Comment by Robotbeat | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Robotbeat | Hacker News Reader

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I want to address this because in spite of Elon (whether punching down with Twitter or COVIDiocy, etc) burning up a lot of the goodwill he had accumulated in the past, these things remain:

The reason people think Elon may do level 5 autonomy is because his companies have accomplished several things that industry experts said were either infeasible or impossible. Fast charging, large-battery electric cars that are faster than almost all conventional cars.

Remember, pre-Tesla, electric cars were looked at as pathetic toys, like golf carts or, AT BEST, green bling like Priuses which are pretty slow and kinda ugly.

And not only has Tesla ramped up to mass production of these desirable vehicles, but they’ve also done it during the ending of EV credits (which almost all their competitors still have access to!) AND crazy low gas prices. And every time, the media plays up this or that “Tesla killer” that never ends up living up to the name and often completely tanks. Every time media or experts say Tesla will fail and they don’t reinforces the view in many that Tesla is somehow special.

And even SpaceX’s early successes like Falcon 1, Falcon 9, and Dragon Cargo were unprecedented for a private company and at those extremely low costs (at the time, Aerospace was a money pit for cost-inflating defense contractors, not nimble rocket startups). Then when they proposed propulsive landing, some NASA experts in the field thought it’d fail. I know one NASA GNC guy who said droneship landing is impossible. Clearly not, as we see now that it’s routine! Then Falcon Heavy, And now Dragon Crew... beating out Boeing, who had long been favored by old guard experts to beat SpaceX to ISS. Similar experts were certain SpaceX would be beat by OneWeb to launching the initial constellation... and we know how that has turns out (OneWeb went bankrupt). Then experts said that SpaceX had no Starlink terminals... until of course pictures emerged of sites they’ve had user terminals testing for months already.

So while I share the skepticism for level 5 autonomy, you should keep in mind That Musk’s companies keep accomplishing what many folks (who should know what they’re talking about) said couldn’t be done. And the more those experts say it’s impossible, the greater that Musk’s reputation soars after the task is completed nonetheless.

What exactly did his companies deliver, that experts said was impossible, in the technological sense I mean? Reusable rockets, deemed possible but not economic due to the low number of launches. SpaceX delivered amazing stuff, so, but nothing impossible. EVs were a thing already 100 years ago, so technically totally feasible, as is mass production. And the battery tech is to large part Panasonic. Still impressive what Tesla did, but again nothing technologically impossible.

Not feasible is a different thing. A lot of people said that about EVs and reusable rockets. With EVs he pushed the industry in zzhe right direction, at enormous costs. Funding seems to be directly linked to Elon, so. And whether or not reusable rockets are feasible is hard to tell, since SpaceX isn't publishing any results.

I think that the moment Elon runs out of stuff to hype and sell to investors, or just fails to sell, is the moment his companies go down. Which would be a pity.

> What exactly did his companies deliver, that experts said was impossible, in the technological sense I mean?

Landing the Falcon 9 booster on a droneship. As a physicist, I never believed it was impossible (the bar for “impossible” is rather high in physics) and yet an expert in the field told me it was!

I mean, people had demonstrated VTOL rocket landings before SpaceX came along. It was obviously just a matter of scaling it up and throwing tons of engineering man hours and test money at it, as SpaceX did.

Oh, absolutely. And yet... the consensus among most of the oldguard was that that approach wouldn't work. Many in the industry thought that reuse had effectively failed due to the lessons of Shuttle and the real future lie in expendables. Additionally, the old guard at NASA that WERE into reuse were generally for single-stage, horizontal landing architectures. In the specific case of the GNC specialist that told me it was impossible, he actually said this AFTER SpaceX had proved Falcon 9 VTVL on land! He thought the relative motion of the droneship would make the landing effectively impossible... I disagreed.

The phrase "hindsight is 2020" applies to Elon's accomplishments in spades... anything he hasn't achieved yet is an "obvious con" and "impossible" while past achievements were "merely a matter of throwing engineers at the problem"...

One of the reasons nobody tries seriously before was economics. They came to the conclusion that it was simply cheaper to not reuse boosters due to the overall low number of launches. And whether that is true or not cannot be evaluated without SpaceX results being published.

First flight: 1993

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McDonnell_Douglas_DC-X

100 $ / kWh battery packs. Or the range of the Semi, deemed 'physically impossible' by a Daimler exec. Let's see how that goes.

Musk's whole point is this: much more things are technologically feasible, but most people / companies limit themselves within apparent constraints.

