10 ms·

Ten Year Futures

105 points by kawera 10y ago

frgtpsswrdlame 10y ago
In a community with so many members that pride themselves on contrarian views, why is this view on autonomous vehicles and more broadly, incredibly powerful AI that is just around the corner so broadly accepted?
- Edmond 10y ago
  Not sure about AI since I am still skeptical about "incredibly powerful" AI around the corner. AI is definitely going to have a big impact in the not too distance future but my sense is that the AI need not be all that powerful, it just needs to be capable of eliminating human input. Self driving cars on the other hand are right in front of our eyes, we have seen them driving around and are rapidly advancing in terms of their level of autonomy...in terms of timeline for widespread adoption, I'll look at utility. The utility of self-driving cars is just too great for them not to quickly replace manual cars once the technology is fully ready. I can't imagine too many people would want to be stuck fiddling with their cars in long commutes when they could be reading, watching TV or taking a nap...just as smart phones dominate now because of their utility, self-driving cars are likely to unfold the same way.
  - frgtpsswrdlame 10y ago
    >Self driving cars on the other hand are right in front of our eyes, we have seen them driving around and are rapidly advancing in terms of their level of autonomy There's basically no evidence for this though. Sure Tesla can show me a 3 min video of a car driving in perfect weather on perfect, straight, wide roads but I don't see self-driving cars "in front of my eyes" at all. We don't have any safety data that is directly comparable to human driving, we have several accidents already, etc. >when they could be reading, watching TV or taking a nap... I agree that when/if we make it to that level of autonomy we'll have turned the corner on adoption and it will explode. But I'm not sure that even the most optimistic of self-driving companies would say that we are anywhere close to that.
    - duggan 10y ago
      You'd have to wonder though if this is perhaps scoffing at the notion of an airline industry at the time the Wright brothers are showing off their first aircraft. Getting from "man powered craft that can stay in the air for 30 seconds and a hundred odd metres" to "jetting millions of people around the world every day" requires a leap of imagination, but unequivocally it was possible, and happened.
      - aetherson 10y ago
        ... Over decades.
  - xenadu02 10y ago
    Like the uncanny valley, the edge cases for self-driving cars will take more work than the rest of the effort combined... by at least an order of magnitude. There is far more money in automating long-distance trucking. My bet is the first real use of self-driving "cars" will be for trucks. The human driver can sleep, eat a meal, etc but will remain on-board for safety's sake and dealing with unanticipated edge cases (e.g. the AI wakes up the driver when it runs into a traffic jam due to an accident. The AI can probably recognize cop cars, flares, etc but won't be able to navigate the scene of the accident while responding to instructions from police officers) The next small step will be "follower" trucks. The lead truck has a human driver same as before, but one or two AI-driven trucks follow. They do their best to track the human driver's response to unexpected situations. Worst-case, they pull over and flag the human driver who pulls over and uses a VR rig to pilot them past the problem. Meanwhile the application of "self-driving" technology to cars over the next 10 years will be to avoid accidents, not to actually be self-driving. Will we have fully autonomous vehicles within 50 years? Almost certainly. Will we have them in the next 5? Almost certainly not.
    - advantager 10y ago
      Self driving haul trucks are already at work at a few open pit mine sites around the world. These are vehicles driving relatively short, prescribed routes, with well defined patterns. The few articles I've read seem to indicate they're operating just fine, although I'd be interested to learn more. If the cost savings are there, I'd bet the entire mining industry will move in that direction rather quickly. http://www.riotinto.com/ourcommitment/spotlight-18130_18328.aspx http://www.riotinto.com/ourcommitment/spotlight-18130_18328....
    - stale2002 10y ago
      You overestimate how good humans are at driving. I'd argue that the shit self driving cars we have right now are ALREADY statistically safer than humans. You don't have to be perfect. Just better than an average driver. And average drivers are drunk, sleep deprived, and texting. That is a very low bar to pass.
      - 10y ago
- nostrademons 10y ago
  A number of us live in Silicon Valley or work daily with AI. These aren't science fiction technologies for us: they're, real, tangible cars that you see daily on the roads, or software libraries that you can download and use yourself. I can understand why they'd seem like fantasy if you live in some far-off place, but when you're stuck behind a self-driving car going 25 mph on El Camino, there's pretty concrete evidence that self-driving cars are here. I do think that AI and particularly deep learning are overhyped. It is a big deal, but it's not as big a deal as many people make it out to be. It's much like the Internet in 1998; it works, you can use it now, and you know that it's going to drastically increase the reach of computing power, but people are talking like that's all going to happen in 1-2 years when really it'll be 2-3 decades.
  - frgtpsswrdlame 10y ago
    I guess my concern isn't that these are "science fiction technologies" but that they're rather simple. AI has a history of over-promising and under-delivering and even if a few "self-driving" cars have made it on the road, how long until people begin trying to use them in scenarios they're not really ready for? All of that progress can disappear overnight if there are a few bad accidents. I guess when I look around, I don't see a comparison between AI now and the Internet then, I see a comparison between AI now and AI then (70's).
    - nostrademons 10y ago
      AI has this effect where whenever an approach starts working, it ceases to be AI: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_effect It's worth remembering that many of the actual technologies developed in 1970s AI - A*, beam search, pattern matching, constraint solving, rules engines - are now basic CS algorithms that most programmers are just expected to know, and they have continued applicability to a wide variety of domains. We just don't call them "AI" anymore, because the technology has been commoditized enough that they are "business rules", or "single-player games", or "layout engines", or other examples of the actual problem domain that's solved. Ditto 1990s AI - fuzzy logic, SVMs, Bayesian networks, collaborative filtering, perceptrons. It just got good enough that it became the standard way you solve a certain class of problems with computers, and now it's called "fraud detection", "Zestimates (tm)", "recommendation engines", "stream ranking", and so on. Deep learning is the same. The hype cycle will eventually bust, because all hype cycles eventually bust. But in the meantime, it has opened up whole classes of problems in computer vision, speech recognition, recommendation, machine translation, and several other domains that were not amenable to computerized treatment before.
