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Serious question: why is cost such a common argument made here against emerging tech? This argument seems to come up every time some new expensive technology is

by gfodor 10y ago

Serious question: why is cost such a common argument made here against emerging tech? This argument seems to come up every time some new expensive technology is transitioning closer to consumers' hands, and the current price, which is obviously expected to go down at scale as it does for nearly all widely useful technology, is used as evidence nobody will be able to afford it. I've seen this argument made for technology that is still in the R&D phase, for goodness sake! Obviously, the assumption of all those involved is that the price will plummet as the technology becomes more adopted, so the goal is to get to a price point where the earliest adopters will be willing to pay. For self driving cars, talking about plumbers not buying this at the current price point is a bizarre argument.

monkmartinez 10y ago
Serious counter question; Why is nobody talking about cost? Cars are very expensive... is self-driving tech going to increase or decrease the cost of a vehicle? Do people generally want more freedom or less freedom choice? Why does everyone assume the cost will decrease with scale? How many people can afford a Tesla right now? Let alone a fully autonomous car? If flying were more affordable and less strict more people would own their own plane. It isn't and they don't. I see self-driving cars a lot like airplanes and John Deere tractors. That is, expensive proprietary tech that you have no control over. No thank you. Why does everyone assume that most people want to share a vehicle?
- stdgy 10y ago
  We've already seen price drops for the most expensive self-driving components. LIDARs, GPUs and storage have already fallen in cost, and the products aren't even on the market yet. There is every reason to believe these price drops will continue as more resources are put into scaling production and more companies enter the game of component design and production.
  - monkmartinez 10y ago
    > There is every reason to believe these price drops will continue as more resources are put into scaling production and more companies enter the game of component design and production. Why? We literally never see that with top shelf products. This isn't an arduino solder job. This is going to be an integrated software and hardware package that will rival an aircraft autopilot/navigation. Please check you facts on the cost of these things. I don't want walmart brand, everday low price components on my self-driving vehicle. I want top of the line if my life is in the balance.
    - joshuamorton 10y ago
      >Why? We literally never see that with top shelf products. This isn't an arduino solder job. This is going to be an integrated software and hardware package that will rival an aircraft autopilot/navigation. Please check you facts on the cost of these things. Google claims that it dropped the price of lidar by a factor of 10x once it started producing them. That seems like a significant, factual, drop in cost.
      - monkmartinez 10y ago
        The iPhone is how much to produce? Very important point you missed in what I wrote; Hardware and software package. A lidar without software is useless.
        joshuamorton 10y ago
        The price dropped from something ridiculous (~100K) to something manageable for a luxury car (~10K), and certainly reasonable as a cost offset by multiple consumers (like in a rideshare environment).
        monkmartinez 10y ago
        It doesn't matter. As we have learned with the John Deere tractor situation is that we will lose even more control. Think buying and maintaining a car is expensive now? Wait until you literally can't drive it without paying for a software update. I'm sorry, but I don't see anything cool in this other than a quick nap sometimes on a long road trip. Everything else quickly approaches pain in the ass levels to the point where I would rather have carburetors back. Also, don't want to rideshare with a group of disgusting people. I work in EMS and I see first hand what nastiness is out there. Nope.
- jliptzin 10y ago
  I'll bet you would have said the same thing about a $5,000 personal computer in the early 90s.
  - monkmartinez 10y ago
