What is going on with the reflexive upvoting of articles arguing against new technologies here on HN?
Are there any upcoming technologies HN does not have an aversion toward?
Are there any upcoming technologies HN does not have an aversion toward?
In particular to self-driving cars, it is a distraction from other technological development we could be doing, it continues to hold up the car as a source for peoples' affection and keeps cars relevant, and the need for self-driving cars has never been articulated in a way that makes any sense.
Uh, it's literally already here and being extensively tested in cities.
I don't need, for example, a self driving car to be able to handle snow particularly well, because it does not snow where I live. I don't need it to be able to drive well off-road because there are roads everywhere I go. I don't need it to be able to tow a trailer or a caravan, or drive a heavy vehicle. Self driving technology does not need to surpass humans in every single driving condition in order to be useful to a large number of people.
Waymo and Cruise are currently testing systems with no driver that do at least a passable job in most standard city driving conditions for (self-reported) hundreds to thousands of hours between traffic incidents. Humans average a few 10K-100K hours between traffic incidents so it is at least within the general ballpark. It remains to be seen whether they can improve adequately and robustly to be better than human drivers.
It is literally here in the sense that there are cars with no drivers that can operate for on the order of years (self-reported) without a critical failure that are currently in testing. It is not here yet in that human drivers are amazing and we do not know if AVs are better than human drivers as there is insufficient, unbiased evidence and the more extensive testing with safety drivers indicate they are still a factor of 10x to 100x away.
Is there anything on the horizon you are interested in / enthusiastic about?
Personally I never use Google Maps to find my way, I never use Uber to commute, I always book hotels and flights through a travel agent, all my computers run XP, I watch all TV from plastic DVDs, I listen to music on more plastic discs, I go into the bank or write checks to do any transactions.
Or maybe, I do none of that anymore.
I absolutely agree there's a bunch of crap. I argue that there's a bunch of really excellent good things in there too. (I'll add rocket landings to the list because they are so insanely cool.)
With regard to crypto; it's just the latest in histories long list of get-rich-quick schemes. I think we can ignore that. (Human greed is human greed).
I think most of your list boils down to a mix of shitty humans, the Free market in action, and things playing out to their natural conclusion in an extreme capitalistic society. A lot of the things (not all) are very localised to the US.
To your point though, I think two shifts in attitude are in play. One, technology has a higher bar to reach when it comes to safety. We accept that to err is human and expect that a human driver will have remorse and shame and may even be punished. With a self-driving car these things don't exist. Two, we have a lower tolerance to death and injury. Imagine cars didn't exist (but for some reason roads did) and you invented the car with all of today's safety standards. You would never get it approved.
Same for comments, voting is not agreeing, its saying that a point us well made and adds to the discussion.
As to HN aversion to new technologies - thats a mix of an aging demographic (fear of making my job obsolete), a reflexive aversion to hype over substance, (a thing which nerds have tradionally been against because, well, we are bad at hype and view people good at it as undermining our substantive work), and in some cases because there's objectively not much value in the tech even if it succeeds.
It's the way of the world. People whine about new stuff all the time, from their hand-held-hi-tech computer, over the connect-everything network, while binging their favorite sitcom from the 90s. Because, you know, those techs are from the oldentimes .
Ooooo Shiny!