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Comment by axguscbklp | Hacker News Reader

Here's what I don't get about the robotaxi stuff - did the company and the investors ever actually believe that the robotaxi stuff was even close to viable, or was it just a scam all along? To me it seems obvious that fully self-driving cars are almost certainly, at best, several decades away - and, if it turns out that fully self-driving technology really does require artificial general intelligence, it's quite plausible that humanity actually will never build fully self-driving cars. This isn't something that I've just realized recently - I've thought for several years now that full self-driving is almost certainly at best quite far away. How did it happen that thousands and thousands of rather smart people fell for the delusion that there was any realistic chance of implementing full self-driving any time soon? Of course it's not just Uber in question, it's also Tesla, Waymo, and so on.

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There are certainly some overly optimistic timelines being promised by some people and companies, but "several decades" seems extremely pessimistic. There are self-driving cars driving all over San Francisco (and presumably other cities) with minimal human driver intervention. I'm sure they're not perfect, and they might not be as good as whatever human driving ability baseline will be needed for mainstream and regulatory acceptance of self-driving cars, but I don't think there's any huge leap (like the development of AGI) required to get to that acceptance from where we are now.

There is a huge leap in regulations and public acceptance needed. Either way it doesn’t affect Uber because the tech will be easily licensable.

Several decades ago, I was hearing about flying cars. The technology existed for years. Commercial flight is a thing too, but 20 years later we're still no closer to having flying cars.

Why would self driving cars be different?

I don't know, why would any new technology be different? I feel like the similarities between flying cars and self driving cars are superficial.

The factors seems weighted very differently. Flying cars are even more dangerous than SDV (a flying ton near buildings ?). The technological soil of the era might be less nurturing than today.

> Flying cars are even more dangerous than SDV

Are they though? Statistically speaking, planes are safer than cars, and SDVs don't exactly have a pristine record track already.

Commercial planes are inspected regularly by qualified technicians, flown by professional pilots, and they don't fly between buildings in densely populated areas. Imagine if every average joe owned a helicopter, and maintained it the way he maintains his rusty old car... Small planes don't have nearly the safety record of commercial planes, and if everyone owned aerial vehicles that fly inside cities, you can be sure it would be a disaster.

I think there's an argument to be made that if flying cars were owned by a company like Uber, regularly inspected, and flown by a computer, the safety could be there, but then you're still left with issues such as noise and energy efficiency.

I never could swallow the statistics of flight safety. Of course they're safer, there's nothing in the sky. I assure you I can drive a million mile in a flat desert without a single incident while sleeping[0].

Flying cars were probably asking to operate in close proximity to things and people and it would make the probs a lot different IMO.

[0] end of hyperbole.

One of the promises about flying cars was speed: you would theoretically be able to live in LA and commute to SF. So there was definitely some amount of disruption talk.

With that said, this is sort of the point: SDVs would be close to arms reach of pedestrians virtually all the time, so I'd imagine that when all is said and done, the safety/regulatory barrier ought to be an extremely high hurdle to overcome.

There are many things that we can talk about in terms of "if only X was solved, that would change the world" (e.g. X being the cure for cancer, or X being singularity, etc). But the devil is of course in the details: until we know what X is, it _could_ be a single breakthrough but it most likely is a nearly insurmountable wall of a million factors). For SDVs, X is L5 autonomy.

Yeah they're even closer but they're not flying. I'm not even arguing for SDV or against flying cars but I do believe that flying tons in cities is (unless you have Transformers level of tech) non sequitur.

That said I'm far more about co-disrupting the world by .. walking.

General aviation (the closes comparison to driving) is more than 20x more dangerous than driving.

https://philip.greenspun.com/flying/safety

I’m not sure I understand the argument. Surely you can’t conclude from the lack of flying cars that nothing will ever happen.

I'm questioning the notion that SDV are somehow just around the corner, considering that another technology with similar regulatory/safety/public opinion challenges still hasn't become ubiquitous after over 20 years.

Flying cars aren’t (as far as I know) being routinely tested in major cities the same way self-driving cars are.

> did the company and the investors ever actually believe that the robotaxi stuff was even close to viable

IMO, absolutely. The hype for self driving cars a few years ago was massive. I forget who, but a prominent SV investor offered to make a bet with someone that self-driving taxis would be on the road in five years. There was plenty of it in HN, too.

That's the investors. Did Travis think so too? The insane amounts of money they spent on acquisitions and developing the tech suggests yes: they were trying to be first to a huge potential market. But maybe he was doing all that to scam investors, who can tell.

I think all the self-driving cars hysteria was just momentum from the hype of deep learning advances. I remember thinking about the idea of self driving cars within 10 years, "this seems crazy, but I guess I've been wrong before...". A few years later it seems even crazier. But I've also been wronger than that...

There were (are?) people talking about Artificial General Intelligence being just around the corner, which is a sign of people buying way too much into the hype cycle.

It's the sort of problem that is easily prone to extreme optimism extreme pessimism cycles. You get 90% of the way there and then the difficulty skyrockets. Getting to 95% is as hard as going from 0 to 90%. Getting to where you need to be for it to be mainstream is like 10-20X as hard as making an impressive looking proof of concept.

Space flight is another thing like that. We were supposed to have manned flights to the outer solar system by 2000. We're getting reusable first stages that are actually economical to fly and commercial orbital spacecraft in 2020. That was supposed to be 1980s stuff according to 1950s and 1960s space hype.

Putting someone on the moon? 1969. But that was done with a monstrously expensive finicky one-off architecture that could never be anywhere close to economical, and it was dangerous as hell. Routine trips to the moon that could even approach economic sustainability are at least 10X as hard as Apollo.

I strongly suspect safe, sustainable, and affordable nuclear fission power is yet another one. Getting some atoms to smash and boil some water? Easy! Build some power plants? A little harder. Then you hit the edge of that bath tub curve and the problems (waste, safety, fuel cycle, cost management) multiply and it gets brutally hard really fast.

We should learn to recognize engineering problems that have this kind of "bath tub curve" for difficulty vs ones with gentler learning curves.

I like these analogies to other engineering challenges!

It's easy to make predictions when outside a field (and I'm guilty of this fallacy too), but easy to miss the true challenges. For example, a lot of people just assume that fusion reactors will be better than fission, because that's what they were told their entire life and because we still haven't figured it out. But looking at energy density or thermal transference and fusion just looks like a really crappy heat source, something that would be incredibly difficult to ever engineer into a product without a secondary invention that is just as difficult, if not more, than the initial idea of fusion.

Fusion is much better on safety, waste, and fuel cycle. The thing I wonder is whether it can be made cost competitive with renewables plus storage when the latter is experiencing falling costs at scale. At midday solar is already cheaper than most other power sources, and economical storage at scale is probably a much easier problem than fusion (or really good scalable fission for that matter).

I work in machine learning, and I've noticed a particular dynamic in how people treat predictions like this.

In general, when there is a breakthrough in a field of research—like what deep learning went through recently—there is a gold rush of new projects that push the boundaries.

A certain category of people look at these new startups, and project that momentum out to some extremely distant problem (like AGI or fully autonomous vehicles), without understanding if this field of research necessarily leads to solutions to those problems, at least in linear fashion.

Then there is another category of person who looks at those predictions and dismisses the entire field as hype, ignoring the surge of valuable projects that kicked it all off.

Totally agree, and as newcomers enter the field they can have a mistaken sense of time as they digest a bunch of really amazing new ideas, like has happened with deep learning in the past decade (the decades before that felt much slower to me).

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