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> My ride was so smooth, the novelty began to wear off, turning a trip to the future into just another journey across town. This is the only nod in the article

• Fatnino 3y ago
  My first driverless ride in a Cruise vehicle was like "oh this is neat, no driver!" and then I put on my seat belt and it was immediately just another ride in a car, no big deal. Not even a lingering thought in the back of my mind. They drive just like a human would 99% of the time.
• Waterluvian 3y ago
  It took just two moon landings for people to get bored. I don’t think you need a technology to be fully functional for people to tire of it. It just has to be in the news for enough years.
  • mc32 3y ago
    It's true for most people, but you also have fans who never get bored --and in the case of rockets to the moon would witness every launch, if they could --just as some people love watching planes take off and land.
  • austinl 3y ago
    Reminds me that SpaceX has now landed rocket boosters successfully over 200 times. Landing just a single rocket was huge news a few years ago. The US is launching things into space about 20 times as frequently compared to 10 years ago [1]. Now, most rocket launches don't make mainstream news—I only keep up with things by subscribing to a niche newsletter [2]. [1] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/yearly-number-of-objects-launched-into-outer-space https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/yearly-number-of-objects-... [2] https://orbitalindex.com https://orbitalindex.com
    • fnordpiglet 3y ago
      Every time I watch a booster landing I get goosebumps. And robo taxis still amaze me.
      • rob74 3y ago
        Yeah, people sensitive to technology (and I guess there's a fair share of those on HN) find these things fascinating. Or things that are even more commonplace, like airplanes - that it's really possible to transport millions of people around the world with this speed and reliability is also fascinating if you think about it. But most people just complain about the lack of legroom and the bad food - and would probably do the same on a flight to the Moon too if those would become commonplace enough...
        • fnordpiglet 3y ago
          Welllllll - no one likes being uncomfortable for long periods of time. Even if I went to the moon in economy class I would definitely be thrilled, but would complain about the leg room and the (no) food :-)
  • ycdavidsmith 3y ago
    It’s in the word: news. It must be new.
• frakkingcylons 3y ago
  I felt this way too after my Waymo ride in Chandler, AZ. The ride to my destination was incredible, my family couldn't stop taking pictures and gushing when the car managed to deftly make turns and obey traffic. The ride back from our destination we were just looking out the window and occasionally glancing at the car's 3D view.
• ChatGTP 3y ago
  It's a ride in a car, it's boring, even if it's driven by GPS and Lidar.
  • unyttigfjelltol 3y ago
    It's a kind of Rube Goldberg contraption for getting around town..... The most complex gizmo possible for the most mundane of tasks.
    • zzzzzzzza 3y ago
      humans in a nutshell
      • ChatGTP 3y ago
        Am I supposed to get excited each time I get in one or something ?
        • archgoon 3y ago
          [dead]
    • jeffbee 3y ago
      In a city as hilly as sf getting around in an electric car is a real benefit that saves a great deal of effort. I’d rather have core bus lines that run on 2-3 minute headways instead, but I’ll take what I can get.
      • mcny 3y ago
        I wonder... Could we sort of mix this self driving car technology with an app that does something like Uber pool and put it on buses? I am not thinking going to a different state. I'm just thinking local public transit. If we have enough buses and assuming there is no rain or snow, passengers just punch in where they want to go and one of the buses takes them there? I feel like there is so much valuable data getting wasted because Uber and Lyft are private companies with no interest in improving public transit. However, I think this data from my hypothetical bus pool could be used to alter bus routes or even to come up with maybe potential metro lines?
• User23 3y ago
  Driverless cars have never been even remotely as unsafe as early commercial passenger aviation.
  • labster 3y ago
    The alternative to early aviation was taking 2-20 times longer to reaching your destination, with the vast majority of the risk borne by the passengers. The alternative to self-driving is paying a guy less than minimum wage to take you in the same amount of time. And the risks are mostly on pedestrians and first responders.
• fnord77 3y ago
  I was super thrilled the first time I rode in a waymo. The second trip seemed humdrum. I've taken over 100 trips now and it is no more exciting than riding the bus
• proc0 3y ago
  There's a term for this, or at least it's a known phenomena in the AI industry for a while. It's how AI becomes transparent after wide adoption. I'm still amazed at video filters that transform your face in real time, and that is now a common feature in so many apps that most people might not consider AI.
  • Dylan16807 3y ago
    > It's how AI becomes transparent after wide adoption. I don't like this framing for video filters. Go back ten years and nobody thought of that kind of visual effect as AI. Then someone made an AI version, and people talked about that for a bit, then they went back to considering the actual effect. This is very different from situations where a task is inherently thought of as an AI task when people are anticipating it.