    We still have $5000 personal computers in the '10s! Hell a new MacBook Pro with everything and some upgrades is $3499 to $4299... very few people can truly afford that.
    - ghaff 10y ago
      The late Bill Machrone coined Machrone's Law which stated that "the computer you want always costs $5,000." This hasn't really been true for 5-10 years. You can build a $5K computer but you have to really push it. But saying that the figure is still at least $2,500-$3,000 is probably fair.
      - tempestn 10y ago
        Sure, but you can also build a perfectly serviceable computer for < $1000. Even $500 would (obviously) get you something far, far superior to that 90s machine.
    - svachalek 10y ago
      That's not accounting for inflation - $5000 then was more like $10000 now. And a bare-bones minimum machine for running business software (i.e. no color graphics or floating point hardware) was still close to $2000 (more like $4000 in today's dollars). So, roughly speaking a maxed-out gaming rig today is about as affordable as a bare-minimum box in 1990, without even accounting for the massive difference in absolute power.
      - jliptzin 10y ago
        That's the point
  - Noos 10y ago
- Qwertious 10y ago
  "Serious counter question; Why is nobody talking about cost? Cars are very expensive... is self-driving tech going to increase or decrease the cost of a vehicle? Do people generally want more freedom or less freedom choice?" Because you don't need to own the car - you could feasibly rent one on demand (like a taxi), since you can now rent a car without the necessary wage overhead of the taxi driver, or the minimum costs of car-rental (i.e. car rental typically is per-day, for logistical reasons) or the logistical problems of car-rental (i.e. you need to drive to and from the car-rental place, to pick up and drop off the car - and by "drive" I mean "get a lift or use public transport"). Plus, the self-driving stuff shouldn't be particularly expensive, and will be counterbalanced by lower insurance premiums, and likely tax incentives once voters realise that they really do save lives. "Why does everyone assume the cost will decrease with scale? How many people can afford a Tesla right now? Let alone a fully autonomous car?" Because just about everything decreases with scale, and it's not inherently hard tech. Tesla's main problem is their lack of scale. As are autonomous cars. "Why does everyone assume that most people want to share a vehicle?" Money. It's not "want", it's "can tolerate so as to save money". Your car, when adding together all the costs (purchase, fuel, rego, maintenance, interest payments if you borrow instead of buying outright) is one of the biggest expenses that most people have. Sharing a car between several people should decrease the costs by an order of magnitude, which could be used to buy whatever people spend their money on these days, or saved.
  - monkmartinez 10y ago
    I live in the suburbs. I have a family with two grade school kids that participate in seasonal team sports and year-round gymnastics. They attend a charter school with no school bus system. Let's say each ride cost $10... that is $20 to $40 per day just for the kids on most weekdays. Add in birthday parties, saturday games, doctor/dentist, trip to grandma/grandpa that live 7 miles away... and we are talking $1000 per month in "ride-sharing costs" for my children alone. We could add in my wife and I's costs, but it would be silly. Maybe this service is less than $10 per ride, even at $5 per ride it is wayyyyyy more expensive than I currently spend on a 4 year old Toyota Highlander with low miles with insurance and fuel.
    - 10y ago
- alasdair_ 10y ago
  > Do people generally want more freedom or less freedom choice? I'd quite like the freedom to be able to commute to work, go out for drinks with people after work and come home again at the time of my choosing without relying upon someone else to cart me around, paid driver or otherwise. THAT seems freedom-enhancing.
jliptzin 10y ago
It usually just comes down to the person being against something without really having any good argument for why they're against it, and that's the only thing they can think of.
Noos 10y ago
But this doesn't always happen. We have yet to see any electric car reach the price of a low-end kia or hyundai.
- sxates 10y ago
  In 10 years electric cars will be the cheapest cars. We're at the beginning of this transition right now, still in the early-adopter stage.

