Marc Andreessen: Turn Detroit Into Drone Valley | Hacker News Reader

Marc Andreessen: Turn Detroit Into Drone Valley

politico.com

58 pointskloncks27 comments

Why drone valley and not autonomous vehicle valley? Seems more prime for the motor city.

Not to mention, Detroit already has some large neighborhoods that are mostly vacant and the roads could be shifted over to test grounds for the autonomous vehicles. Michigan endures extremes in all four seasons, as compared to Santa Clara County which has pretty moderate weather year round.

But I don't think Marc was specifically saying that Detroit is for drones. I think that was merely an alliteration. I do think Marc is right in that specialization is the key.

There's an argument that autonomous vehicles will cannibalize vehicle sales overall, or at least destroy the existing investments of automakers, so it's in Detroit's interest to delay them as long as possible.

Specialization may be key. Detroit certainly has a long history of it. Before motor manafacturing, the area was one of the largest hubs in the fur trade.

But I still think, eventually, that the Detroit renaissance will be brought on by a broader set of influences (a combination of artists, startups, and tech manufacturing moving in and redefining the city).

Also, Michigan is one of those states where you can drive literally anything, even experimental, on the road (no state car inspection).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vehicle_inspection_in_the_Unite...

A great example is Colorado which has become the silicon valley of cannabis

>Santa Clara County which has pretty moderate weather year round.

Except no one has figured out how to drive in the snow or even heavy rain. Moving self-driving cars to Detroit won't magically fix that. I imagine we're a breakthrough or two away in computer vision processing and fuzzy logic/AI to crack that nut.

While I fully appreciate the self-driving car and have watched more than a couple videos on how they work, they all require the ability to see things like lines painted on the road, a decent distance ahead, etc. What happens when heavy snow comes down and driving is less a deterministic act of following lines and crossing intersections and more of a poorly thought out social contract involving every driver's idea of what workable chaos looks like? What happens when your visibility is terrible? What happens when veterans know what roads to avoid and which to take but the GPS-based self-driving car goes the cheapst/most logical way? What happens when you're at an intersection that's out or the lights are covered in snow and everyone is stopped honking at one another? Or a car is stuck in the middle of the intersection? Do you dumbly drive through or avoid that route because its not plowed correctly or plowed at all?

As a Chicagoan, I know driving in the snow is a bitch. The success stories of the self-driving car will come from places like Santa Clara for the foreseeable future. We're just not there yet and Detroit can't help us, nor can we help it.

>I do think Marc is right in that specialization is the key.

Uh, we tried that in Detroit. Regular cars. Didn't work out too well. I think Andreeson suffers from the ivory tower economist disease. He's out of touch outside of his domain. He just points fingers at things and acts like this is all a simple command economy, "Do this there! Do that here!" Life tends to be more complex than that.

> Except no one has figured out how to drive in the snow or even heavy rain.

I thought the advise for human beings trying to drive in the snow or heavy rain was always the same: don't.

If you do, you're taking a huge risk, so don't go anywhere unless you have to (e.g. need groceries or else will die).

Except it stopped snowing hours ago and the plows have already done their job. Still, there's snow on the ground, limited visibility of the painted lines, people driving like jerks, people sliding out on black ice, etc.

Some towns don't even plow non-major streets but if that's the street you live on, then you need to drive on it.

Definitely. If there is a municipality which, for a myriad of reasons, isn't winning the current cycle of competition for industry, definitely deregulate the crap out of it and use it as a test bed for the products designed and built by Silicon Valley. It's the closest thing to the third world, am I right?

The more he tweetstorms and drops half-baked opinion pieces, the more I see him as having been smoking crack while watching TED talks on repeat.

Detroit is not some one-dimensional shit hole ripe (it's multidimensional and not ripe) for taking on the burden of someone's experiments. It's like municipal eugenics or something?

"if we think of airspace as the next Internet-like platform.."

