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Comment by a_bonobo | Hacker News Reader

John Deere saw this coming a long time ago; they've locked down the data their tractors generated with iron bars. Lots of previous HN discussions.

Now they make bank based on that data, they use their customers' millions of hours of driving tractors to train self-driving tractors. They can do it not because of fancy AI, but because they spent years raising abundant task-specific data. It's genius: the customers pay John Deere to create data for John Deere, which John Deere uses to get more money from other customers.

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I think you're mixing two very separable behaviors. They're using data from their tractors to train AIs (1), and they're locking the data away from their customers, including from their customers' own tractors (2).

First is pretty cool, second is pretty shitty.

And?

Who do you think would pay JD to generate this data otherwise?

The customers of course.

I get your sentiment, but tractors generally drive based on GPS routes.

AI and data collection is useful for more intricate tasks, like spraying weeds, planting seeds, etc.

The article literally mentions that the tractors use AI to avoid obstacles in the first paragraph.

The tractor is still driving on a pre-programmed GPS route.

To avoid a semantics debate, I'll agree for a brief moment the AI is "driving" the tractor to avoid an object and get back on the pre-programmed route.

Self driving encompasses a bunch of things. Obstacle detection is one. Vehicle control, including micro adjustments, is one. Path planning is another one.

GPS is one way of doing one part of self driving. But it's ALL self driving

A pre-planned route != self-driving (in my opinion).

I say that because it's not driving itself, it's driving a route you plotted or recorded.

You can't take that same tractor and have it work on your neighbors pasture as-is, it has to be programmed.

But again, this is getting into a semantics debate. Personally I'd prefer to differentiate using autonomous and automated, self-driving is too ambiguous.

By that logic, am I driving the car while following the route plotted and dictated to me by Google Maps? What if it's all over two-lane freeways, so all I have to do is stay on track, not crash into the vehicle in front of me, and follow Google's instructions? And what if I then turn on adaptive cruise control? Am I still driving the car?

So you really think looking at a GPS and driving a car yourself and putting cruise control on makes a car self-driving?

(hint: no, you are driving the car with assisted technology)

I'll remember to cite this in the next Tesla thread when we discuss Autopilot and self-driving.

Agreed. It will always be pre-programmed GPS because it’s the only way for a tractor to get an absolute position and heading without a star tracker and a sophisticated dead reckoning system (expensive gyros and accelerometers) or an electronic perimeter.

Tractors don’t sit idle all of the time, the owners swap out tractor attachments so their “user experience” depends on handling the transition between manual driving and automatic operation, even if that UX is limited to “too far from first waypoint, try again.”

If I’m driving a car, and hit a brick wall that someone’s put in the middle of the road, it’s inarguable that this is a failure of my driving. There are no hairs to split here.

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