- marcosdumay 10y ago
  Who pride themselves on contrarian views? That looks like a rather foolish kind of goal. Well researched, fundamented, empirically valid views are worth pursuing, and if those happen to lead into contrarian, ok, nothing wrong with that, but pursuing it? No way.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
guimarin 10y ago
Or of course, things could take an altogether different turn. I remember when GPS was introduced in 96 for civilians and no one could have predicted Uber at that time, though all the pieces were there. BE does a great job of synthesizing possible directions from what's available to him in albeit a really good position at a16z. However, there are many people out there quietly building technology that changes the game completely. Making affordable graphene is one such unknown at this point.
- mathattack 10y ago
  He's great, and I appreciate his 10 year view.
- protomyth 10y ago
  Another example of having the technology in front of you and not predicting its use is the Apple videos under Sculley. I remember one (cannot find now) that had a man scan in a newspaper into his tablet to help him learn how to read. GPS for civilians actually predates the 1996 directive http://www.pcworld.com/article/2000276/a-brief-history-of-gps.html http://www.pcworld.com/article/2000276/a-brief-history-of-gp...
- icebraining 10y ago
  On the other hand, in 2001 (eight years before Uber): Basically WebTaxi works well with people having wireless web access from PDAs (Personal Digital Assistants). Imagine a scenario where you are sitting in a restaurant and you need a Taxi service. You go to the WebTaxi website and request a Taxi to your home. WebTaxi comes back and tells you exactly how much it will cost you. It can even tell you how long you will have to wait for the taxi. You continue to chat while you wait for the taxi to show up. As soon as the taxi arrives, your PDA informs you that the taxi is waiting for you! https://web.archive.org/web/20010127103500/http://www.eventhelix.com:80/ThoughtProjects/WebTaxi/WebTaxiIntroduction.htm https://web.archive.org/web/20010127103500/http://www.eventh...
  - guimarin 10y ago
    good argument that all internet businesses were invented in the late 90s bubble. nearly all were too early.
SideburnsOfDoom 10y ago
> TV, which so far has not really been touched by the internet, uhhh, wasn't I reading pieces about how the internet was really shaking up TV about 5 years ago?
- mbesto 10y ago
  His point is that TV ad dollars haven't shrunk (look at the graph)
no1youknowz 10y ago
I think the rise of machine learning, graphene, high performance electric engines and metallic hydrogen will finally allow a reusable vehicle to go into space, something like the Skylon [1]. The reason why I bring this up, as being important in 10 years or less. Is that it will be available for around $1m. AI will negate the need to go through rigorous astronaut training. Maybe there will be some, but not as thorough. Graphene and other exotic metals will allow for lighter craft and reusability. High performance electric engines will allow for less fuel payloads to get into high altitude, whilst allowing for the metallic hydrogen to literally blast out into space. Metallic hydrogen is 7x more powerful than liquid hydrogen. I think once average joe is able to get into space. We could finally see an abundance of rare earth materials. Could be like the old west, where a co-op of you and your buddies go out, wrangle an asteroid and mine. Come back with a trillion dollars worth of metals. Of course, a glut of anything will bring prices down. But hopefully by then manufacturing is ubiquitous also. Maybe it's the optimist in me, but there are certain historical events that could take our society from where it is now, scarcity based, to an abundant one. Interesting times ahead. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skylon_(spacecraft) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skylon_(spacecraft)
- bigger_cheese 10y ago
  Graphene is interesting I was working on synthesizing it for my undergrad thesis in Materials Engineering in 2010 (back then we were looking at using it in Li-Ion batteries). Personally I feel we are still more than 10 years away from mass applications. I'm happy to be proven wrong though. Thinking from a Materials POV in the next 10 years I think 3D printing (additive manufacturing) is an area where large advances will occur. New applications for 3D printed materials and wider adoption of 3d printing.
- meric 10y ago
  Considering how much more abundant we are, in terms of CPU, RAM, Disk space, compared to twenty years ago, and also in terms of food, clothing, shelter, compared to a thousand years ago, IMO we're only going to find more ways to consume the abundance in ever more less efficient ways, and won't escape "scarcity" within the next 100 years.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
metastart 10y ago
"mobile is maturing and its growth is slowing"...yes, somewhat on the hardware side. There are still annual sales of maybe 1 billion smartphones a year...so that's a pretty big market. I think that there's still ENORMOUS potential for mobile apps and mobile-driven services. There's huge opportunity for new services e.g. Uber. I think just about every large web/desktop property faces a significant threat from a mobile app e.g. craigslist, match.com (they luckily own tinder), flickr (wait, already gone to Instragam), AIM/Yahoo Messenger (gone thanks to Whatsapp), etc...
- Animats 10y ago
  The top 10 apps are now all from Facebook or Google. The average user now loads zero apps per month. Apps are dead.[1] [1] https://www.recode.net/2016/9/16/12933780/average-app-downloads-per-month-comscore https://www.recode.net/2016/9/16/12933780/average-app-downlo...
  - microddin 10y ago
    in addition, the users who don't have smartphones yet don't have very attractive demographics, and attention is saturated: https://key2.bluematrix.com/docs/pdf/570bbc5f-526e-482f-90ac-c6ff2fd9fb29.pdf https://key2.bluematrix.com/docs/pdf/570bbc5f-526e-482f-90ac...
    - Animats 10y ago
      From that article: "U.S. users spend about 12 hours a day consuming media, which seems a relatively hard limit (up only 4% in the past five years)." 12 hours? Wow. TV maxed out at about 5 hours a day.
  - flukus 10y ago
    Why is that surprising? All my needs are catered for so why would I download more apps? I'm actually surprised the 51% are downloading one or more a month, that's hundreds of millions of potential customers right there.
Animats 10y ago
53% of US jobs look automatable within 20 years.[1] There will be a much larger underclass in a decade. But they'll have legal pot to keep them quiet and passive. [1] https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2017/05/the-parts-of-america-most-susceptible-to-automation/525168/?single_page=true https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2017/05/the-par...
- olewhalehunter 10y ago
  Doesn't Netflix and EPSN already do this? In contrast, have you ever encountered just how "paranoid" about these issues a cannabis user can be?
- maverick_iceman 10y ago
  Or they'll do better jobs. At one point, 70% of US workforce was engaged in agriculture, now it is 1%. The 69% didn't become an unemployed underclass.
  - spydum 10y ago
    True, but the pace of the transition was substantially slower. I think that is the concerning part: it will happen over years (less than ten) versus generations.
