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> It’s like the initial hype around self driving cars Wait... Self driving cars actually happened. Seems like the hype was true, but 5 years later than expecte

• ab5tract 1y ago
  I have not ever been in a self-driving car. I've seen a few of them visiting the Bay Area. Only taxis seem to be allowed to use this tech so far. I've always been a proponent that we would see self driving cars in our lifetime. But they have absolutely not arrived outside of the sheltered enclaves of a handful of tech-centered cities.
  • lubujackson 1y ago
    Goal post: moved.
    • deleted 1y ago
      [deleted]
  • danenania 1y ago
    There aren't just a "few" in the Bay Area—they've become totally ubiquitous in SF.
    • ab5tract 1y ago
      That hardly entails that self-driving cars have "arrived". Am I mistaken or is it true that you can't even own and operate one yourself? In my opinion, it's as similarly off-base as to making claims that 'mach speed consumer air travel' "arrived" just because for a few decades you could catch a Concorde flight between NYC and London.
      • danenania 1y ago
        I didn’t say they’ve arrived—I was just pointing out the very misleading “few” in your earlier comment. Anyone who spends an hour or two in SF can tell you how wrong that is. They’re literally everywhere. You’re right that they have a long way to go before being fully mainstream. But thousands of people are using them every day in multiple major cities. That’s a pretty big milestone.
• blabus 1y ago
  The progress thus far has been very impressive but the ultimate product the average person imagines as a "self-driving car", one where you can literally devote zero attention and do something else entirely while being driven around (and that handles effectively any edge case), is still quite a ways off.
  • decimalenough 1y ago
    Waymo is that ultimate product. Obviously it's not everywhere and you can quibble about what "effectively any edge case" means, but it's close to human level at being able to handle whatever the streets of SF throw at it.
    • georgemcbay 1y ago
      > able to handle whatever the streets of SF throw at it. Not able to handle what the streets of Los Angeles throw at it, however.
      • decimalenough 1y ago
        I don't think human drivers would be much better at handling getting torched by mobs.
        • tsimionescu 1y ago
          And yet human drivers keep using the LA streets, including human taxi drivers, while Waymo has paused.
        • klipt 1y ago
          Maybe if the Waymo deployed an inflatable dummy passenger people would be like "oh there's someone in that car, better not torch it"?
• afavour 1y ago
  I’ve never seen nor ridden in one. I know there are deployments in a few cities but that is a far, far cry from the future we were told was right around the corner.
• tsimionescu 1y ago
  No, they haven't , at least nowhere near the scope of the hype. The promise in the early 2010s was that in 10-20 years, human driving would be obsolete, that professional drivers would be out of a job, and that all land-based transportation would be overhauled. None of this is even close to happening. Waymo is impressive tech, for sure, but what they're proving is that this is just not currently solvable as a general problem. The best we can do is to meticulously craft a solution for one constrained use case - driving in SF, driving in LA, etc. And even then, we need to pick certain use cases - it's not like they could use their current tech to start autonomous service in Juneau Alaska. Or even NYC, most likely.
  • olalonde 1y ago
    The optimists got the timeline wrong but they were closer to the truth than those who said it would never happen. I have no idea how close AGI is but there is clearly no AI winter around the corner as some HNers have been predicting[0]. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23886325 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23886325
    • yencabulator 1y ago
      Solving a small subset of the problem != solving the problem. I'll believe self-driving is solved when I can order an automated ride to a BLM/forest service dirt road I only have GPS coordinates for and that has cell service on the hilltop only.
      • olalonde 1y ago
        I'm pretty sure that problem is solved from a technical point of view - though it might not be commercially available yet due to economic and regulatory reasons.
        • yencabulator 1y ago
          You're trying to move the goalpost from "self-driving" to "self-driving in scenarios where the route has been fully premapped". Might as well move it to "as long as there's no semi crossing the road" to cover for Tesla. Centrally-managed clean and rigid setting is not the full extent of the problem domain.
• const_cast 1y ago
  What laypeople consider as "happened" and what those in the know consider as "happened" are very different IME. For most people, they'll consider self-driving as "happened" when most cars are self-driving. Similarly, the consider the smartphone as "happened" not when the palm came out - but somewhere around the iPhone 4. Like, right now, immunotherapy for cancer has "happened" - there's real patients really doing it, for real. But most cancer patients don't consider immunotherapy as "happened", they're still getting chemo. Once chemo is obsolesced, we can consider immunotherapy as "happened". From then, to now, may be on the scale of decades.