As mentioned: he's a physicist. From a physics standpoint, only a small amount of things are actually impossible. Only the deepest fundamentals give rise to constraints, and only those are the constraints he accepts. Everything else is debatable. At least. Sure, money so that he can throw army of talented engineers at problems helps. But it's his whole point! If it's your goal and it's possible in principle, reach for it.

Be it batteries, reusable rockets, autopilot.

That's why he says that it's possible in principle to achieve level 5 autonomy without lidar (having worked with lidar as chief engineer at SpaceX) and that it's possible in principle to do brain-machine-brain communication of language or complex ideas within a decade.

It might not work eventually. If so, it might be very well delayed for years.

But there is a reason that ppl like Thiel or Palihapitiya say: never bet against Elon.

Imagine Tesla actually rolling out level 5 autonomy within a year or two...

We are waiting for Level 5 for way longer than 2 years by now. And you don't have to pull the physical impossible argument. EVs were among the first cars built 100 years ago. Reusable boosters were deemed possible but not economic by EASA before SpaceX talked about them.

Musk is constantly moving the goal post, so when he ultimately delivers something one day, people tend to forget how often he didn't deliver in the past. He seems to be the only one to get away with that.

This is some serious revisionist history right here.

No one was talking about technically possible. We're not discussing space elevators.

The key point is combining economic feasibility with the prevailing cultural will.

Of course electric cars exist. GM made a bunch of them in the 90s and literally forcibly recalled them and crushed them into tiny cubes in front of their owners. They held a candle light vigil. The documentary about this is what inspired Musk to get involved with Tesla in the first place. There was clearly passionate market demand that was being suffocated and purposefully ignored by bloated incumbents who couldn't see anything past their bottom line and they lost track of the market.

Americans are sick of excuses for space travel. The USA is made entirely out of a culture of optimism and all the aerospace companies have nothing to show for meaningful progress as they collect their massive government checks. SpaceX is the first group to ever over promise and then also over deliver. They don't give excuses, they get results.

There is hype because these are the first companies since the post war utopia that are actually making things again that are fundamentally changing our transportation reality with technology.

So you are saying that before Tesla EVs were not a thing. They were, already during the early day of automobiles. Funny how better electric motors enabled ICE cars and killed EVs.

Before SpaceX, humanity travelled to the moon, shot probes out of the solar system, landed on other planets and moons. We got multiple space stations into orbit. We didn't have reusable rockets so.

And aerospace companies did, in fact, change transportation fundamentally post WWII. Jet engines, passenger jets, the 747, ever decreasing fuel consumption per passenger, ever quieter aircraft.

And the parent was talking about technical impossible. Which clearly it isn't. Never argued against incumbents being unwilling to do certain things. But please stop putting Musk, and people in general, on podests like that.

> hen when they proposed propulsive landing, some NASA experts in the field thought it’d fail. I know one NASA GNC guy who said drone ship landing is impossible.

Propulsive landing was not a spacex innovation. They simply picked back up the research agenda of Delta Clipper.

There is one aspect that SpaceX absolutely pioneered: supersonic retropropulsion. NASA was actually planning on testing it as it's needed for landing heavy payloads on Mars, but SpaceX figured it out for "free."

To be honest, SpaceX got a ton of VC money on top of a ton of NASA money on top of a ton of government launch money.

Not saying SpaceX isn't impressive, but without published results it is impossible to tell how economic their tech is, how expensive development and so on.

> The reason people think Elon may do level 5 autonomy is because his companies have accomplished several things that industry experts said were either infeasible or impossible.

That is all well and good, but what is at issue here and in many of these comments is the deceptive/dangerous marketing around Tesla's current offerings and, implicitly, the potential dangers it presents to the public roadways.

There is no progress if said "progress" is achieved unethically at any stage of its development.

I think we all, deep down, know this to be true.

I think Musk does not believe in that or marginalizes it (to cynically achieve business objectives) given some of his public statements and actions (snubbing the NTSB during the Mountain View investigation, taking his own hands off the wheel for a considerable period of time during an early 60 Minutes interview, several questionable statements on Twitter, glossing over the hundreds of abuses on YouTube and other social media platforms) with respect to Tesla - particularly in the past year or so.

Furthermore, let us consider that developing a highly desirable electric vehicle and the technical bar to clear to achieve that pales in comparison technologically to what Musk and Tesla are promising in Level 5 autonomous driving several times (wrongly) in the past and in the near future. Level 5 Autonomy presents several unpredictable engineering unknowns that may require similarly unpredictable breakthroughs while the development of say, the Model 3, was an iterative improvement upon what was already available in the market at the time - impressive improvement though it may be.

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