Why's everyone being so negative? This is cool!
You can see significantly more negativity for non-SV tech, especially when they do something outside of the narrative. If it’s an electric car, should be batteries and not fuel cells for example.
This is also one of the reasons why if a company wants to go big needs to move to SV. It looks much better when things happen the correct way, you don’t have to do all that convincing.
I couldn't find the video I was looking for but this is another cool one from the 80s: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_HbVWm7wdmE
Anyway, the way I see it is, to get positive reaction you need to drive and follow the narrative. That is, for example, providing arguments about how it should be done as if it is a public debate and then reveal your tech. Then you will have fanboys and and hateboys and people will feel involved and if you do it in SV your ability to do what you say you do would not be questioned as much because magic happens in SV.
You say that your car is basically a computer o wheels and the story gets traction, when a car company makes a self driving car it doesn't fit and will need to do much more convincing because the techies will be digging in to find faults. The computer on wheels might cause crashes but the techies will be much more forgiving and look for excuses.
I feel quite vindicated by this, because I've always been (perhaps irrationally) rather suspicious of Tesla. Software company suddenly decides to make 'luxury cars'? Cool story bro.
My opinion is that the German triad (BMW, VW (and subsidiaries, including Porsche), Merc-Benz) may have lost some ground to Tesla when it comes to EVs and self-driving cars, but they have an immense mind- and market-share and will quickly recover lost ground. They have a pretty good engineering-first mentality, too.
Plus, they have always built generally good cars (late 1990s-early 2000s unreliability notwithstanding).
In fact, this is not surprising at all. Audi claimed in 2017 that its A8 was capable of Level 3 self-driving[1], but the system was subsequently downgraded. In the intervening years, the Germans' research into self-driving cars has drastically expanded.
[1]: https://www.audi-mediacenter.com/en/on-autopilot-into-the-fu...
Americans, SV and HN especially, are also oblivious to this.
The current VW CEO was just sent packing.
Why?
Software quality.
They know it's do or die and the level of investment into it is huge, they've been hiring software devs like crazy, in Germany.
But, like, that's after they were making EVs. The roadster was announced in 2006, and started production in 2008 - 15 years ago.
They went from making EVs, which are cars with some software inherently in them, to making different cars with even more software in them. They're a car company first, who have been increasing the amount of software they've written to put in their cars.
The comment I was replying to was suggesting they were a software company first, which then pivoted to making cars. Which is... just... what?!?
Yes, you technically answered my question, so thanks for taking the time and making the effort and whatever, but just not in a way that is actually helpful in the context that I asked it.
I have yet to see a good explanation of this.
Maybe this is the case on every forum, simply because that is the prevailing attitude among people in general? During the evolution of mankind, fundamental shifts have probably not happened during a lifetime. So maybe our brains are wired to fight the idea of fundamental change as nonsense or betrayal?
Hate and healthy skepticism are two completely different things.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34335123
Calling the article "complete horseshit". That sounds hateful to me.
Objectively speaking, the article IS complete horseshit, if it resorts to suggesting "watching a movie" or "participating in a meeting".
Which has got nothing to do with the technology itself, though.
Watching videos is one of the top things I would probably do while level 3 is engaged, and the writing of that sentence seems fine to me.
Even in cars, it's not a new technology. But it's very easy to claim something without backing it up. Which is exactly what tesla has been doing with this "new technology" for the last 10 years. People are cautious about hearing news about self-driving, because in the past there have been some pretty major caveats.
This was certainly not possbile 10 years ago:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5X9XyHHTTQI
How long back in time can we go and still find a Youtube video of a car driving itself as well as this one?
The video you posted is two weeks old.
But I believe the video with the blind guy does have a long form version somewhere, so if you consider that (different vehicle, much older technology) to be "as well as they do now" in the sense you meant then that's still roughly in the six year mark.
xracy talked about autonomous vehicles which will include at least trains. London's Victoria Line underground service build in the 1960s was always ATO, which is closer to L4 in this scheme than L3, under normal operation the original Victoria Line trains basically require the driver to push a button, closing the doors and then once the train concludes all of its doors are safely closed it will leave, drive to the next station, stop and open the doors, then we just rinse and repeat.
Now, trains don't actually use the car terminology, in trains we'd call this GoA2, Grade of Automation 2, with the next steps being GoA3 in which there's a human who knows how to operate the train manually in principle, and they are on the train, but they aren't up front "driving it" unless something went wrong; and then GoA4 in which the train doesn't have anything resembling a human driver it just has passengers, in an emergency some central authority will set out to rescue the passengers from their disabled train. There are a handful of GoA4 train systems, but they're probably only 5-10 years old.
But it's funnier if I don't.
case in point: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34347778
To be fair I don't think this particular "L3" is groundbreaking but what I said still applies.
I try to push back against this attitude by leaving positive comments to the effect of "Hey, this is cool!" for cool things, but it's an eyedropper against the ocean sort of situation.
This may be more a result of news outlets exaggerating claims, than of actual creative entities themselves overpromising.
"We" built a free, open, internet. Which brought the twentiers mostly surveillance capitalism by a few monopolists. "We" built a system in which companies that seed division can generate trillions of revenue from that. Twentiers (tweens?) rightfully are sceptical about the things I am sceptical about today, but which I rooted for (and spent my energy on) in my twenties.
More like the last 200 years will be like the last 200 years. When has there been some truly "giant shift" that swept the world in less than a decade?
The automobile we know today was an outgrowth of the decades of developments of steam engines to farm tractors to passenger vehicles and was only fully enabled once we built the interstate system and has required decades of further development particularly of safety systems to bring us to the comfortable place we are now.
I imagine this technology will eventually be useful, but so many more developments and earned experience needs to be gained before we can build out the rest of the infrastructure that will truly allow this technology to become a ubiquitous improvement over our current state.
It's maybe not that we're negative on the new technology, it's just that we'd like to acknowledge this gap and concentrate on the issues that it creates rather than getting lost in the perennial shine of the new.
When has there been some truly "giant shift"
Cars replaced horses.
Email replaced letters.
Phones replaced desktops.
Phones replaced cameras.
Websites replaced newspapers, TV and radio.The web created a searchable, worldwide instant knowledge base in which mankind shares what it knows.
Mobile makes everyone connected to everybody else, where ever they are.
For all of these examples, the time going from "most people are aware of it" to "most people use it" was less than 20 years.
Example: Most people in developed countries started to become aware of email in the 90s. In the 2010s most people had an email. Probably even in the 2000s already.
Therefore, if you took uber away, they would be worse off, in their own estimation.
- "Self-driving cars are a suspect and dangerous technology which is unlikely to perform as well as the companies promoting it claim, and may not become broadly useful for decades, if ever" (I broadly fall into this camp) - These people don't like it because it's a 'self-driving' car, FSVO self-driving.
- "Self-driving cars are coming any day now, and will be a transition straight to robo-taxis lead by visionary super-genius Elon Musk" (This has probably become less common as the promises from that camp haven't materialised over the last decade) - These people don't like it because it is insufficiently robo-taxi-y or musky.
There's possibly an argument that the first camp has become too cynical in response to the second, but as it stands there just isn't that much mindshare for this sort of cautious progress.