  - jnicholasp 10y ago
    > Or they'll do better jobs. [...] The 69% didn't become an unemployed underclass. No, they moved into factory, mining, retail, and other jobs that were commensurate with their abilities. The automation shift is not the same, because it will take over all the unskilled/low-skilled jobs, and there will be nowhere in the economy for the displaced people to move into. It is not really conceivable that all these people are capable of taking on jobs which require complex thinking, judgment, creativity, or other higher skills. IQ is a real thing, and although it does not reflect on someone's human value, it does very definitely place limits on what functions a significant portion of the population can perform. And in the long run, we will all be in that displaced portion. Best that we find ways to create human security and meaning, now, for a coming world in which we have no necessary economic role to play.
thriftwy 10y ago
These days I'm afraid that my ten year future is trying to hit "ethnic minorities" with sharp objects while avoid being hit in return.
- sctb 10y ago
  Please post civilly and substantively on Hacker News or not at all. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
charlesism 10y ago
I realize mentioning Bitcoin in a tech forum feels gauche in 2017... Having said that, it's strange that this guy doesn't mention cryptocurrency anywhere in his post. He spends a lot of time discussing technologies that aren't quite there yet, and leaves out the one area that is (likely) right at the point of adoption.
- cponeill 10y ago
  I was thinking the same thing while reading through this essay. I know the firm he works for (A16Z) is investing in the cryptocurrency area and even just did a podcast[0] on it. [0] http://a16z.com/2017/04/03/cryptocurrencies-protocols-appcoins/ http://a16z.com/2017/04/03/cryptocurrencies-protocols-appcoi...
  - charlesism 10y ago
    Regardless of his opinion, he probably should have added a one-liner as to why it he didn't think it relevant. Otherwise he leaves the reader wondering did he forget? or not think it will have impact? or feel it's outside the scope of what he''s discussing? Regardless, it was an interesting read.
- pharrlax 10y ago
  Wider adoption of cryptocurrency doesn't seem to be a foregone conclusion the way self-driving cars are.
  - charlesism 10y ago
    Agreed. I was mainly thinking about timing, but I let the words pick my meaning a bit there. I ought to have said that if bitcoin amounts to anything (ie: if new technologies built on it begin to affect everyday life), it's likely to happen over the next one or two years.
palakchokshi 10y ago
I think he missed the point about TV ad budget not moving to the likes of Netflix or Amazon. The reason it hasn't moved is not because the audience is limited but because the companies in question don't want to pollute their viewers' experience with Ads. Compare that to YouTube which is free and does have Ads. Viewing habits are shifting but so is public opinion on Ads. The future of Ads on these internet TV sites is going to be the same as it was for traditional TV albeit a bit more targeted. Instead of TV networks controlling the viewing data in the future internet TV services will control it. so the potential of a startup to take advantage of that data is going to be minimal since it will be guarded like gold.
- graycat 10y ago
  Some Web sites will have enough data to do some unique and especially effective ad targeting, due to data and targeting math, for their own users.
3pt14159 10y ago
Swords and shields. People can't really see it yet, partially due to a unwillingness to see the darker side of humanity, but a real cyber security expert is worth more than a cruise missile. Planes, self-driving cars, swarms of aerial and underwater drones, fraud, propaganda, auto-targeting laser systems, surveillance, power generation and distribution, command and control interruption, machine learning + cyber warfare. Who needs nuclear weapons when you have a zero day on a hundred million self-driving cars and you can get them to the nearest gas station or chemical plant going 300km/h?
- Nition 10y ago
  I wish the present was a little less obsessed with having everything Internet-connected. I don't want an Internet connection on my self-driving car, or at least have an air gap between the user functions and the car's driving computer. But that won't happen because the company will be more worried about being able to push updates than about security. To be fair I guess even with a non-connected car that I have to update via USB, I could still download a malicious update. But at least we won't all get the malicious update pushed at once.
  - desdiv 10y ago
    All I see is praise for Tesla on HN. I rarely see sentiments like "Tesla makes great cars, but I just wish their ECU and other critical systems wasn't internet connected" or "I refuse to buy any Tesla products until they remove the constant user tracking". People vote with their wallets, and if the technology-savvy and privacy-conscious HN crowd is voting this way then...
    - lyqwyd 10y ago
      It's almost 1984
    - Pica_soO 10y ago
      .. nothing changes. We are too small of a group, even as influencers to change that. However, if someday a zeroday is used to duke it out, a very angry, very unreasonable, not interested PR-Bla and Excuses crowd is going to assemble outside someones office tower. The someone will call the police, but the police will be busy, with the mess someones ECU peeping has made. The privat guards will do what private guards always do, if they see no good outcome for themselves and step aside. The escape helicopter pilot will have lost loved ones in the mess and take off. Someone is going to get shoved out the airlock, for all the other someones to see. That will have a interesting learning effect. Thus ended the lesson.
Nition 10y ago
Not the main point of the article, but pretty interesting to see that Google's ad revenue is now apparently about equal to advertising revenue from all print media in the world combined.
graycat 10y ago
My view is: (1) Software is well on the way to an old, slowly changing, mostly routine, boring, low margin, slow growth business and industry. (2) That the general purpose computing hard/software and 100 Mbps Internet data rates are all so cheap will in places undercut large, expensive approaches to computing projects. E.g., people will do projects, but Sand Hill Road need not be more involved than they are now in, say, a new pizza shop in Peoria, not more involved than they were in the romantic matchmaking Web site Plenty of Fish. (3) A huge problem for computing causing (1) is that there just are not enough good, new ideas for high value IT startups. For a joke, but a simple explanation, the days of a hot social, mobile, local sharing app are gone. (4) For Evans's dreams about machine learning (ML), he is not very well informed and is not seeing very clearly, but in principle, if strain to extend the meaning of ML, he is correct about the potential. But in practice that future will come slowly, very slowly. Why so slowly? In fact, e.g., looking at, say, scikit, that's basically some applied math, and nearly all the math there is now old enough to have long, gray whiskers, literally. That applied math and much more in optimization, simulation, experimental design and analysis of