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Comment by mertlx | Hacker News Reader

I'm not surprised. People want to drive, the market for those who want to be driven around by an AI chauffeur is minimal.

Add the legal liabilities, and it's a fantasy project with hardly any takers like the metaverse.

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>People want to drive

I seriously question that as a general statement.

I don't mind driving for the most part and there are situations where I even enjoy it. But the congested drive into the 1 hr+ away city for an evening event or long boring highway drives? (And certainly a commute if I did one?) If there were an AI chauffeur I could engage for a price not that much elevated over driving myself? Sign me up. Not that I expect to see that anytime soon.

I don’t particulary like driving either. OTOH my car is boring&practical - if the car was a fun drive it might change my disposition.

Even given your German (or whatever) sports car of choice, a lot of driving on both highways and in urban areas especially is just boring or annoying.

This is a solved problem. You can buy cars that will drive themselves on the highway and in traffic jams. The other situations are the unsolved problem.

I’m not sure where you’re based but I hate driving and so do many of my friends. I’m probably in the middle of the average age of a HN reader, and I’ve lived in huge cities and small towns (mostly Europe, never the US, which might be e factor here).

Give me more trains and then self driving cars only for the last few kilometres of the route.

As someone who has driven the equivalent of 23x around the equator I have to tell you, as much as I like driving, you see a lot more from the passenger seat. So if I had an AI chauffeur tomorrow I’d happily jump into the passenger seat and have it drive me down historic Route 66, then onward to Wyoming and Montana, and maybe the trans-Canada highway from there.

"People want to drive, the market for those who want to be driven around by an AI chauffeur is minimal"

Did you ever had to drive somewhere for more than a few hours?

Everyone I know, would rather have a chauffeur then. If the chauffeur is trustworthy.

If is correct. I'll probably never trust unattended software to drive me. I'll let the generations coming up take that plunge.

It's weird and I'm likely in the minority here. I actually do like to be the driver when it's 4 or more hours. It's a way to be engaged in something.

There was a time when I was regularly doing 6 to 12 hour drives every other month or so.

Well, you may drive me and my family around then.

But I doubt you have as much fun, when the children loudly say, they have enough after 30 minutes ..

> People want to drive

Unfortunately. I guess it will take 50-100 years more for necessary changes in society values/worldview to realize that it's really not a good idea. Just like it happened with smoking.

>People want to drive

I, for one, would love a self-driving rv. I can see it now, first taking a shower, then sitting back on the sofa, drinking a cup of coffee while silently gliding to the office in the morning.

I want a self driving camper van not for the office commute but for travel. Imagine being able to leave after work on a Friday night, chill on the sofa with a few drinks, sleep and wake up parked anywhere within 14 hours range.

Then on sunday night you simply go to bed, wake up, have the shower and coffee and boom you're back at the office. Or if you work remote you could potentially work while the van drives you places.

I want the freedom to take a short trip to the store or a long trip to visit friends and family, without waiting to leave. I'm not a big fan of the actual driving part, but there's no way to avoid it without depending on another human being and their car.

That is what a functional transit system does. In Japan, train headways can be 5 min. You get to the station, wait a minute, hop onto a train, hop off, walk a minute, and you're there. The same amount of time it takes for you to put your seatbelt on, check the dash, and park. Transportation on demand.

Yes, people would also LOVE to fly an airplane. Yet it's great that they generally can't as that would pose a danger to their surroundings.

Why we act like the death toll of 35.000 A DAY is an acceptable price for "the fun of driving" I can't comprehend.

any death toll is acceptable if we're accustomed to it. It's seen as inevitable and people stop caring.

The only reason we actually (as a society) care about people dying is when they're dying from something novel.

Depends on what kind of want to drive actually. I doubt anyone wants to be stuck in traffic every day because they have to get to work / are out of groceries etc.

Now going on a long weekend and having fun on a winding mountain road is another matter...

Clearly not true in the US, where driving is (at best) a distant 2nd to the most popular activity while behind the steering wheel: looking at your phone.

Plenty of people use VR Chat. Once it gets mainstream it'll be common place.

At the moment it's int he same place as IRC was back in the 90s before social media took off

Well, your opinion is as valuable as mine: I think you're completely wrong and VR will never be mainstream.

I'll double your opinion. ;-)

VR for communication may not be. VR for training will almost certainly be in use by millions of people on a daily basis in the very near future. Anything that requires operation of a machine or performance of a physical procedure and some level of risk/cost will probably involve VR.

Just so.

I'd be very interested to see some data here. What's "plenty"?

But the big difference between the 1990s and now is that everybody already has perfectly good text chat. Plus free voice calls and video calls. Plus regular social media for non-synchronous interaction.

I can believe VR Chat is better for some niche of people. But I don't see much reason to think it's going to be enough better than all the other options that people will don special gear for it.

Someone would sure have to convince me that the VR made things a lot better. I'm skeptical given that I rarely even use video for personal calls outside of some group Zoom one group of friends or other put together maybe every couple months.

Yeah, video is a great example. In the movie 2001, which was made in 1968, video calls were The Future just as much as space travel was. But now that we actually have video calls, we've discovered that they're good for some things, but people prefer lower-capability mediums for a lot of things.

In the case of 2001, it also made the assumption that the futuristic video call would be made from... a phone booth as opposed to a mobile device networked to the station's computer.

I suspect many of us would be more inclined to just use video if we were sitting in a video booth--or, as is actually the case, from a place we've arranged to made video call from using a computer. As it is though, when I'm casually chatting with someone, I'll often be multitasking with making dinner or I'll be pausing the video I was watching on the TV. I'm not really setup for video and they're probably in the same boat.

But we know what each other look like anyway. Video is often better for a group call for various reasons but for a 1:1 chat voice is fine.

I've been video chatting my friends since Skype was a P2P app in the mid-2000s, though I was definitely the more introverted/less video-happy friend in the bunch. The friends most interested in video chatting were usually not STEM folks. My Gen-Z baby sibling has been using FaceTime to chat with school friends since they were 12. Even as early as 2014, so very pre-pandemic, 15-20 million FaceTime calls were being made per day [1]. I think you're colored by a STEM bubble, since STEM folks tend to be more private and introverted. Video chatting is huge.

[1]: https://www.macrumors.com/2014/02/28/apple-40-billion-imessa...

Fair enough. Honestly, probably not so much about being introverted. I'm actually a marketing person who travels to a lot of events these days :-) But when I'm casually talking 1:1 with someone I know personally, voice-only is just a lot more flexible. I don't mind video but it's more convenient to chat audio-only while also doing something else.

I think where 2001-style projections of the future differ is that they hold up video chatting to be some end-all, be-all goal of future communication. As you say, audio only is more convenient. I'm a dirty tech person and I prefer text even when most of my friends prefer audio. But unless I'm putting my software engineer hat on, I'm not really thinking about "how am I communicating today is it video, voice, or text" I'm just summing up my situation (at home, in public, doing groceries, etc) and finding out how I can communicate with a person. With video, voice, and text all instantly available, none of us really think of one form as paramount, though we all have our preferences. Just like in real life, we all communicate in each other with different ways appropriate to our moods and our settings.

100%. And this isn't a new thing. 25 years ago when I was a product manager, I used to hate the call from a sales rep or systems engineer that involved discussing the weather etc. when all they really cared about was the answer to a specific question which could have been a five minute email. (Not that there is anything wrong with some inefficiency if it helps establish connections.)

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