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Comment by croes | Hacker News Reader

We changed the world for combustion cars, why not for self-driving cars?

Combustion cars were already usable even on the roads built for horse drawn carriages - they were, in fact, adapted to the existing world.

They even ran on things like firewood, coal, or, for the first ICEs, relatively common liquid fuels that could be sourced in large cities.

Cars rely on gas stations today - but gas stations only became a thing after cars already became a thing.

Nowadays, Tesla had to make Superchargers happen all by themselves before EVs could really happen - despite EVs already having the crushing advantage of being able to charge overnight in any garage that has power.

Can you see a robot company branching out to be a competitor to McDonalds to prove that their kitchen robot is viable if you design the entire kitchen for it? Well, it's not entirely impossible, but I think it unlikely.

Yes, I can see restaurants easily adopting an entire robot-friendly kitchen if it means robots can handle dish-handling and repetitive cooking tasks.

From that to every manufacturer adopting the standard on every product, independently of the client you just need some competition on their market. I dunno if there is any, but it's not a lot.

If all a robot does is take a package and throw it into the microwave why don't I just save a trip to the "restaurant" and eat at home?

I have no idea how you came from my comment to that idea. But nothing is stopping the chef from just throwing your food into the microwave today, so I don't see what change you are complaining about either.

There's a huge practicality issue for the chef. They don't have the food in microwavable format for many dishes.

But to me thats the end state of this conversation. Like lets take shipping as an example, we came up with pallets and containers not because they're useful for a person to move but because they're helpful for robots (and analogs) to move. People aren't born with palletjacks for hands. So to me it seems as you add more robotics into the kitchen you're going to slowly change your supplies to arrive in more robotic form.

Your comment is actually lagging behind reality. There is a manufacturer of kitchen robots that opened a fully functional demo fast food joint: https://misorobotics.com/CaliExpress/

While in Europe earlier I learned that BYD had to make hybrids for the European market since their charging infastructure isn't quite there.

Typically the world changes when a new market is discovered, making the earth more traversable by car at the time opened up enough of a new market that it was done post haste for better or for worse. The only real way I see self-driving cars opening up markets at a scale that they would justify the amount of overhead is if they created self-driving only lanes with infrastructure closely around them to be quick and easily accessible from the passengers.

Which at that point is really just the Japanese train system and surrounding infrastructure, which many places (at least in the US) don't seem capable or willing to make happen.

How so? roads were already dimensioned for horses, motorways for tanks. Most major change had industry (shipping, logistics etc) or military backing.

We changed the main purpose of roads to be for cars

https://www.forbes.com/sites/carltonreid/2022/11/08/happy-bi...

Yeah bit we didn't change the world, and we didn't add roads. We just refused the existing ones, building out as necessary.

Only if you think a road back then is the same as a road now.

We changed the layout, the material, added guardrails and guide posts etc.

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