automation, then people would no longer need jobs to meet their survival needs.

I agree. What I have trouble seeing is how we will transition from a society where most people's share of economic production is based on employment to one that really doesn't need many humans to produce goods.

Humans will produce culture and luxury instead. We're already halfway there: Think of the percentage of people directly involved in producing first necessities compared to a thousand years ago.

Energy isn't free.

Well, at least not yet.

At most unions only have any power whatsoever in traditional manufacturing corporations. They're practically non-existent in the service sector. If someone wants to start a company that fully automates the manufacture of iPhones or an automobile, how could unions stop him ?

Technical obstacles, financial obstacles - sure. Government obstacles - maybe. But unions ?

What is a Christmas tree machine?

They're going by the name "3-D printer" right now, but the overall idea is a home fabrication machine capable of producing complex 3-D goods (including moving parts, electronics, etc) on demand. Current 3-D printing is an extremely crude version of the eventual device.

So if you wanted a new microwave, go online and download the design. Then go to the Christmas Tree machine and have it print one up for you. Just like presents under a Christmas Tree, you ask for something, say the magic words, then it appears with a little bow on it. (It occurs to me they should have been named Santa Claus machines, but I don't make this stuff up, I simply repeat it)

Of course, we're starting off with extremely simple implementations. I think the current technology does stuff like figurines. Adding moving parts is probably a next logical step, then printable simple electronics.

There's a long way to go, but once realized, Christmas Tree machines will change everything.

Ah, I gotcha, thanks. I've only ever heard those called "3D printers". Google only turned up either artificial tree makers or logging equipment.

The Make magazine follows CTM/3DP stuff pretty closely: http://blog.makezine.com/

It's the latest name. Don Lancaster's been calling them Santa Claus machines for about 15 years now...

Actually, that seems like a low estimate. I think I remember him already having coined that term when I was buying his books 20 years ago...

...And Don was already Old School then...

...so how long did it take before your copy of The Incredible Secret Money Machine was ripped off :-)

I proactively bought gift copies...

Seriously, it is amazing how way ahead of the curve he was. ISMM was originally published when Tim Ferriss was only 1 year old, but the only real difference between it and 4 Hour Work Week is the scale that the Internet makes available. Every time some hungry hacker blogs about supplementing his income by selling photos on some stock photography site--man, it's deja vu all over again.

Scifi. Imagine you had nano-scale robots where, given a substrate to work with, they would assemble whatever the local environment needed to look like, then assemble two child bots coming from them like twigs on the branch of a Christmas tree. This is supposed to allow arbitrarily complex construction at prices which are rounding error next to current ones, solving scarcity, reshaping the world, and generally making for a nice backdrop for your novel of choice.

[Edit: Hmm, Daniel and I seem to have different etymologies for the word...]

[Edit the second: Engrish is hard.]

FWIW your version is the one I've encountered before.

I saw it in a nice book called Indistinguishable From Magic by Robert L. Forward. It is half sci-fi, and half hard science fact. The format is that he first describes a hard science idea that could allow future technology to do something that looks like magic. And then he has a short story showing a world with that technology. Then he moves on to the next idea.

Christmas Tree robots were one of the ideas he considered.

Either you mean "etymology", or that's a really unusual and interesting sentence :-)

Oh you mean Kalpavriksha! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kalpavriksha

I guessed 3d printer. A search results suggested it was a common science fiction term synonymous with Star Trek's replicator.

I love the concept of: rooms which go places.

Carriages with compartments are one of the reasons I prefer travelling by train over other forms of transportation - they're basically an implementation of the travelling room concept, albeit non-private. You usually have to share the compartment with up to 5 other travellers, but a handful of people in a small room tend to be much quieter (and more friendly) than dozens in an open plan carriage. Sadly, compartments are increasingly rare nowadays, even in first class. I assume they're less space efficient in terms of passengers/m².

Of course, if you can afford it, you can get one like this... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Royal_Train

My grandparents used to call their RV 'the wheelhouse', which I guess is like the more common term 'motorhome'.

When someone else is driving, for you it certainly functions like a room that goes places.

I mean, isn't this a room that goes places? http://www.prevostcar.com/DB/markets/market_motorhome_4high....

Major changes would have to made to cars so they could function like that for everyone safely, though. Even with robot drivers, I still wouldn't trust that I could be walking around cooking and playing ping pong while we're moving.

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