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There are certainly some overly optimistic timelines being promised by some people and companies, but "several decades" seems extremely pessimistic. There are s
by baddox 6y ago
There are certainly some overly optimistic timelines being promised by some people and companies, but "several decades" seems extremely pessimistic. There are self-driving cars driving all over San Francisco (and presumably other cities) with minimal human driver intervention. I'm sure they're not perfect, and they might not be as good as whatever human driving ability baseline will be needed for mainstream and regulatory acceptance of self-driving cars, but I don't think there's any huge leap (like the development of AGI) required to get to that acceptance from where we are now.
- valuearb 6y agoThere is a huge leap in regulations and public acceptance needed. Either way it doesn’t affect Uber because the tech will be easily licensable.
- lhorie 6y agoSeveral decades ago, I was hearing about flying cars. The technology existed for years. Commercial flight is a thing too, but 20 years later we're still no closer to having flying cars. Why would self driving cars be different?
- agumonkey 6y agoThe factors seems weighted very differently. Flying cars are even more dangerous than SDV (a flying ton near buildings ?). The technological soil of the era might be less nurturing than today.
- lhorie 6y ago> Flying cars are even more dangerous than SDV Are they though? Statistically speaking, planes are safer than cars, and SDVs don't exactly have a pristine record track already.
- tachyonbeam 6y agoCommercial planes are inspected regularly by qualified technicians, flown by professional pilots, and they don't fly between buildings in densely populated areas. Imagine if every average joe owned a helicopter, and maintained it the way he maintains his rusty old car... Small planes don't have nearly the safety record of commercial planes, and if everyone owned aerial vehicles that fly inside cities, you can be sure it would be a disaster. I think there's an argument to be made that if flying cars were owned by a company like Uber, regularly inspected, and flown by a computer, the safety could be there, but then you're still left with issues such as noise and energy efficiency.
- agumonkey 6y agoI never could swallow the statistics of flight safety. Of course they're safer, there's nothing in the sky. I assure you I can drive a million mile in a flat desert without a single incident while sleeping[0]. Flying cars were probably asking to operate in close proximity to things and people and it would make the probs a lot different IMO. [0] end of hyperbole.
- lhorie 6y agoOne of the promises about flying cars was speed: you would theoretically be able to live in LA and commute to SF. So there was definitely some amount of disruption talk. With that said, this is sort of the point: SDVs would be close to arms reach of pedestrians virtually all the time, so I'd imagine that when all is said and done, the safety/regulatory barrier ought to be an extremely high hurdle to overcome. There are many things that we can talk about in terms of "if only X was solved, that would change the world" (e.g. X being the cure for cancer, or X being singularity, etc). But the devil is of course in the details: until we know what X is, it _could_ be a single breakthrough but it most likely is a nearly insurmountable wall of a million factors). For SDVs, X is L5 autonomy.
- agumonkey 6y agoYeah they're even closer but they're not flying. I'm not even arguing for SDV or against flying cars but I do believe that flying tons in cities is (unless you have Transformers level of tech) non sequitur. That said I'm far more about co-disrupting the world by .. walking.
- thebean11 6y agoI don't know, why would any new technology be different? I feel like the similarities between flying cars and self driving cars are superficial.
- baddox 6y agoI’m not sure I understand the argument. Surely you can’t conclude from the lack of flying cars that nothing will ever happen.
- lhorie 6y agoI'm questioning the notion that SDV are somehow just around the corner, considering that another technology with similar regulatory/safety/public opinion challenges still hasn't become ubiquitous after over 20 years.
- baddox 6y agoFlying cars aren’t (as far as I know) being routinely tested in major cities the same way self-driving cars are.