Disrupting Uber

Luckily unicorn-driven magic carpets don't face this problem.

In some big cities, Google Maps can provide this, sort of, Uber vs bus fare, for instance.

You can't blame the driver, they weren't driving. The car manufacturers can't accept blame, as it costs a lot if you have to factor in the cost of a lifetime of support for a maimed infant. Even ignoring the fact that it only works on highways and not normal surface roads, Tesla's "beta" Autopilot feature takes no responsibility because the driver is still supposed to be holding the wheel.

Also as any software developer would tell you, software updates would also be a problem in themselves. If you propose that cars be auto-updated automatically, I wonder how insurance would work when the car is running different software to the software it was originally insured with. Critical saftey systems can't get auto-updated without a lot of testing. What if the auto-update mechanism gets hacked, or maliciously changed by a disgruntled self-driving car employee? What if a legitimate update causes another bug where it maims the elderly now instead of infants? Do they roll back to the infant-maiming software now? I'm being silly but updates on critical safety stuff isn't so simple, especially with the legal ramifications.

I think legal issues will be a problem for self-driving cars, maybe even a larger problem than the actual designing a working self-driving car problem. Someone has to be responsible for inevitable accidents (bugs?). After a century of being able to blame the driver, car companies won't want to change that status quo.

Maybe insurance will decide that they'll cover self-driving cars if they prove themselves to be safe, but we'll see.

It can. The problem wasn't that. The problem was that it wasn't able to differentiate the color properly and thought nothing was there. There's more info in Tesla's blog post. And it's not like it is an unsurmountable problem that is leading to accidents everywhere. It was an edge case and will probably be sorted out.

>massively premature to suggest that there's anything like a driverless future

I really think that's a very harsh opinion. And you're asserting this opinion on many intelligent people working towards a difficult solution. Thousands of people have used auto pilot without any problems and many lives were probably saved (consider if they were driving normal cars instead of self driving ones?)

>There's just too many variables on our roads and the stakes are too high.

Nobody is disagreeing with you on that. That's the reason it already took so long. Self driving cars first appeared in 2005 if not earlier [0]. And remember all of self driving is mostly a software problem, which greatly reduced iteration time for new developments unlike electronic or mechanical revisions.

>25 years away IMO

Funny how people predict things. Ray Kurzweil predicts AGI (general Artificial Intelligence) to arrive before the year 2045, 4 years after you say we get self driving cars. I'm not going to argue with you on that number since we probably have different opinions on what constitute self driving cars. Just so you know, I predict we'll have fully self driving cars on the road (with humans in them) in 5 years.

>Remember 25 years ago, cars weren't super different from today

Please tell me you're kidding. [1][2]

>Self driving cars are pretty much unicorns

At least those unicorns are achievable and people are trying towards achieving it rather than give up.

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DARPA_Grand_Challenge#2005_Gra...

[1]http://www.popularmechanics.com/cars/a11201/why-cars-are-saf...

[2]http://www.iihs.org/iihs/sr/statusreport/article/50/1/1

Absolutely not. This is why price-discrimination always happens jumping through a weird hoop or other. Imagine the typical example of price discrimination, S/M/L coffee for widely spread prices that don't have much to do with the cost for the amount of coffee with prices that wildly change up and down depending how busy it is, customers would be rightly pissed for getting screwed because they're obviously not getting a fair price. Price differentiation needs some sort of trick to obscure this fact.

Otherwise it's like saying "getting away with this is perfectly fine because capitalism", which is motivated purely by greed, not the possible benefits of a free market.

> it's harder to arrange for 10 cars to arrive at a spot than 1.

I think you forgot to divide by ten, there. Try this statement for a fairer comparison:

to arrange for 10 cars to arrive at 1 spot vs 10 cars at 10 spots

Seems to me that the 10 cars at 1 spot should be cheaper.

The only reason they get away with this price differentiation going the other way is because they are able to hide these prices from the customers. Driving up profits from unequal information availability is also known as "screwing people over", so yeah that'd be a scandal (except for all the HNers that will go "I am genuinely curious why this is so *surprising" to anyone" -- because getting screwed should be a surprise, otherwise you should've gotten mad sooner, like when we said there's no proof of getting screwed)