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Comment by xnx | Hacker News Reader

I encourage anyone interested in the topic of self-driving cars (this author calls them "robocars") to read more articles from this author. He provides a very reasoned analysis of most every self-driving car topic: Tesla sensors, safety, parking issues, business models, etc.

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> I founded ClariNet, the world's first internet based business, am Chairman Emeritus of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and a fellow of the Foresight Institute. My current passion is self-driving vehicles and robots. I worked on Google's car team in its early years and am an advisor and/or investor for car OEMs and many of the top startups in robocars, sensors, delivery robots and even some flying cars. Plus AR/VR and software. I am founding faculty and computing chair for Singularity University, and I write, consult and speak on robocar technology around the globe.

(Emphasis added)

This doesn't sound like the bio of a person who gives a fair shake at AVs. This sounds like a person who is quite literally invested in the success of AVs and is using the Forbes platform to lend legitimacy to his opinions.

To be fair, it also sounds like the bio of a person who's quite knowledgeable about AVs. But I'd rather get my commentary about AVs from somebody who doesn't have a financial interest in their success.

I’d rather read someone who has a stake at the subject, which is clearly disclosed, than try to find a totally unbiased objective observer.

People don't want experts, who probably have at least some stake in a topic, writing about it. And they don't want some theoretically "objective" journalist or other outside observer writing about it. I'm not sure who that leaves. (Obviously some journalists and other writers are pretty knowledgable about the topics they cover but they're still often filtering and interpreting what experts have told them.)

Maybe I should have clarified, that quote came from the bio which you get if you click on the author's name -- not from the body of the article. It does appear in a little "show more" box (at the end of the article) but the juicy conflict of interest bits are obscured by the "show more" link. That's not clear disclosure by journalistic standards.

Journalists put relevant conflict-of-interest disclosures right at the beginning of the article, with emphasis added. This guy is doing the opposite: using the Forbes site to make it look like he's a journalist employed by them, when in fact he's a consultant/investor with the very industry he's writing apologist articles for. Sure, he's not lying... he put it in the bio field. But it's still misrepresentation.

About 10 years ago, my first non-academic job was with a start up causing a major stir winning major awards and was profiled all over the place for their work in food traceability. Once I started though, I realized everything was theoretical - in reality it could be used for food. But no one actually was and none of the applications they talked about were done using these systems.

Then one day I was called into a meeting with an editor at Forbes. And the conversation began with the fee and moved into topics I knew we couldn't pull off.... Which our marketing guy said to me later was normal and that all the articles and awards (from Red Dot to Fortune to Barron's) were effectively paid placement. No one checks, no one verifies, no one blinks an eye. "This is how you build the market and our story is compelling"

They never made a breakthrough in food because it never worked. This in spite of that Forbes profile leading to a CNN mention and eventual WEF appearance... In which no one asked to verify or reproduce our data

So the author may be a good SME, and I will check him out but take anything you read in places like Forbes for what they are: likely advertorials hiding the smoke and mirrors

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