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Comment by andrewchambers | Hacker News Reader

I feel like your point would be better if there weren't already self driving cars around like waymo.

Except they’re not fully self-driving, they’re all at least partially driven by an underpaid contractor in a remote warehouse.

That is kind of my point. They exist only in a few select locations. If they were truly self driving Google would be rapidly rolling them out around the World, but they are not.

Waymo's first real driverless ride on a public road was less than 10 years ago. Now they are doing 100k rides a week.

I think your original post just overestimates the 'normal' pace of change - Taking 10 years to go from the first ride to 100k rides a week is no time at all in the scheme of things.

Airplanes are an example of an insanely fast technological adoption, and they still took 30 years to go from the wright brothers to the first commercial jet. I get the feeling that if the wright brothers invented the plane in 2024 though, people would be saying 10 years after "Planes are all hype! If planes were truly transformative they would be rolled out everywhere and would be carrying passengers by now"

> 30 years

45 years: December 1903 to July 1949

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wright_Flyer

https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/first-jet-makes-...

Oop, sorry I mean 30 years to the first commercial passenger plane (Boeing 247)

Yes, 45 years to the first passenger jet plane.

I wondered if that was what you were talking about.

I am not debating the transformative nature of self-driving cars or if it will become common place. I think it is huge. I guess my point is that is just one application of machine learning / AI. To automate such a complex task with our current approach to AI, that humans do easily, one will need to spend trillions of dollars and therefore the benefit, such as with self-driving cars, needs to be significant.

I suspect this will be the case with any AI workload. Heavy customization to get to a place where it is good enough. So the financial benefit needs to be equally huge and someone needs to feel confident they can extract that value 20 years in the future.

Same with computers though - back in the 60's problems had to be sufficiently valuable to solve in order to justify compute resource to them. For the initial computers, the 'prize' was Enigma and winning the war.

Now we can use compute resource for memes.

Costs will come down, so the required benefit will be lower.

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