variance, stochastic processes, on and on, i.e., the math sciences, optimization, operations research, statistics, except for a few niches (e.g., optimization in operating oil refineries, the fast Fourier transform for oil prospecting, partial differential equations for modeling oil reservoirs, air line crew scheduling, maybe airline plane scheduling, statistics in biomedical research and development) hasn't caught on at all well generally in business; so there is only tiny reason to believe it will become "The next big thing" now. For that math, it's not so easy to get good at it: (A) The pure math departments don't want to teach it. (B) Very few other departments have enough grounding in the math prerequisites to teach the material very well. (C) Except for a few niches, business has long made its position crystal clear -- such applied math and a dime won't cover a 10 cent cup of coffee. (D) It has long been the case and still is that about the only paying customer that takes such applied math seriously is the US DoD for purposes of US national security. Run a good applied math project down Sand Hill Road, for a big problem, with running prototype software, and will hear laughs, silence, or "don't call us; we'll call you". I have to doubt if there is a single information technology (biotechnology can be different) VC firm on Sand Hill Road able to direct technical due diligence for an applied math project. There can't be "The next big thing" without a few hundred times more well qualified startup founder, worker bee, applied mathematicians to do the work.
stretchwithme 10y ago
Excellent questions regarding autonomous vehicles. Instead of a city center being two hours away at rush hour, it could be a half hour trip. But also living in the city is going to get a lot easier because of robotic transportation. It won't be necessary to haul anything home from a store, for example. A lot of cabs could just have one or two seats and no trunk. We'll see tiny vehicles delivering dinner, handling dry cleaning. And parking woes disappear. But the biggest change will be in how easy it will be to move from one place to another. Yes, robots will be able to move all your stuff cheaply. But they also might just procure comparable stuff in your new city instead. And most of your stuff you don't use all the time, so maybe it's in long term remote/cheap storage until you do. Maybe its okay if those table leafs are at your house for Thanksgiving dinner. Maybe you move every month or live in one place during the week and another on the weekends.
- roymurdock 10y ago
  This sounds good in theory because it correlates with trends in the IT industry. Centralized compute/storage/app delivery on an IaaS but in the real world, with our actual physical stuff instead of data. In practice I'd wager that this lifestyle of moving constantly and having robots move your stuff around for you would be prohibitively expensive. Also, who wants to containerize their life? How could this ever be sustainable for someone with kids. I think we should be less focused on autonomous driving, and more focused on reforming our tax code, infrastructure spend (too little), and healthcare spend (too much).
  - stretchwithme 10y ago
    I know a guy that travels constantly and has no permanent address. And there are a few families that spend years on the road because they want to teach their kids that life is an adventure. They haven't found it prohibitively expensive or unsustainable. It's worth it to them. Making that lifestyle cheaper and easier will expand the number of people for whom that is true. Automation, as it has always done, will make our infrastructure cheaper and more robust. It will slash the cost of healthcare and dramatically increase the amount of resources we have available and our quality of life. So, no, I don't think we should focus more on nibbling around the edges of what is possible. Those things can all be fixed, but that takes political will and convincing the majority of people. And most of them are stuck in the analogies of the past.
wtvanhest 10y ago
Higher ed should see the most impressive shift of all in the next 10 years. Right now, it seems like everyone realizes there is a problem, but nobody can see the future. Student loans are driven by massive inefficiencies that various companies will exploit. The end will be apparent in 10 years.
- austenallred 10y ago
  I'm sure there's a YC company working on that right now
  - wtvanhest 10y ago
    Yeap, and coursera etc. The 'disruption' will come from every angle.
- kayoone 10y ago
  For the US thats true, as a german who can basically study for free at any of the "elite" Universities in the country (same for scandinavia, netherlands etc) the whole higher ed concept in the US seems borderline scam to me anyway.
  - fwn 10y ago
    ...not implying that you meant otherwise, but: The German "elite" label does not mean anything at all. It's basically a government program to allocate (a small amount of) additional funds decorated with a fancy term. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_Universities_Excellence_Initiative https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_Universities_Excellence...
    - kayoone 10y ago
      Well yes, but all of them are among the most highly regarded Universities in the country, while there are others without the label that are equally good. I just wanted to emphasise that the quality you can get for "free" is really good.
greggman 10y ago
I don't think we know where AI driven cars will lead. no parking lots? If we have AI driven cars than billions of people who can't drive can suddenly use a car. Your 5yr old kid wants to visit grandma? The just ask the car to take them there. Grandma who's too old to drive wants to go somewhere? She jumps in an AI car. All that public transportation in Tokyo, HK, Singapore, NYC, London, Paris, Berlin? Maybe all that disappears. Maybe many people stay close to home because they don't have a car and public transportation is no fun (10 minute walk to station, 2-3 transfers, possibly a crowded train standing with sweating people, 10 minute walk from station to final dest) but if there are ubiquitous AI cars then I can go door to door at any time. Those two 10 minute walks disappear, the standing with sweaty people disappears. Now I start traveling far more often. Even better I don't have to concentrate on driving I can use that time. In other words, AI cars might 10x car usage
- blauditore 10y ago
  I really doubt that. For many people, having a car is also a question of money. Also, in many cities it's more practical to use bicycles or public transport rather than cars. Also, the reasons 5-year-olds don't travel alone would still apply with AI cars: What happens if something goes wrong, e.g. the car breaks down?
  - greggman 10y ago
    You don't need to own an AI car to use an AI car. As for "what if something goes wrong" the same is true for any transportation. If I can stand anywhere in the city, press a button on my phone and have an AI car pick me up in 3-5 mins you can bet using them will become extremely common.
- dx034 10y ago
  Public transport will continue to exist because it'd too expensive to build enough roads. London without Bus & Tube? You could walk faster than using a self driving car (recent tube strikes confirm that). It would hurt medium distance flights and trains though. Boston-NYC would probably be more attractive in a self driving car than flying.