What? Did I read the correctly? No offense but this piece seems a bit off kilter. It's one thing to make money investing in things like social network websites, yet another to demand some kind of government sanctioned libertarian utopia and expect all kinds of foolish (and sometimes outright anti-social) schemes will bear fruit or even ever be permitted to grow beyond a certain socially tolerable size... Galt's Gulch was a fictional place and likely always will be. As long as the current system (on which the "innovators" rely) is in place anyway.

I would request that Mr. Andreessen ensure that the companies that he invests in are transparent & ethical with their interactions, particularly with the US Government.

Drones can be a wonderful tool to empower us. They can also be a powerful tool to enslave us. Skynet anyone?

Some sort of effective regulation is probably necessary. Not the kind of regulation involving a former/future Drone Manufacturing executive/lobbist being the chair of the regulatory body.

Based on his stance on how terrorists are bad because they're bad, I wouldn't hold your breath.

There are already a group of drone companies in Detroit. I've met several of them. They want to be able to fly over the city but so far have been blocked.

http://www.crainsdetroit.com/article/20140330/NEWS/303309969...

Giving them a large area to test would give the city a huge advantage over the rest of the US and I believe drive more drone companies to relocate in Detroit where they would find cheap real estate and an abundance of engineering talent.

I think Mark Andreesen undoubtedly knows this and that is why he picked Detroit for his example.

Detroit has a myriad of problems, but I think this could be great for the city. A big problem with Detroit is that it's a huge city, but a lot of people have left, so there are whole neighborhoods with only a few residents. This makes it hard common government services such as garbage pick up and police force to cover the whole city. The government could provide incentives for any entrepreneurs willing to come to Detroit and help solve these problems using drones and/or autonomous cars. The pay off would be huge on both sides. Autonomous cars would especially click with the culture in Detroit too, being that it is the motor city.

Instead of drones and cars, perhaps it would be simpler to just relocate individuals and businesses toward downtown.

I would agree, but the problem is that many of the individuals don't want to be reallocated and refuse to the leave their homes.

The author forgot that one of the impetus for Silicon Valley becoming what it is in an influx of government money.

It all began with army proving grounds and military research right?

>Provide incentives to attract scientists, firms and users;

> Establish a favorable business environment and regulations.

> Except … this approach to innovation clusters hasn’t really worked. Some have even dismissed these government-driven efforts as “modern-day snake oil.”

I would argue that such an approach has never actually been attempted only lip service has been paid. The types of solutions you describe above are politically untenable because they involve significantly lowering taxes.

I would say that Nevada is an example of a place where this kind of approach has worked. Look at Las Vegas it's a metropolis that sprung up out of nowhere in the middle of a vast desert wasteland. Maybe Michigan could learn a thing or two from Nevada and begin by lowering it's state income tax to 0%.

Las Vegas is big because of the gambling money, not tax structure. Compare to the rest of the state.

Las Vegas got it's start because of the gambling money, but it has maintained itself as nationally relevant over the years despite it's inhospitable weather and isolated environs due to low taxation but also because of the "hands off of business" stance that the state has taken which is helpful to a diversity of industries other than just gambling, ask Zappos CEO about it.

In my opinion it's not a terrible choice of a place to launch a startup either because you could poach employees away from both the Bay Area and LA job markets by showing them what kind of spacious luxury highrise accommodations they could be enjoying for similar money to what they spend on their 600square foot rental in the City. The fact that they'd pay no state income taxes just makes the job offer all the more enticing. I suspect there's going to be more of this kind of thing going on in the future especially as Zappos continues to invest significant funds into renovation of certain districts.

I wonder if he picked Robocop city on purpose.

The prophecy must be fulfilled.

Joking aside, the reasoning behind choosing Detroit in real life isn't much different than OCP choosing it in the movies. The city's broke, has crime problems, and you sell people on the idea of bringing it back to it's former glory.

"The Future has a Silver Lining" :)

> The prophecy must be fulfilled.

No, that will interfere with the fulfillment of the other prophecies.

By the way did they actually build that Robocop statue in Detroit ?

At least he acknowledges a weakness of the Silicon Valley clone efforts.

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