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Comment by DasIch | Hacker News Reader

Augmented reality glasses, self-driving cars... Google is becoming a really exciting and interesting company. It will be interesting to see how Apple will react to this given that they are the ones claiming to revolutionize consumer technology every couple of years.

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Real artists ship. I'm very excited about all of Google's cool new projects, but they have a history of shooting themselves in the foot. If these technologies are so far along, why not build a consumer version and get people to pay to be testers?! Then iterate on the concept and keep improving it through successive versions. But that's Apple's game.

Because you don't ship when it still kills people. Google launches stuff in betas all the time (arguably too much and for too long), but I'm glad they're not out there letting anyone test self driving cars or augmented reality contacts.

Apple's difference isn't that they iterate, it's that they don't talk about their new stuff until it ships.

The automated car has driven over 200,000 miles and has never once been in an accident. I don't know many humans that can live up to that.

200k miles is nothing. Over 8 billion vehicle miles are spent per DAY in the US. One person is killed for every 75 million miles driven. 200k miles isn't enough to test every terrain, under every weather condition, in every lighting, etc. There's too many variables in the equation.

The Google car won't be truly safe until it has logged 1000x miles.

Its not that Google's automated cars haven't been in an fatal crash, its that they haven't been in a crash at all. The US _crash rate_ is a bit over 5 per million miles traveled, you you would expect about one crash in the 200k miles already covered if it was a human driver. The circumstances probably aren't identical, but what evidence we have suggests that these automated vehicles are at least comparably safe to a human driver.

If we expect 1 crash per 200k mi, and the car has driven 200k mi, the evidence we have has sample size 1 ...

We only have a sample size of one for the 1 crash per 200k miles case. So the evidence that these cars are actually _better_ than humans is non-existent. However, the evidence against the 1 crash per 100k miles case where the car is no longer comparable to human error rates is at least suggestive. And the evidence against the 1 crash per 20k miles case is actually pretty decent. I chose my words carefully.

We can also look at it from the perspective of the geometric distribution: if the P(Crash) = 1/200k for each mile driven there is around a 36% chance that the car would have made it 200k miles without a crash.

You can't be serious. The evidence may support it, but the evidence is incredibly limited.

Can you imagine the potential liability Google faces if they try to bring this to market without having done due diligence? This is a car, not an iPad.

It really depends on the implementation. You're assuming that all of the functionality has been revealed. For example, it's not completely out of the question that their technology will b, in part, completely mapped and trained co-ordinates (hey, they did it with StreetView). Each road, each corner, each nuance all recorded several times over for redundant accuracy - plus all the sensory, awareness that they have previously shown. There's also the point to be made that the car may know when and where it will have problems (calculating multiple steps ahead) and let you know that a known obstacle is coming up and you'll have to take over. Nothing wrong with that.

No one said the car should ship tomorrow, but the reasoning: "Because you don't ship when it still kills people" is ridiculous. Cars have killed people for 90 years and they still ship. And not every death is due to human error. The fact is, the Google car has yet to even be hit by another car, let alone hitting something itself. It hasn't even remotely injured anything, let alone killed a human being.

The Google car has been hit by another car and it's not ridiculous at all to not ship something that can very easily kill someone (and in this case, almost assuredly innocent bystanders) before you've had time to work out the bugs. I'm glad car companies don't release their drive by wire systems out for public betas too.

http://www.technolog.msnbc.msn.com/technology/technolog/goog...

It's a silly debate anyways considering all the extra hardware you'd need.

> The historic moment passed quickly however, along with any opportunity for robot rebellion hysteria, when Google stated that the car was not in auto-mode at the time of the fender bender.

The Google car is only driven in controlled conditions in sunny California. For example the car simply doesn't work when it snows, so they just turn it off for that duration.

The project looks promising but it still has a long way to go.

But remember: a car that can drive for you perfectly well when the weather is fine but that requires you to take the wheel under adverse conditions is still an awesome product as long as the limitations are clear, consistent, and understood by purchasers.