105 points by kawera 10y ago

In a community with so many members that pride themselves on contrarian views, why is this view on autonomous vehicles and more broadly, incredibly powerful AI that is just around the corner so broadly accepted?

Edmond 10y ago
Not sure about AI since I am still skeptical about "incredibly powerful" AI around the corner. AI is definitely going to have a big impact in the not too distance future but my sense is that the AI need not be all that powerful, it just needs to be capable of eliminating human input. Self driving cars on the other hand are right in front of our eyes, we have seen them driving around and are rapidly advancing in terms of their level of autonomy...in terms of timeline for widespread adoption, I'll look at utility. The utility of self-driving cars is just too great for them not to quickly replace manual cars once the technology is fully ready. I can't imagine too many people would want to be stuck fiddling with their cars in long commutes when they could be reading, watching TV or taking a nap...just as smart phones dominate now because of their utility, self-driving cars are likely to unfold the same way.
- frgtpsswrdlame 10y ago
  >Self driving cars on the other hand are right in front of our eyes, we have seen them driving around and are rapidly advancing in terms of their level of autonomy There's basically no evidence for this though. Sure Tesla can show me a 3 min video of a car driving in perfect weather on perfect, straight, wide roads but I don't see self-driving cars "in front of my eyes" at all. We don't have any safety data that is directly comparable to human driving, we have several accidents already, etc. >when they could be reading, watching TV or taking a nap... I agree that when/if we make it to that level of autonomy we'll have turned the corner on adoption and it will explode. But I'm not sure that even the most optimistic of self-driving companies would say that we are anywhere close to that.
  - duggan 10y ago
    You'd have to wonder though if this is perhaps scoffing at the notion of an airline industry at the time the Wright brothers are showing off their first aircraft. Getting from "man powered craft that can stay in the air for 30 seconds and a hundred odd metres" to "jetting millions of people around the world every day" requires a leap of imagination, but unequivocally it was possible, and happened.
    - aetherson 10y ago
      ... Over decades.
- xenadu02 10y ago
  Like the uncanny valley, the edge cases for self-driving cars will take more work than the rest of the effort combined... by at least an order of magnitude. There is far more money in automating long-distance trucking. My bet is the first real use of self-driving "cars" will be for trucks. The human driver can sleep, eat a meal, etc but will remain on-board for safety's sake and dealing with unanticipated edge cases (e.g. the AI wakes up the driver when it runs into a traffic jam due to an accident. The AI can probably recognize cop cars, flares, etc but won't be able to navigate the scene of the accident while responding to instructions from police officers) The next small step will be "follower" trucks. The lead truck has a human driver same as before, but one or two AI-driven trucks follow. They do their best to track the human driver's response to unexpected situations. Worst-case, they pull over and flag the human driver who pulls over and uses a VR rig to pilot them past the problem. Meanwhile the application of "self-driving" technology to cars over the next 10 years will be to avoid accidents, not to actually be self-driving. Will we have fully autonomous vehicles within 50 years? Almost certainly. Will we have them in the next 5? Almost certainly not.
  - advantager 10y ago
    Self driving haul trucks are already at work at a few open pit mine sites around the world. These are vehicles driving relatively short, prescribed routes, with well defined patterns. The few articles I've read seem to indicate they're operating just fine, although I'd be interested to learn more. If the cost savings are there, I'd bet the entire mining industry will move in that direction rather quickly. http://www.riotinto.com/ourcommitment/spotlight-18130_18328.aspx http://www.riotinto.com/ourcommitment/spotlight-18130_18328....
  - stale2002 10y ago
    You overestimate how good humans are at driving. I'd argue that the shit self driving cars we have right now are ALREADY statistically safer than humans. You don't have to be perfect. Just better than an average driver. And average drivers are drunk, sleep deprived, and texting. That is a very low bar to pass.
    - 10y ago
nostrademons 10y ago
A number of us live in Silicon Valley or work daily with AI. These aren't science fiction technologies for us: they're, real, tangible cars that you see daily on the roads, or software libraries that you can download and use yourself. I can understand why they'd seem like fantasy if you live in some far-off place, but when you're stuck behind a self-driving car going 25 mph on El Camino, there's pretty concrete evidence that self-driving cars are here. I do think that AI and particularly deep learning are overhyped. It is a big deal, but it's not as big a deal as many people make it out to be. It's much like the Internet in 1998; it works, you can use it now, and you know that it's going to drastically increase the reach of computing power, but people are talking like that's all going to happen in 1-2 years when really it'll be 2-3 decades.
- frgtpsswrdlame 10y ago
  I guess my concern isn't that these are "science fiction technologies" but that they're rather simple. AI has a history of over-promising and under-delivering and even if a few "self-driving" cars have made it on the road, how long until people begin trying to use them in scenarios they're not really ready for? All of that progress can disappear overnight if there are a few bad accidents. I guess when I look around, I don't see a comparison between AI now and the Internet then, I see a comparison between AI now and AI then (70's).
  - nostrademons 10y ago
    AI has this effect where whenever an approach starts working, it ceases to be AI: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_effect It's worth remembering that many of the actual technologies developed in 1970s AI - A*, beam search, pattern matching, constraint solving, rules engines - are now basic CS algorithms that most programmers are just expected to know, and they have continued applicability to a wide variety of domains. We just don't call them "AI" anymore, because the technology has been commoditized enough that they are "business rules", or "single-player games", or "layout engines", or other examples of the actual problem domain that's solved. Ditto 1990s AI - fuzzy logic, SVMs, Bayesian networks, collaborative filtering, perceptrons. It just got good enough that it became the standard way you solve a certain class of problems with computers, and now it's called "fraud detection", "Zestimates (tm)", "recommendation engines", "stream ranking", and so on. Deep learning is the same. The hype cycle will eventually bust, because all hype cycles eventually bust. But in the meantime, it has opened up whole classes of problems in computer vision, speech recognition, recommendation, machine translation, and several other domains that were not amenable to computerized treatment before.
marcosdumay 10y ago
Who pride themselves on contrarian views? That looks like a rather foolish kind of goal. Well researched, fundamented, empirically valid views are worth pursuing, and if those happen to lead into contrarian, ok, nothing wrong with that, but pursuing it? No way.
deleted 10y ago
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guimarin 10y ago