by gfodor 10y ago

monkmartinez 10y ago

Serious counter question; Why is nobody talking about cost? Cars are very expensive... is self-driving tech going to increase or decrease the cost of a vehicle? Do people generally want more freedom or less freedom choice? Why does everyone assume the cost will decrease with scale? How many people can afford a Tesla right now? Let alone a fully autonomous car? If flying were more affordable and less strict more people would own their own plane. It isn't and they don't. I see self-driving cars a lot like airplanes and John Deere tractors. That is, expensive proprietary tech that you have no control over. No thank you. Why does everyone assume that most people want to share a vehicle?

stdgy 10y ago
We've already seen price drops for the most expensive self-driving components. LIDARs, GPUs and storage have already fallen in cost, and the products aren't even on the market yet. There is every reason to believe these price drops will continue as more resources are put into scaling production and more companies enter the game of component design and production.
- monkmartinez 10y ago
  > There is every reason to believe these price drops will continue as more resources are put into scaling production and more companies enter the game of component design and production. Why? We literally never see that with top shelf products. This isn't an arduino solder job. This is going to be an integrated software and hardware package that will rival an aircraft autopilot/navigation. Please check you facts on the cost of these things. I don't want walmart brand, everday low price components on my self-driving vehicle. I want top of the line if my life is in the balance.
  - joshuamorton 10y ago
    >Why? We literally never see that with top shelf products. This isn't an arduino solder job. This is going to be an integrated software and hardware package that will rival an aircraft autopilot/navigation. Please check you facts on the cost of these things. Google claims that it dropped the price of lidar by a factor of 10x once it started producing them. That seems like a significant, factual, drop in cost.
    - monkmartinez 10y ago
      The iPhone is how much to produce? Very important point you missed in what I wrote; Hardware and software package. A lidar without software is useless.
      - joshuamorton 10y ago
        The price dropped from something ridiculous (~100K) to something manageable for a luxury car (~10K), and certainly reasonable as a cost offset by multiple consumers (like in a rideshare environment).
        monkmartinez 10y ago
        It doesn't matter. As we have learned with the John Deere tractor situation is that we will lose even more control. Think buying and maintaining a car is expensive now? Wait until you literally can't drive it without paying for a software update. I'm sorry, but I don't see anything cool in this other than a quick nap sometimes on a long road trip. Everything else quickly approaches pain in the ass levels to the point where I would rather have carburetors back. Also, don't want to rideshare with a group of disgusting people. I work in EMS and I see first hand what nastiness is out there. Nope.
jliptzin 10y ago
I'll bet you would have said the same thing about a $5,000 personal computer in the early 90s.
- monkmartinez 10y ago
  We still have $5000 personal computers in the '10s! Hell a new MacBook Pro with everything and some upgrades is $3499 to $4299... very few people can truly afford that.
  - ghaff 10y ago
    The late Bill Machrone coined Machrone's Law which stated that "the computer you want always costs $5,000." This hasn't really been true for 5-10 years. You can build a $5K computer but you have to really push it. But saying that the figure is still at least $2,500-$3,000 is probably fair.
    - tempestn 10y ago
      Sure, but you can also build a perfectly serviceable computer for < $1000. Even $500 would (obviously) get you something far, far superior to that 90s machine.
  - svachalek 10y ago
    That's not accounting for inflation - $5000 then was more like $10000 now. And a bare-bones minimum machine for running business software (i.e. no color graphics or floating point hardware) was still close to $2000 (more like $4000 in today's dollars). So, roughly speaking a maxed-out gaming rig today is about as affordable as a bare-minimum box in 1990, without even accounting for the massive difference in absolute power.
    - jliptzin 10y ago
      That's the point
- Noos 10y ago
Qwertious 10y ago
"Serious counter question; Why is nobody talking about cost? Cars are very expensive... is self-driving tech going to increase or decrease the cost of a vehicle? Do people generally want more freedom or less freedom choice?" Because you don't need to own the car - you could feasibly rent one on demand (like a taxi), since you can now rent a car without the necessary wage overhead of the taxi driver, or the minimum costs of car-rental (i.e. car rental typically is per-day, for logistical reasons) or the logistical problems of car-rental (i.e. you need to drive to and from the car-rental place, to pick up and drop off the car - and by "drive" I mean "get a lift or use public transport"). Plus, the self-driving stuff shouldn't be particularly expensive, and will be counterbalanced by lower insurance premiums, and likely tax incentives once voters realise that they really do save lives. "Why does everyone assume the cost will decrease with scale? How many people can afford a Tesla right now? Let alone a fully autonomous car?" Because just about everything decreases with scale, and it's not inherently hard tech. Tesla's main problem is their lack of scale. As are autonomous cars. "Why does everyone assume that most people want to share a vehicle?" Money. It's not "want", it's "can tolerate so as to save money". Your car, when adding together all the costs (purchase, fuel, rego, maintenance, interest payments if you borrow instead of buying outright) is one of the biggest expenses that most people have. Sharing a car between several people should decrease the costs by an order of magnitude, which could be used to buy whatever people spend their money on these days, or saved.
- monkmartinez 10y ago
  I live in the suburbs. I have a family with two grade school kids that participate in seasonal team sports and year-round gymnastics. They attend a charter school with no school bus system. Let's say each ride cost $10... that is $20 to $40 per day just for the kids on most weekdays. Add in birthday parties, saturday games, doctor/dentist, trip to grandma/grandpa that live 7 miles away... and we are talking $1000 per month in "ride-sharing costs" for my children alone. We could add in my wife and I's costs, but it would be silly. Maybe this service is less than $10 per ride, even at $5 per ride it is wayyyyyy more expensive than I currently spend on a 4 year old Toyota Highlander with low miles with insurance and fuel.
  - 10y ago
alasdair_ 10y ago
> Do people generally want more freedom or less freedom choice? I'd quite like the freedom to be able to commute to work, go out for drinks with people after work and come home again at the time of my choosing without relying upon someone else to cart me around, paid driver or otherwise. THAT seems freedom-enhancing.

jliptzin 10y ago

It usually just comes down to the person being against something without really having any good argument for why they're against it, and that's the only thing they can think of.

Noos 10y ago

But this doesn't always happen. We have yet to see any electric car reach the price of a low-end kia or hyundai.

sxates 10y ago
In 10 years electric cars will be the cheapest cars. We're at the beginning of this transition right now, still in the early-adopter stage.