I wonder how well we will handle the adverse conditions when we have been letting the car do all the work in fair weather scenarios? "Google wants me to drive in this weather? I haven't driven for 2 years! Now let me see - where is that indicator stalk?"

Where have you found fair weather for 2 years?

It's also a product for which there's a considerable sampling bias in making safety assumptions.

The more so as it's adversely selecting hazardous conditions for the human driver.

My own stats, space travel excepted, are about a quarter million miles driven. Three parking scrapes (insufficient clearance / hitting unseen object), twice rear-ended (neither major damage) both times by a trailing car driving too close, too fast.

Touch wood.

http://techcrunch.com/2010/10/09/google-automated-cars/

Says that they do have the occasional human intervention. So even if it has never been in an accident up to that point there had only been 7 cars that had driven 1,000 miles without any human intervention.

You'd have to have a lot more data (such as a much higher number of miles logged without human intervention and 'all weather' exposure) before you could make such a grand claim.

In very carefully controlled conditions with carefully controlled equipment. Supervised by experts. That's different than a bunch of people modding their Civics and having them roam the streets.

It has been in accident. It wasn't in one it caused but it was rear ended.

As to your first sentence, much of the most advanced technology in existence did not ship until it was sufficiently effective at causing or, at least, facilitating death.

> Real artists ship.

While true, don't you think that the world would be a poorer place without the research from Xerox Parc? People who were notoriously bad at shipping, but their ideas were used to create product elsewhere.

My only point is that shipping isn't everything for research, unlike product development. So the question is really, are they looking to build a product, or research the future of computing? Perhaps both. Having said that, I do wish I could get my hands on one...

Well treating your users like guinea pigs can back fire. Look at Siri. There seems to be a lot of frustrated users, some even going as far as lawsuits. That model doesn't always work.

Siri is great. Almost 90% of iPhone 4S users use Siri once a month.

http://www.macnews.com/2012/03/26/87-iphone-4s-owners-use-si...

http://www.idownloadblog.com/2012/03/26/90-percent-siri-user...

Siri isn't perfect, but it's a great start. Apple will almost certainly improve Siri in the next iteration of iOS.

Why is this being downvoted?

Apple respecter, not fanboy here:

I don't know either. It'd be nice for some explanation.

I think you got downvoted because you come off a little fanboyish when you retort the class action lawsuits regarding false advertising simply stating "Siri is great". Just because 90% of people use it once a month doesn't make it great. That said, I personally think Siri is great, and use it all the time. :)

Oh, this is because these technologies complement each other... Not much use in having people wearing augmented reality glasses if they'll die in car crashes as soon as an ad pops up in front of their eyes when driving. They won't even click on the ad. Hence self driving cars...

Kidding apart, it's nice to see Google innovating in many fronts :)

To me it looks amazing and really impressive. I kind of expected Google to release some bulky glasses as rumored, that would look like version 0.1 of such a product in the future. But I'm really impressed with what I'm seeing so far.

I'm a bit curious what self driving cars add. I live in a bike friendly town and am 36 and never had my license. Do people want to really to pass out on the drive home?

What about liability? Say the google car goes on sale and gets in a ton of wrecks due to a software bug. Who is liable? The owner of the car or Google?

Google and Microsoft show lots of possible futures for their products and research. Apple keeps most of their stuff behind curtains, so it's unclear what they're working on.

My prediction for Apple is that they'll do glasses, but will be much less ambitious and will do it's job well. Specifically I think they'll drop the camera and AR stuff. Just have a heads up display for IMs and track names so you can read messages and find music while walking. Cheaper and easier to polish, and builds on what people already do.

I very much doubt that. Glasses restrict your field of vision, your movements and change the appearance and thereby the way others see you. No one wants to wear a pair of glasses just as an additional display for your smartphone you are too lazy to take out of your pocket, the cost is just too high.

However the display part doesn't really matter, what really matters is ubiquitous environmental recognition, voice recognition - not just of yourself but of everyone around you, no matter which languages they are currently speaking - and (three dimensional) image recognition. This will completely change how people interact and explore the world and each other.

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