Or of course, things could take an altogether different turn. I remember when GPS was introduced in 96 for civilians and no one could have predicted Uber at that time, though all the pieces were there. BE does a great job of synthesizing possible directions from what's available to him in albeit a really good position at a16z. However, there are many people out there quietly building technology that changes the game completely. Making affordable graphene is one such unknown at this point.

mathattack 10y ago
He's great, and I appreciate his 10 year view.
protomyth 10y ago
Another example of having the technology in front of you and not predicting its use is the Apple videos under Sculley. I remember one (cannot find now) that had a man scan in a newspaper into his tablet to help him learn how to read. GPS for civilians actually predates the 1996 directive http://www.pcworld.com/article/2000276/a-brief-history-of-gps.html http://www.pcworld.com/article/2000276/a-brief-history-of-gp...
icebraining 10y ago
On the other hand, in 2001 (eight years before Uber): Basically WebTaxi works well with people having wireless web access from PDAs (Personal Digital Assistants). Imagine a scenario where you are sitting in a restaurant and you need a Taxi service. You go to the WebTaxi website and request a Taxi to your home. WebTaxi comes back and tells you exactly how much it will cost you. It can even tell you how long you will have to wait for the taxi. You continue to chat while you wait for the taxi to show up. As soon as the taxi arrives, your PDA informs you that the taxi is waiting for you! https://web.archive.org/web/20010127103500/http://www.eventhelix.com:80/ThoughtProjects/WebTaxi/WebTaxiIntroduction.htm https://web.archive.org/web/20010127103500/http://www.eventh...
- guimarin 10y ago
  good argument that all internet businesses were invented in the late 90s bubble. nearly all were too early.

SideburnsOfDoom 10y ago

> TV, which so far has not really been touched by the internet, uhhh, wasn't I reading pieces about how the internet was really shaking up TV about 5 years ago?

mbesto 10y ago
His point is that TV ad dollars haven't shrunk (look at the graph)

no1youknowz 10y ago

I think the rise of machine learning, graphene, high performance electric engines and metallic hydrogen will finally allow a reusable vehicle to go into space, something like the Skylon [1]. The reason why I bring this up, as being important in 10 years or less. Is that it will be available for around $1m. AI will negate the need to go through rigorous astronaut training. Maybe there will be some, but not as thorough. Graphene and other exotic metals will allow for lighter craft and reusability. High performance electric engines will allow for less fuel payloads to get into high altitude, whilst allowing for the metallic hydrogen to literally blast out into space. Metallic hydrogen is 7x more powerful than liquid hydrogen. I think once average joe is able to get into space. We could finally see an abundance of rare earth materials. Could be like the old west, where a co-op of you and your buddies go out, wrangle an asteroid and mine. Come back with a trillion dollars worth of metals. Of course, a glut of anything will bring prices down. But hopefully by then manufacturing is ubiquitous also. Maybe it's the optimist in me, but there are certain historical events that could take our society from where it is now, scarcity based, to an abundant one. Interesting times ahead. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skylon_(spacecraft) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skylon_(spacecraft)

bigger_cheese 10y ago
Graphene is interesting I was working on synthesizing it for my undergrad thesis in Materials Engineering in 2010 (back then we were looking at using it in Li-Ion batteries). Personally I feel we are still more than 10 years away from mass applications. I'm happy to be proven wrong though. Thinking from a Materials POV in the next 10 years I think 3D printing (additive manufacturing) is an area where large advances will occur. New applications for 3D printed materials and wider adoption of 3d printing.
meric 10y ago
Considering how much more abundant we are, in terms of CPU, RAM, Disk space, compared to twenty years ago, and also in terms of food, clothing, shelter, compared to a thousand years ago, IMO we're only going to find more ways to consume the abundance in ever more less efficient ways, and won't escape "scarcity" within the next 100 years.

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metastart 10y ago

"mobile is maturing and its growth is slowing"...yes, somewhat on the hardware side. There are still annual sales of maybe 1 billion smartphones a year...so that's a pretty big market. I think that there's still ENORMOUS potential for mobile apps and mobile-driven services. There's huge opportunity for new services e.g. Uber. I think just about every large web/desktop property faces a significant threat from a mobile app e.g. craigslist, match.com (they luckily own tinder), flickr (wait, already gone to Instragam), AIM/Yahoo Messenger (gone thanks to Whatsapp), etc...

Animats 10y ago
The top 10 apps are now all from Facebook or Google. The average user now loads zero apps per month. Apps are dead.[1] [1] https://www.recode.net/2016/9/16/12933780/average-app-downloads-per-month-comscore https://www.recode.net/2016/9/16/12933780/average-app-downlo...
- microddin 10y ago
  in addition, the users who don't have smartphones yet don't have very attractive demographics, and attention is saturated: https://key2.bluematrix.com/docs/pdf/570bbc5f-526e-482f-90ac-c6ff2fd9fb29.pdf https://key2.bluematrix.com/docs/pdf/570bbc5f-526e-482f-90ac...
  - Animats 10y ago
    From that article: "U.S. users spend about 12 hours a day consuming media, which seems a relatively hard limit (up only 4% in the past five years)." 12 hours? Wow. TV maxed out at about 5 hours a day.
- flukus 10y ago
  Why is that surprising? All my needs are catered for so why would I download more apps? I'm actually surprised the 51% are downloading one or more a month, that's hundreds of millions of potential customers right there.

