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Comment by vibrunazo | Hacker News Reader

Self driving cars first. Flying cars second. In that order, cannot happen the other way around. I agree with Erick Schmidt when he said "It's a bug that cars were invented before computers, or else humans would have never driven cars themselves". Hopefully we won't implement the same bug again.

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Prescriptively, I agree. But descriptively, the economy isn't rational, and I bet we will implement that bug again: arguably the most essential and accurate message on that page is "ultimate freedom"—flying cars, and normal cars, and planes have rarely been motivated by the goal of efficient or safe transportation. Practical, rational people ride the train (or the bus) and rowdy kids whose prefrontal cortex still hasn't fully developed love their off roaders and street racers. As far as the "spirit of driving" goes, letting your car (or flying car or plane) drive (or fly) itself is tantamount to putting it on tracks. This website, their product, and the marketing all indicate that the motivation is purely irrational: the perennial lust for freedom, not for practical transportation.

What kind of nonsense is this? As a pilot (of both land and air vehicles) your sentiments seem completely irrational. Define "flying car"! There are tons of entrants in this category, and many that are fully functional. I can't say that I find them practical, or myself a potential early customer-- but not because of some misplaced sense that we need computers to handle the piloting for us.

And what of Eric's quote? Sounds like someone who's busy building a self-driving car-- not someone who loves the beauty of being a pilot!

Are we to cede all functions that we used to master to computers? Really?

Give me a break.

> Are we to cede all functions that we used to master to computers? Really?

People bake bread in their homes every day. Nothing is stopping anyone from doing it. But most people let a machine do it for them.

So will go piloting.

> Are we to cede all functions that we used to master to computers? Really?

We are. You don't have to for many things, but for instance a self-driving-car; it's very likely it will be forbidden to drive a car in 100 years yourself (only on special tracks) because computer driven cars will be much safer and you are a hazard. This will happen wether you like it or not; it's a question of when; I think 100 years is pessimistic (or optimistic depending on your POV) of me.

Mostly everything you buy or do will be computerized/made by robots in not too much time. Hopefully they'll find a better way of writing code so that we won't all die because of the many 1000s of bugs in everything, but it is not something you can stop.

Edit: you are on HN so I suppose you are interested in computers and live somewhere civilized; if you live in a jurt somewhere without internet/computers/phones (so far enough for mobile signals to reach you) you can hold up for at least your lifetime without all that probably :)

General safety was the first issue that came to my mind when seeing their website. If a thing like that goes viral we need to consider plenty of idiots on the roads making enough damage as it is already. Imagine giving them just additional angles from which they can crash into each other.

However, considering the current speed of research I believe (and hope) that before something like that goes "very" public and popular it will be already automated.

And Schmidt underestimates the thrill of driving and flying.

Self-flying air vehicles like this are probably easier to implement than cars. For simple reasons, such as there being no obstacles like roads, street lights, pedestrians, and because you have a 3rd dimension there is significantly more space so the vehicles can be more spread out. The trip itinerary is a lot easier because you're essentially going from point A to point B in a straight line. Also, starting from day one, you could mandate that no human is allowed to pilot these types of vehicles, so you wouldn't have a mix of human and computer pilots that you have with cars.

The answer to safety issues should not be a matter of restricting people from operating them. By that mentality, you'd ban a huge range of very useful things.

I disagree, restricting humans is exactly what needs to happen for personal air travel to ever to be safe. The humans are the rogues, they're ones that are going to cause problems, not follow standard procedures, drink and fly, check their cellphones while flying etc. Imagine how much uncertainty and risk could be eliminated if you know that 100% of the vehicles in the air are all computer controlled, and use a common communication/navigation protocol. It would simplify everything.

Exactly. A sufficiently advanced "flying car" should be able to simply take a destination entered via smartphone, generate a flight plan, file the plan electronically, ping a regional air traffic control server for takeoff clearance, and run a preflight self-diagnostic, all in a matter of minutes.

Yep and then when the computer hangs up, or a lightning hits your plane and burn all the electronics, or the turbulence is so hi that the autopilot simply disconnects, or a sensor breaks in the middle of the flight and the flight computer throws erroneous predictions, or a software update introduces a bug that is active just in certain circumstances, etc... I think that eventually it will be possible but ( and I am talking of 30 million $ planes) actually there are simply to many failures too many times ( once a year is enough and I assure you that potentially dangerous failures happen far more often than that) to have a fully autonomous plane flying with people inside. Don't even start thinking of consumer grade planes.

A robotic car could be made to Self stop whenever a failure happens, that is a luxury that planes don't have.

Well I agree with all that you're saying. But this is still a car. If you want it to make "the last mile", which can take you from your home door to work. Then you'll need it to drive on ground and deal with traffic with other cars. And then only fly if there's a good enough spot for both take off and landing. Just like the hybrid on the video.

I think can of a few dirty workarounds. But for this to be optimal, I still think we'd have to master fully automated both air and ground driving first.

I wonder how they would coordinate a large number of these flying objects, both in flight and while take off and landing. You know, large cities have millions of cars... It sounds really 'sci-fi' to imagine all those million cars flying :)

Easier? We use UAV's every day. What we have to do is make them able to land and take off reliably so that they don't kill their users. Thats a engineering problem and you could solve that in about 5-10 years.

The mix of human and computer pilots is inevitable. There has to be a manual override option. Otherwise, the cars simply won't sell, no matter how ultra steadfast and safe the technology is.

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