    • proc0 3y ago
      Maybe not the best example, although I still remember filters became huge around the same time the AI versions started emerging. Video transcripts are another example, or even text translation at this point. These are widely used forms of AI but it's not what most people are talking about when they talk about AI.
      • Dylan16807 3y ago
        I think a large part is because those uses are much more sensory than thinky. And for those sorts of uses they're good at using a huge corpus to clean up the details but straightforward algorithmic methods can get into the same ballpark.
  • ChatGTP 3y ago
    We just get use to material objects very easily, like colour TV for example, was amazing I don’t own one and would prefer to read a book or surf the net. If we had flying cars tomorrow morning it would be a wonderful novelty but we’d get bored with them too.
  • mensetmanusman 3y ago
• mint2 3y ago
  As an SF resident, I’m not at all excited about riding in them as they seem to drive annoyingly, especially right turns. They are slow and position weirdly for turns. I have contemplated that if a person from 1995 woke up from a coma and saw one they would freak out and then think they are living in sci fi future. But nope, the cars are mundane and boring. It’s just as google intended in order to be unthreatening. But it also makes them boring so that was a double edged sword
• taurath 3y ago
  > I wonder if this is a function of how “around the corner” this tech has felt for so long? Have we somehow become jaded to this innovation before it has even arrived? The end customer experience is nearly identical to having a quiet driver. A taxi is still a taxi. Someone having their own self driving car would be a big change. Being able to not own a car because of cheap shared self driving vehicles would be interesting if economical, but does anyone really believe anymore that it will be cheap, given how expensive ride share services are?
  • belugacat 3y ago
    > does anyone really believe anymore that it will be cheap, given how expensive ride share services are? I used to own a car in SF, and I definitely spend way less money every month on Lyft + the occasional weekend Getaround than I did on insurance/gas/repairs/the occasional tow or parking ticket when I had my car (not even counting initial acquisition). Obviously depends on a lot of factors, but it’s not that clear cut.
    • rob74 3y ago
      If robo-taxis actually manage to reduce the number of people that own cars, it also has other advantages - mainly less need for parking spaces.
      • BurningFrog 3y ago
        A robo-taxi driving 24/7 replaces 24 cars driving 1h/day, 23 of which are parked on average. This would be a huge improvement in resource efficiency.
        • danmaz74 3y ago
          Only if there weren't rush hours.
          • mlyle 3y ago
• 3cats-in-a-coat 3y ago
  The realization a self-driving car is not infinitely exciting is how bubbles pop. This particular bubble was formed mostly by Tesla hyping up the coming of their fleet of millions of robotaxis that will turn every other car immediately obsolete, “like owning a horse”, and Teslas will 100x in price, and Tesla will be the most valuable company in the world. And all that, over a product they still can’t ship (and won’t). The reality of robotaxis is that they’re happening but gradually, not overnight. There will be problems, also benefits. And it’ll be an OK business. And humans will be kicked out of another job only they could do. In a way it’s not good news. It’s bad news. Because we think not being able to work this or that means we’ll be given more responsibility at a higher level. But we’re still apes barely qualified to drive a car. How does that magically make us capable of higher jobs? It doesn’t. As robots do more, the expectations of humans are also to do more. And most will fail.
  • pirate787 3y ago
    Your Luddite take is profoundly wrong, and has been consistently proven wrong at every single technological turn in history. We have more robots than even today, and yet a labor SHORTAGE. Eliminating the tedious and dangerous task of driving is an enormous benefit to humanity that will save 30,000+ lives a year in the US alone. We will end the misery caused to millions from injury and tragedy, and the billions of dollars lost. We can rethink our cities and move parking to the periphery. New jobs will emerge to replace long distance trucking and taxi driver (two jobs that didn't really exist just 100 years ago). Humanity will benefit.