Animats 10y ago

53% of US jobs look automatable within 20 years.[1] There will be a much larger underclass in a decade. But they'll have legal pot to keep them quiet and passive. [1] https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2017/05/the-parts-of-america-most-susceptible-to-automation/525168/?single_page=true https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2017/05/the-par...

olewhalehunter 10y ago
Doesn't Netflix and EPSN already do this? In contrast, have you ever encountered just how "paranoid" about these issues a cannabis user can be?
maverick_iceman 10y ago
Or they'll do better jobs. At one point, 70% of US workforce was engaged in agriculture, now it is 1%. The 69% didn't become an unemployed underclass.
- spydum 10y ago
  True, but the pace of the transition was substantially slower. I think that is the concerning part: it will happen over years (less than ten) versus generations.
- jnicholasp 10y ago
  > Or they'll do better jobs. [...] The 69% didn't become an unemployed underclass. No, they moved into factory, mining, retail, and other jobs that were commensurate with their abilities. The automation shift is not the same, because it will take over all the unskilled/low-skilled jobs, and there will be nowhere in the economy for the displaced people to move into. It is not really conceivable that all these people are capable of taking on jobs which require complex thinking, judgment, creativity, or other higher skills. IQ is a real thing, and although it does not reflect on someone's human value, it does very definitely place limits on what functions a significant portion of the population can perform. And in the long run, we will all be in that displaced portion. Best that we find ways to create human security and meaning, now, for a coming world in which we have no necessary economic role to play.

thriftwy 10y ago

These days I'm afraid that my ten year future is trying to hit "ethnic minorities" with sharp objects while avoid being hit in return.

sctb 10y ago
Please post civilly and substantively on Hacker News or not at all. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

charlesism 10y ago

I realize mentioning Bitcoin in a tech forum feels gauche in 2017... Having said that, it's strange that this guy doesn't mention cryptocurrency anywhere in his post. He spends a lot of time discussing technologies that aren't quite there yet, and leaves out the one area that is (likely) right at the point of adoption.

cponeill 10y ago
I was thinking the same thing while reading through this essay. I know the firm he works for (A16Z) is investing in the cryptocurrency area and even just did a podcast[0] on it. [0] http://a16z.com/2017/04/03/cryptocurrencies-protocols-appcoins/ http://a16z.com/2017/04/03/cryptocurrencies-protocols-appcoi...
- charlesism 10y ago
  Regardless of his opinion, he probably should have added a one-liner as to why it he didn't think it relevant. Otherwise he leaves the reader wondering did he forget? or not think it will have impact? or feel it's outside the scope of what he''s discussing? Regardless, it was an interesting read.
pharrlax 10y ago
Wider adoption of cryptocurrency doesn't seem to be a foregone conclusion the way self-driving cars are.
- charlesism 10y ago
  Agreed. I was mainly thinking about timing, but I let the words pick my meaning a bit there. I ought to have said that if bitcoin amounts to anything (ie: if new technologies built on it begin to affect everyday life), it's likely to happen over the next one or two years.

palakchokshi 10y ago

I think he missed the point about TV ad budget not moving to the likes of Netflix or Amazon. The reason it hasn't moved is not because the audience is limited but because the companies in question don't want to pollute their viewers' experience with Ads. Compare that to YouTube which is free and does have Ads. Viewing habits are shifting but so is public opinion on Ads. The future of Ads on these internet TV sites is going to be the same as it was for traditional TV albeit a bit more targeted. Instead of TV networks controlling the viewing data in the future internet TV services will control it. so the potential of a startup to take advantage of that data is going to be minimal since it will be guarded like gold.

graycat 10y ago
Some Web sites will have enough data to do some unique and especially effective ad targeting, due to data and targeting math, for their own users.

3pt14159 10y ago

Swords and shields. People can't really see it yet, partially due to a unwillingness to see the darker side of humanity, but a real cyber security expert is worth more than a cruise missile. Planes, self-driving cars, swarms of aerial and underwater drones, fraud, propaganda, auto-targeting laser systems, surveillance, power generation and distribution, command and control interruption, machine learning + cyber warfare. Who needs nuclear weapons when you have a zero day on a hundred million self-driving cars and you can get them to the nearest gas station or chemical plant going 300km/h?

Nition 10y ago
I wish the present was a little less obsessed with having everything Internet-connected. I don't want an Internet connection on my self-driving car, or at least have an air gap between the user functions and the car's driving computer. But that won't happen because the company will be more worried about being able to push updates than about security. To be fair I guess even with a non-connected car that I have to update via USB, I could still download a malicious update. But at least we won't all get the malicious update pushed at once.
- desdiv 10y ago
  All I see is praise for Tesla on HN. I rarely see sentiments like "Tesla makes great cars, but I just wish their ECU and other critical systems wasn't internet connected" or "I refuse to buy any Tesla products until they remove the constant user tracking". People vote with their wallets, and if the technology-savvy and privacy-conscious HN crowd is voting this way then...
  - lyqwyd 10y ago
    It's almost 1984
  - Pica_soO 10y ago
    .. nothing changes. We are too small of a group, even as influencers to change that. However, if someday a zeroday is used to duke it out, a very angry, very unreasonable, not interested PR-Bla and Excuses crowd is going to assemble outside someones office tower. The someone will call the police, but the police will be busy, with the mess someones ECU peeping has made. The privat guards will do what private guards always do, if they see no good outcome for themselves and step aside. The escape helicopter pilot will have lost loved ones in the mess and take off. Someone is going to get shoved out the airlock, for all the other someones to see. That will have a interesting learning effect. Thus ended the lesson.

Nition 10y ago

Not the main point of the article, but pretty interesting to see that Google's ad revenue is now apparently about equal to advertising revenue from all print media in the world combined.

