Just curious what other people on HN are most excited about.
If someone ever invents a worthwhile holographic display, that would be huge as well. The limiting factors on most portable electronic devices are the display and keyboard: if you could have a full-sized, immersive 3D display and an accelerometer-based pointer, you could do so much more with your phone.
* WebKit - decidedly the web brick that should help with introducing new developments faster in order to keep things open and modern;
* IronRuby - might take a while, but eventually it should make programming for the .net world much more pleasurable and help folks with bridging different worlds with the same interface, thing that's quite difficult to plan out;
* Google JavaScript Engine, v8 - it's quite a beast of technology that deserves to take off outside of the browser as well. If Ruby is going to get its ass kicked, I hope it will be by Javascript that's quite dynamic and has closures and so on;
* Canvas on the browser - graphics, widgets and games, all fully printable by the browser, all starting instantaneously;
* Javascript on the browser - programming the dynamic way without having to compile, recompile, deploy, to test things... no, just a small change and a refresh and you get to develop the feature!
* Misc: YUI 3, Bazaar VCS, Ubuntu, computer hardware, broadband, Google Chrome, Ruby implementations, Flash (I just tried to see some videos on Microsoft using Moonlight the Silverlight clone and it made me feel little sympathy for Microsoft and their technologies again)...
* Wishful thinking: Microsoft coming to terms and creating their Windows on top of a Unix-like infrastructure; ;-)
Car accidents cost over a million lives worldwide every year - 45,000 in the USA - and injure about 40 times that number. They are the leading cause of death for people aged 18-34. In the USA, the total cost of accidents is about $230 billion (1.7% of American GDP according to my calculations).
Robot cars will reduce car accidents, probably by a lot (human errors make up 93% of the causes of car accidents; 80% of accidents are due to human inattention). They'll make parking vastly more efficient (the car can drop you off and go and park in some optimal place). 50 billion person-hours are spent driving every year. In productive hours, that's worth a trillion dollars. Even if the hours aren't productive (watching TV or whatever), it's still worth a lot. Congestion would be reduced because robot cars don't need the follow space between cars that human reflexes require. It's like quadrupling the capacity of existing roads for free. Since the crash rate might be so low, cars might be ultralight rather than made of armor, so they'll use less energy and less metal.
I first became excited about robot cars from reading this essay: http://ideas.4brad.com/robocars-are-future
Disclaimer: I spent last quarter working on a driver assistance system on Junior for changing lanes on the highway.
human errors make up 93% of the causes of car accidents
What kind of human errors? Running out into the road in front of cars? Driving while too tired? Arguments with passengers? Not looking when changing lanes? Too busy looking for road signs to see a stopped car ahead? Driving horribly to try and go back for a missed turn?
Technology could help with a lot of these problems without replacing cars altogether. Current Volvos can have a blind-spot warning system, they can ready the brakes for you as you get close to a car in front so they will react quicker, they can silence incoming phone calls when the car detects too much activity (e.g. sharp cornering) so it wont distract you.
I look forward to the day when all road signs are gone and replaced with informational broadcasts that my car will interpret, and on the dashboard I get a neat summary of the current speed limit, the GPS navigation route to where I'm going, and that's about it.
You also aren't clear which figures you mention are worldwide and which are USA only. Worldwide, there are countries which don't require regular car maintenance, and people drive around with tree branches instead of steering wheels, for instance. Is that kind of thing 'human error'?
I could turn off auto-pilot, but then there wouldn't be any point. I think that the magic in getting auto-pilot to work in cars is in enforcing that enough other cars on the road are using it too. I truly believe that so long as there are any cars on the same road as you not on auto-pilot, that it will negate most of the benefits for everybody.
Regarding human error, I think that most of what you listed would count. The car is a human operated machine, which means that most of the time, wrecks are our fault. Unless the wheel falls off unexpectedly, or the brakes fail, you could pretty much always attribute a failure to the operator -- or the operator of the other car where applicable.
I would also not like to be rid of driving as a pastime, but until you do, I'm also not sure that there's any point in automating the driving experience. So while I am sympathetic to your point, the pain of my daily commute is sympathetic to the other.
As if the two groups don't overlap! As if the regular commuters are completely innocent and the people who enjoy driving both have and cause all the accidents! As if robocars could not and would not have any accidents! As if people who commute to work by car are forced into it and have no choice about being road users!
I disagree with all four implied statements.
a good half of driving accident victims did not and could not see it coming.
Then why do so many other countries have fewer road deaths per hundred thousand people and also fewer road deaths per miles travelled?
http://www.driveandstayalive.com/info%20section/statistics/s...
See how the USA is way down in 40th position - more dense countries, countries with more dangerous driving weather, other big sparse countries, other rich countries, much poorer countries are all above the USA. Switch the table to deaths per vehicle miles travelled and the USA is still barely in the top 10.
Just luck? Or better driver training so their drivers can see potential accidents coming and avoid them?
I know, arguing not hacker news. But someone is wrong on the internet. It might even be me!
The only problem with robots is systemic risk - some sort of common bug (e.g. Y2K) that would take out many machines at once or another thing that fails in a non-graceful manner. Car companies are not strangers to designing proper failure modes so I think it will pan out ok in the end, but software engineers aren't as good at it yet so we do have that risk for a while.
