> It's some of the hardest roads in the bay area.Hard is subjective. Multiplying large numbers is hard for humans, but easy for machines. I'd say something like the I-80 through Nebraska is one of the easiest drives imaginable, but good luck getting your Waymo ride down that route... You've not made a good case for it operating outside of tightly controlled bounds.
More importantly, per the topic of conversation, you've not made a good case for the investment. Even though it has found an apparent niche, Waymo continues to lose money like it is going out of style. It is nice of them to pay you to get yourself around and all, but the idea that someone could invest in self-driving cars to get rich from it is dead.
> What I see more of on HN is everyone calling everything a bubble.
Ultimately, a bubble occurs when people invest more into something than they can get back in return. Maybe HN is right — that everything is in a bubble? There aren't a lot of satisfactory answers for how the cost of things these days can be recouped. Perhaps there are not widely recognized variables that are being missed by the masses, however the sentiment is at least understandable.
But the current AI state of affairs especially looks a lot like the Dotcom bubble. Interesting technology that can be incredibly useful in the right hands, but is largely being used for pretty stupid purposes. It is almost certain that in the relatively near future we'll start to realize that we never needed many of those things to begin with, go through the trough of disillusionment, and, eventually, on the other side find its true purpose in life. The trouble is, from a financial perspective, that doesn't justify the spend.
This time could be different, but since we're talking about human behaviour that has never been different before, why would humans suddenly be different now? There has been no apparent change to the human.