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Comment by nabla9 | Hacker News Reader

"If the automobile had followed the same development as the computer, a Rolls- Royce would today cost $100, get a million miles per gallon, and explode once a year, killing everyone inside."

– Robert Cringely.

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It's concerning how hesitant I am to assert today's consumers wouldn't accept such a compromise.

In the past, not even distant past, just ~15-20 years ago, I'd confidently say that would never fly without hesitation.

It's definitely not the case today. Just look at how willing people are to delegate control over their lives to Tesla's "Autopilot". Even well-educated software engineers are being killed by putting 100% confidence in this glorified cruise control.

> well-educated software engineers are being killed by putting 100% confidence in this glorified cruise control.

If you mean the person who died when his car hit the crash attenuator on the way to work at Apple in California I think you are misrepresenting the situation.

As far as I can tell from the media reports on this case he had reported to Tesla that the autosteer misbehaved at this junction yet he still used it at that place and he was exceeding the speed limit. That's not confidence, it's foolhardiness.

In addition the crash attenuator had been hit by a conventional car a week earlier and had not been repaired.

I have a Tesla S, 2015 autopilot 1, and I use the autosteer feature pretty much every time I use the car. I am also a well educated software engineer but my degree is physics and my career has been in test equipment, embedded controllers, and design software.

I am well aware of the limitations of the feature and I pay attention to the times and circumstances in which it does not behave as well as I would like it to and adjust /my own/ behaviour accordingly. I suspect that most Tesla drivers do the same.

> It's concerning how hesitant I am to assert today's consumers wouldn't accept such a compromise.

Nobody would get in a car that kills you once a year.

But it would be an amazing tool for pulling things. So they might get in a carriage behind it. And people would definitely use that tech to make unmanned truck tractors.

>Nobody would get in a car that kills you once a year.

Sure, PEOPLE wouldn't, but I'd bet that we'd have autonomous driving perfected for deliveries if every car only cost $100 and was essentially free to run.

People crash all the time texting and driving. I see people looking into their phones while the car is coasting all the time. Autopilot is at the very least a much much safer coasting mode. To say Tesla Autopilot, at least the current version of it, net-net increases the chance of crashes is pure speculation, requiring a very hard to measure second-order effect argument of it being significant a cause for distraction and intuitively untrue for anyone who actually uses it day to day.

Yeah, I enable autopilot when I need to adjust the ac/music or switch from my glasses to sunglasses, because (on the roads I normally drive on) it does a decent job staying in the lane.

Also, in traffic, I’ve been finding Autopilot/adaptive cruise control to be really great for enabling me to pay more attention to the cars around me, because I spend a lot less energy worrying about the speed of the car in front of me and following the curves of the road.

The engine behind moore's law is that for the same given silicon area, we can pack more and more transistors. So what, one might say? Because if we can cram more and more die on a wafer (which has remained a standard 300mm diameter since 2000's) then the $/die goes down. Running a semiconductor fab is about how many wafers can be processed per unit time (or also known as WS/W or wafer starts per week). I see problems with this analogy but that's fine, its an analogy after all :)

"If the automobile had followed the same development as the computer, we would produce a billion rolls royces a year, get a million miles per gallon, can transport 10000 people per car and explode once a year, killing everyone inside. Oh and it would cost $3.50 per car."

And no one would want them because they're a few years out of date.

That's also true with cars for the most part. Not a lot of market for thirty year old cars unless they're very specific models (much like thirty year old computers).

30 year old computers are worth some money.

Not in general they're not. Specific models are, like specific models of cars.

Try to find somebody willing to pay you more than half of original MSRP for some random Compaq PC from 1990.

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