My interest is primarily on reducing deaths. I'm fortunate enough that I've never lost a close friend in a car accident, but two friends of mine have been injured (one moderately, one seriously), a close friend of mine lost his best friend, and the 21-year-old receptionist at my previous employment was killed in a head-on collision. I expect most people have stories like these or worse.
The 93% figure comes from Wikipedia, and the citation is a report that doesn't define human error. Templeton thinks that robocars could eliminate almost all of the million car accident deaths per year. But even if it's only 50%, that would prevent so much avoidable loss.
Templeton: "The creators will need to make an urban test track and fill it with swarms of the robots, and demonstrate that they can walk out into the swarm with no danger. Indeed, like a school of fish, it should be close to impossible to touch one even if you try. Likewise, skeptics should be able to get onto bicycles, motorcycles, cars and hummers and drive right through the schools of robots, unable to hit one if they try. After doing that for half an hour and getting tired, doubters will be ready to accept them on the roads."
If that can be achieved, robocars will drastically reduce deaths.
Imagine your future dentist visit: a really big dude punches you in the teeth the moment you walk into the dentist office, then you spit out your old teeth and they plant you a new set. In 6 month you have perfect teeth - good for next 10 years of abuse.
I can hardly wait.
Augmented Reality: If we get it right, it will obsolete/improve a whole bunch of stuff (laptops, books, phones, movie theaters come to mind)
Cloud computing: I don't mean avoiding the pain of buying servers, I mean the final ultimate realization of dumb terminal and central processing hub (combined with augmented reality and you've got an always-on computational extension of self with zero bulky hardware)
growing things with algae: Oil, steak, ears (likely in that order)
3D printers: I just want to have an infinite cheap supply of standard rectangular Lego blocks.
Further out:
Fusion, hopefully cold: water in, power out (and I suppose whatever elements we're short on at the moment) my physics gets a little shaky here but I think fusion up to Fe is energy positive so an unlimited supply of iron could turn into some interesting things.
Hole diggers: Bullet train from New York to Paris that falls to its destination (and of course climbs to decelerate the second half of the trip)
Yeah! There was a recent press release from Nokia about their prototype service where you can take a picture of a poster, and it recognises the event and finds the details for you, and local showings if it's a film, etc. There's a recent video link on HN of an android/G1 app which pulls location-aware data from the web and allows you to hold your G1 up with the camera looking at the horizon, and it annotates the video feed with information about the main things you can see. Shazzam has been able to recognise currently playing music for ages, and snaptell can recognise a photo of almost any common CD, book or DVD and pull up more data. Android/the G1 has a change-behaviour-based-on-GPS-location feature.
Augmented reality is here if you look for it and want it.
I hope it's not too long before I can take a picture of a sign in a foreign country, and have it OCR'd and the text run through Google Translate.
(How did that pass by with no votes and no replies?)
- The next iPhone. Even after owning one for a year, which was a year old when I got it so it was being designed three years ago or more, I still turn it over and marvel at it, at what it does, how well it does it and how good it looks and feels while doing so. It's the biggest consumer success of HCI in a long time, and that's really pleasing. They're addressing the lag when opening the SMS app, adding MMS, adding better bluetooth support, an autofocus camera, enabling and encouraging an accessory market, and twisting the arms of the mobile carriers like other handset makers haven't been. It's exciting.
- Small, LED driven, no-moving-part "pocket" projectors. See: Microsoft surface and Epson's coffee table and similar. One day they wont be driven by a big expensive noisy projector hidden a few feet beneath or behind. It need not be a massive screen itself, but an improvement of today's pocket projectors - when they can do 1280x1024 at better brightness, look out basic office CRTs and LCDs.
Impressive BCI has been done, e.g. William Dobelle's work on brain-linked-cameras for blind people, but that involves major surgery and, if I may say so without meaning any insult to his work, is still on the easy side - feeding signals into the visual cortex and let the brain learn what to do with them without needing to understand how the brain does so.
To interpret anything like "send an email to John Hancock" and other general instructions, but not non-instructions, lifted from your thoughts ...
Speaking of horrendous there's also those supposedly non-lethal ray guns they are testing on journalists holding mattresses.
+1 for Robotics and Augmented Reality. Met a prof last month that researches in AR, showed us some things he did with ARToolkit; it completely blew my mind.
And I still want to have my own 3D printer.
I can't wait until we can inject single-purpose nanorobots to heal and augment our bodies. Imagine a injection that would completely eradicate cancer from your body. Or improve your eyesight.
It may be a long way off, but it will be amazing when science reaches that point
Specifically, using IBM's Blue Gene supercomputer to simulate neurons and synapses.
"Performance measurements show good scaling behavior on the Blue Gene/L supercomputer up to 8,192 processors. Several key phenomena seen in the living brain appear as emergent phenomena in the simulations.": http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1375994
Also, "Massively parallel simulation of brain-scale neuronal network models": http://www.bgconsortium.org/Past%20Results/kth%20bgwreport06...
Short explanation: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/6287126.stm
Long explanation: http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2007/05/shaping_...
Additionally, transformation of everyday electronic devices into low-power consuming devices, and for this, I think nanotechnology will help us get there.
uploading & sharing myself on the internet, having my multiple identities living a complete life, chat with myselves and learn from them.
cloning me in into the digital, no life expansion but more parallel lives