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Comment by bmitc | Hacker News Reader

"Self-driving" cars is not necessarily new technology in the sense of people shooting down new ideas. It's been shoved down everyone's throats for over a decade now. It's not coming any time soon, despite the unending promises and claims, and companies have gotten away with pushing regulations and skirting the law to perform R&D and testing on public roads that has killed several people. I think it's pretty reasonable to be tired of this. Same goes for VR, crypto, "AI", and every other over-hyped and over-promised technology over the past decade.

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.

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> It's not coming any time soon

Uh, it's literally already here and being extensively tested in cities.

Uh it literally isn't here. It'll be here when you can let a tesla off it's leash in every form of adverse driving conditions known to man and it consistently out-perform a human driver, including in novel situations. What's being tested is the minimum viable approximation that legislators are willing to tolerate on our roadways.

It’s okay though, we don’t need self driving cars. We can all just tie a toboggan to your goalposts.

Excuse you? How is demanding self-driving cars demonstrably improve on the performance of their human counterparts shifting goalposts? What, we're all supposed to just sit with our hands in our lap and accept sharing the road with a mediocre implementation of what humans can already do?

> in every form of adverse driving conditions known to man

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.

It sounds like you need buses, subways, and trains.

And if self driving cards are cordoned off to special areas, they are just another extension of buses, subways, trains, but with less manual operation needed. The criteria that self driving vehicles perform very well everywhere is extreme when we already have so many modes of transportation designed for specific contexts.

Then call them and market them as something other than "car". Because if you call it a car and market it as such folks will treat it like one, which means exposure to every type of road and weather condition known to man with potentially lethal consequences if the software can't keep up.

Vehicles get sold to people that live in places with snow. Snow exists in the world ergo self driving tech is dangerously incomplete if it can't cope.

Tesla is not the front-runner; it hardly even classifys as in the race.

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.

Ok, you are tired of Self-Driving, VR, Crypto, AI and other upcoming technologies.

Is there anything on the horizon you are interested in / enthusiastic about?

Nothing even tangentally related to the software industry, no. There's some exciting stuff in the biotech pipeline but software has been a dumpster fire of grift, hype, bullshit claims, and labor issues for at least couple decades now.

You're right. Software peaked in 2003. There's been no useful things added since then.

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.

Would you care to review the social and geopolitical impacts of social media, how walled gardens have destroyed the original promise of the internet, the financial and labor impacts of Amazon's near-monopoly on online sales, crypto's blistering track record at separating dumb from money at the modest cost of the energy consumption of a medium sized industrial nation, VR & AR's notable lack of life/world/job/industry altering implementations, vendor lock-in, the industry's holy war perpetual motion machine on thick vs thin clients, a few hundred waves of clients having their investment cash set on fire by dev shops platforming on tech only truly suitable for a FAANG because "it's the great new thing", FOSS's implosion into a free labor pool for private companies, or the successive waves of failure of software .orgs claiming to improve everything from healthcare workflows to the functioning of municipal governments by adding software? No? You can take your strawman and go.

>> software has been a dumpster fire of grift, hype, bullshit claims, and labor issues for at least couple decades now

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.

I'd hear an example of really excellent good things. Privatization of space exploration doesn't make the list for a diversity of reasons, not the least of which being kessler syndrome is a thing and handing the keys to orbit material to private industry has -very- predictable outcomes.

You act as though that's everything in the world of technology. And even then, technology is not everything. There's plenty of things going on that have no need for technology, much less over-hyped and over-promised technologies.

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