    • 3cats-in-a-coat 3y ago
      You’re not thinking through what you’re talking about, unfortunately that’s typical. Think about it, how can there be a “SHORTAGE of jobs”, when we have over 8 billion people on this planet? Are we running out of people in general? No. Is everyone employed and happy? No. So we are short of the kind of increasingly mythical people with 20 years experience in some tech that came out yesterday, we’re short of people with IQ 180 and above with five diplomas, people with certain increasingly higher level of requirements. PRECISELY the kind I’m talking about. Most people do not qualify for those jobs. They never will. They can’t. They’re not seeking those jobs as they don’t understand them (the employers often also don’t), and if they saught them they would not be given to them. Do you understand what I’m talking about? More and more people will be in the pool that do not qualify. The more “shitty jobs” you take out of the jobs pool we have available for humans, the more “shitty unemployed people” there will be. Eventually there will be billions of “shitty unemployed people”, because what passes as moderately intelligent person today will be just another shitty person 10-20 years from now, who better brush up and get those five diplomas and his IQ to 180 and otherwise how dare they ask for a job? There is no such situation where dumb people rule over smart machines. If the machines are better then the people become useless. Many aren’t good at much. They’re decent people but just happen to be best at “store clerk”. Those are maybe some of your friends, parents, siblings, children. Your wife. They don’t get math, and find it hard to remember too much. Those people are doomed. And that’s most people. Your elitist attitude is only further stressed by the incorrect reference to the Luddites. They embraced technology with open arms. Their bosses told them no one will be fired, only promoted, everyone will be rich. Then they got fired. They protested and were subdued with violence and prison time. That’s the story of the Luddites. They didn’t hate machines. But the machines made them useless. So they were gone from the picture. You think you’re not like them, you’re better. You’re one of the smart ones. But you’re precisely them. Your don’t know your history so you’re doomed to repeat it. I’m not against machines. I love machines. I make machines. I program machines. I evolve machines. I’m sympathetic to any system in this universe, be it smart, dumb, protein, silicon and metal. But it’s incredibly awkward to me to see people cheer for their own obsoletion. We really have no idea what we’re doing. We’re simply the scorpion riding on the frog’s back and following our nature. We can’t escape our nature.
• Gravityloss 3y ago
  My flying saucer was only going mach three. At this rate it was going to take hours to get to Singapore. What made it worse was the Starlink was janky and scrolling the influencer feed on my Oculus was only 120 FPS. Turned it off and started window whale spotting. Though they were so common now it got boring pretty fast too.
  • JKCalhoun 3y ago
    Found William Gibson.
    • AtlasBarfed 3y ago
      Elevator tennis is really losing its shine, as is the soma. And the ladies aren't looking as pneumatic as they once did.
• edude03 3y ago
  The goal is that it should be boring. When you take an uber normally you really only pay attention to the driver if they're really bad at driving or they're talking to you - so being bored by a self driving car to me is high praise
  • tenpies 3y ago
    And if anything I would place a premium on boredom. I am paying, in part, to have my attention back. The complete opposite for me would be something like Tesla's "self-driving" where I'm effectively an unpaid driving instructor for the equivalent of a drunk teenager that randomly shifts between F1 driver and actively suicidal.
  • ncr100 3y ago
    I'd pay more for Exciting, and Safe rides.
• chankstein38 3y ago
  I feel like it was literally just riding in a car. Sure the car had no driver but what I took from this article is that there was nothing significant or interesting about the whole experience, which is exactly what we'd want if the goal is a future where these are common.
  • idopmstuff 3y ago
    I think this is it - the first time riding in an airplane is vastly different than anything you've ever experienced in your life. You're watching the first the ground, and then the clouds, recede below you. Driving in a robotaxi is (if done well) exactly the same as riding in an Uber, just without the person sitting in front. The crazy part is the how, not the what, and we're pretty good at ignoring the magic that powers many of our otherwise mundane experiences.
  • meowface 3y ago
    Right. In terms of overall end user experience, it wouldn't, and shouldn't, feel different from just getting an ordinary Uber. The real self-driving revolution people have wanted is most/all consumer cars on the roads being self-driving so that you can (in theory) dedicate time to other things and be less likely to get in a collision, but that's far away.
• dfxm12 3y ago
  Getting driven in a self driving car is not so much different from getting driven in a driver driven car. You get in, you check your email, you get out across town, etc. This is the same in both. It's not really comparable to flying in the air to a different part of the world for the first time...
• optimalsolver 3y ago
  Reminds me of "If All Stories Were Written Like Science Fiction Stories": http://web.archive.org/web/20040929041451/http://www.shrovetuesdayobserved.com/flight.html http://web.archive.org/web/20040929041451/http://www.shrovet...
• VoodooJuJu 3y ago
  I think the indifference is a function of just how marginal the utility is. Before self-driving cars, it's either: (1) I'm getting chauffeured around (2) I'm doing something tedious and boring until I arrive at my destination. With self-driving cars: (1) I'm getting chauffeured around (2) I'm doing something tedious and boring or something entertaining until I arrive at my destination. Like who cares how novel and futuristic the implementation is? The utility is nearly the same.
• smugma 3y ago
  My four year old and I pass by several every day and always point out the magic of a driverless car. We look inside at red lights and think about how it might work. I’m also cautious, worried it might run me over. I treat them like I might a dog… cute but could bite me or him.