graycat 10y ago

My view is: (1) Software is well on the way to an old, slowly changing, mostly routine, boring, low margin, slow growth business and industry. (2) That the general purpose computing hard/software and 100 Mbps Internet data rates are all so cheap will in places undercut large, expensive approaches to computing projects. E.g., people will do projects, but Sand Hill Road need not be more involved than they are now in, say, a new pizza shop in Peoria, not more involved than they were in the romantic matchmaking Web site Plenty of Fish. (3) A huge problem for computing causing (1) is that there just are not enough good, new ideas for high value IT startups. For a joke, but a simple explanation, the days of a hot social, mobile, local sharing app are gone. (4) For Evans's dreams about machine learning (ML), he is not very well informed and is not seeing very clearly, but in principle, if strain to extend the meaning of ML, he is correct about the potential. But in practice that future will come slowly, very slowly. Why so slowly? In fact, e.g., looking at, say, scikit, that's basically some applied math, and nearly all the math there is now old enough to have long, gray whiskers, literally. That applied math and much more in optimization, simulation, experimental design and analysis of variance, stochastic processes, on and on, i.e., the math sciences, optimization, operations research, statistics, except for a few niches (e.g., optimization in operating oil refineries, the fast Fourier transform for oil prospecting, partial differential equations for modeling oil reservoirs, air line crew scheduling, maybe airline plane scheduling, statistics in biomedical research and development) hasn't caught on at all well generally in business; so there is only tiny reason to believe it will become "The next big thing" now. For that math, it's not so easy to get good at it: (A) The pure math departments don't want to teach it. (B) Very few other departments have enough grounding in the math prerequisites to teach the material very well. (C) Except for a few niches, business has long made its position crystal clear -- such applied math and a dime won't cover a 10 cent cup of coffee. (D) It has long been the case and still is that about the only paying customer that takes such applied math seriously is the US DoD for purposes of US national security. Run a good applied math project down Sand Hill Road, for a big problem, with running prototype software, and will hear laughs, silence, or "don't call us; we'll call you". I have to doubt if there is a single information technology (biotechnology can be different) VC firm on Sand Hill Road able to direct technical due diligence for an applied math project. There can't be "The next big thing" without a few hundred times more well qualified startup founder, worker bee, applied mathematicians to do the work.

stretchwithme 10y ago

Excellent questions regarding autonomous vehicles. Instead of a city center being two hours away at rush hour, it could be a half hour trip. But also living in the city is going to get a lot easier because of robotic transportation. It won't be necessary to haul anything home from a store, for example. A lot of cabs could just have one or two seats and no trunk. We'll see tiny vehicles delivering dinner, handling dry cleaning. And parking woes disappear. But the biggest change will be in how easy it will be to move from one place to another. Yes, robots will be able to move all your stuff cheaply. But they also might just procure comparable stuff in your new city instead. And most of your stuff you don't use all the time, so maybe it's in long term remote/cheap storage until you do. Maybe its okay if those table leafs are at your house for Thanksgiving dinner. Maybe you move every month or live in one place during the week and another on the weekends.

roymurdock 10y ago
This sounds good in theory because it correlates with trends in the IT industry. Centralized compute/storage/app delivery on an IaaS but in the real world, with our actual physical stuff instead of data. In practice I'd wager that this lifestyle of moving constantly and having robots move your stuff around for you would be prohibitively expensive. Also, who wants to containerize their life? How could this ever be sustainable for someone with kids. I think we should be less focused on autonomous driving, and more focused on reforming our tax code, infrastructure spend (too little), and healthcare spend (too much).
- stretchwithme 10y ago
  I know a guy that travels constantly and has no permanent address. And there are a few families that spend years on the road because they want to teach their kids that life is an adventure. They haven't found it prohibitively expensive or unsustainable. It's worth it to them. Making that lifestyle cheaper and easier will expand the number of people for whom that is true. Automation, as it has always done, will make our infrastructure cheaper and more robust. It will slash the cost of healthcare and dramatically increase the amount of resources we have available and our quality of life. So, no, I don't think we should focus more on nibbling around the edges of what is possible. Those things can all be fixed, but that takes political will and convincing the majority of people. And most of them are stuck in the analogies of the past.

wtvanhest 10y ago

Higher ed should see the most impressive shift of all in the next 10 years. Right now, it seems like everyone realizes there is a problem, but nobody can see the future. Student loans are driven by massive inefficiencies that various companies will exploit. The end will be apparent in 10 years.

austenallred 10y ago
I'm sure there's a YC company working on that right now
- wtvanhest 10y ago
  Yeap, and coursera etc. The 'disruption' will come from every angle.
kayoone 10y ago
For the US thats true, as a german who can basically study for free at any of the "elite" Universities in the country (same for scandinavia, netherlands etc) the whole higher ed concept in the US seems borderline scam to me anyway.
- fwn 10y ago
  ...not implying that you meant otherwise, but: The German "elite" label does not mean anything at all. It's basically a government program to allocate (a small amount of) additional funds decorated with a fancy term. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_Universities_Excellence_Initiative https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_Universities_Excellence...
  - kayoone 10y ago
    Well yes, but all of them are among the most highly regarded Universities in the country, while there are others without the label that are equally good. I just wanted to emphasise that the quality you can get for "free" is really good.

greggman 10y ago

I don't think we know where AI driven cars will lead. no parking lots? If we have AI driven cars than billions of people who can't drive can suddenly use a car. Your 5yr old kid wants to visit grandma? The just ask the car to take them there. Grandma who's too old to drive wants to go somewhere? She jumps in an AI car. All that public transportation in Tokyo, HK, Singapore, NYC, London, Paris, Berlin? Maybe all that disappears. Maybe many people stay close to home because they don't have a car and public transportation is no fun (10 minute walk to station, 2-3 transfers, possibly a crowded train standing with sweating people, 10 minute walk from station to final dest) but if there are ubiquitous AI cars then I can go door to door at any time. Those two 10 minute walks disappear, the standing with sweaty people disappears. Now I start traveling far more often. Even better I don't have to concentrate on driving I can use that time. In other words, AI cars might 10x car usage

blauditore 10y ago
I really doubt that. For many people, having a car is also a question of money. Also, in many cities it's more practical to use bicycles or public transport rather than cars. Also, the reasons 5-year-olds don't travel alone would still apply with AI cars: What happens if something goes wrong, e.g. the car breaks down?
- greggman 10y ago
  You don't need to own an AI car to use an AI car. As for "what if something goes wrong" the same is true for any transportation. If I can stand anywhere in the city, press a button on my phone and have an AI car pick me up in 3-5 mins you can bet using them will become extremely common.
dx034 10y ago
Public transport will continue to exist because it'd too expensive to build enough roads. London without Bus & Tube? You could walk faster than using a self driving car (recent tube strikes confirm that). It would hurt medium distance flights and trains though. Boston-NYC would probably be more attractive in a self driving car than flying.