The dream of driverless cars is dying
spectator.co.uk
The dream of driverless cars is dying
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Re: The dream of driverless cars is dying
#2Though this article sounds plausible, I became more skeptical when I noticed he put the word "facility" in scare quotes.
Re: The dream of driverless cars is dying
#3Reminds me of this famously wrong column dismissing the Internet back in 1995: https://www.newsweek.com/clifford-stoll-why-web-wont-be-nirv...
> How about electronic publishing? Try reading a book on disc. At best, it's an unpleasant chore: the myopic glow of a clunky computer replaces the friendly pages of a book. And you can't tote that laptop to the beach. Yet Nicholas Negroponte, director of the MIT Media Lab, predicts that we'll soon buy books and newspapers straight over the Intenet. Uh, sure.
Takeaway: people expect way too much out of next five years of the future, and typically it takes twenty years for those expectations to become fully realized. (I believe there is an Andy Grove quote to the same effect, but I couldn't find it in time.)
Re: The dream of driverless cars is dying
#4Reminds me of this famously wrong column dismissing the Internet back in 1995: https://www.newsweek.com/clifford-stoll-why-web-wont-be-nirv... > How about electronic publishing? Try reading a book on disc. At best, it's an unpleasant chore: the myopic glow of a clunky computer replaces the friendly pages of a book. And you can't tote that laptop to the beach. Yet Nicholas Negroponte, director of the MIT Media Lab, pr…
He wrote a great book "Silicon Snake Oil" that is full of things just like this he was so very wrong about, it's a great read still. He complains about how bad things were in the late 90s, but somehow misses how things will get better. It's really worth reading.
Somewhere there's a great review, written somewhat recently, on all the things he had wrong. I can't seem to find the one I'm thinking of. I guess he was correct about how things on the web are never permanent.
Re: The dream of driverless cars is dying
#5Reminds me of this famously wrong column dismissing the Internet back in 1995: https://www.newsweek.com/clifford-stoll-why-web-wont-be-nirv... > How about electronic publishing? Try reading a book on disc. At best, it's an unpleasant chore: the myopic glow of a clunky computer replaces the friendly pages of a book. And you can't tote that laptop to the beach. Yet Nicholas Negroponte, director of the MIT Media Lab, pr…
He wrote a great book "Silicon Snake Oil" that is full of things just like this he was so very wrong about, it's a great read still. He complains about how bad things were in the late 90s, but somehow misses how things will get better. It's really worth reading. Somewhere there's a great review, written somewhat recently, on all the things he had wrong. I can't seem to find the one I'm thinking of. I guess he was cor…
Well, much like in buying options, you have to guess both the outcome of a bet and the time at which it happens.
The author right, in 2003, I doubt you saw many people reading books on the beach with a clunky laptop or whatever version of kindle existed back then. So, from the mid 90s to mid 2000s, the author was decidedly right for 10 whole years, which is a long time.
Now, if he continued to say that not many people would read ebooks on the beach from 2008-2018, he would have been wrong about that bet. But I doubt he would have felt that way, because by 2008, it was much clearer where the internet was headed compared to in 1998
Re: The dream of driverless cars is dying
#6Reminds me of this famously wrong column dismissing the Internet back in 1995: https://www.newsweek.com/clifford-stoll-why-web-wont-be-nirv... > How about electronic publishing? Try reading a book on disc. At best, it's an unpleasant chore: the myopic glow of a clunky computer replaces the friendly pages of a book. And you can't tote that laptop to the beach. Yet Nicholas Negroponte, director of the MIT Media Lab, pr…
Several people have formulated the same idea.
Bill Gates:
> We always overestimate the change that will occur in the next two years and underestimate the change that will occur in the next ten.
Roy Amara:
> We tend to overestimate the effect of a technology in the short run and underestimate the effect in the long run.
Kurzweil has called it ”the intuitive linear view” vs ”the historical exponential view”:
> Most technology forecasts ignore altogether this “historical exponential view” of technological progress. That is why people tend to overestimate what can be achieved in the short term (because we tend to leave out necessary details), but underestimate what can be achieved in the long term (because the exponential growth is ignored).
Re: The dream of driverless cars is dying
#7The part that I can't figure out is why everyone seems to act like driverless cars will be some kind of all-at-once phase change transition instead of being incremental.
It seems almost a certainty that we will gradually ease into the concept. Some cars will be able to do some things autonomously, a little, for some people, some of the time. Eventually the cost/benefit levels will improve, more features will roll out, and sure over a long time scale things might look revolutionary.
In other words this big complicated category of tech will grow like most other technology has. This isn't an individual app like Instagram or WhatsApp it's a whole category of technology, like the concept of automated factories, or container based shipping, or the internet itself. It could be decades, or longer. Or not.
But as a casual observer it's pretty easy to look around and notice that there really aren't any practical applications of autonomy with mass adoption, and conclude that it's going to be a minute, and that we'll definitely have ample time to notice as we slowly get closer.
Re: The dream of driverless cars is dying
#8My 2016 23k Honda Civic can drive itself down the highway. Gas, break, stear - it can do it all on a clearly marked highway. As can Subarus and probably many others. I just know what my friends and coworkers have. Saying no car maker has shipped anything is a blatent lie.
Re: The dream of driverless cars is dying
#9My 2016 23k Honda Civic can drive itself down the highway. Gas, break, stear - it can do it all on a clearly marked highway. As can Subarus and probably many others. I just know what my friends and coworkers have. Saying no car maker has shipped anything is a blatent lie.
For that to happen does that 2016 Honda Civic have to have a driver in it?
That's how you can tell if it's driverless.
Re: The dream of driverless cars is dying
#10Reminds me of this famously wrong column dismissing the Internet back in 1995: https://www.newsweek.com/clifford-stoll-why-web-wont-be-nirv... > How about electronic publishing? Try reading a book on disc. At best, it's an unpleasant chore: the myopic glow of a clunky computer replaces the friendly pages of a book. And you can't tote that laptop to the beach. Yet Nicholas Negroponte, director of the MIT Media Lab, pr…
However, there is a difference, and I think an important one. With the internet, every piece of needed technology was either in place or easily imagined; with driverless cars, I don't think anyone can claim that is true. While ML/deep learning have made impressive strides in the past years, it is still a big leap to say these same technologies are enough to drive a car in the wild. They may be, but it also may be many years until such a technology is realized.