5 ms·

I have to say, this is one of the most cynical and unimaginative posts I've ever read on HN. I think you should save it somewhere so you can laugh at yourself i

by gfodor 13y ago

I have to say, this is one of the most cynical and unimaginative posts I've ever read on HN. I think you should save it somewhere so you can laugh at yourself if someday driverless cars become prevalent. The positive economic effects and the transformative effect driverless cars will have on society is pretty hard to overstate. You seem to falling into the trap of thinking that infrastructure will not be updated around the assumption that cars are autonomous, and clever people will not exploit this new reality in ways that benefit the world. To attack your specific example, why do you assume the cars will drive around passenger-less, and not merely continually make productive uses of themselves, such as by servicing other passengers or acting as deliverymen for physical goods? Why do you assume people will own cars in general, when a service which provides on-demand autonomous transportation in clean, well-maintained, up-to-date vehicles will be more convenient, less work, safer, and will be cheaper? Why does the car that drops you off need to be the car that picks you up? Why do you think highways will not become wildly more efficient and safe even if the average passenger per car (one of several metrics of efficiency) goes up? Why do you think parking garages and cars themselves will not be able to be packed in more efficiently and quickly when they can autonomously coordinate their insertion and removal from a fixed area? Why do you even think that centralized parking garages will be as necessary when autonomously controlled vehicles can coordinate to efficiently fill any designated parking space that is road accessible? When the assumptions of society change in such a dramatic way (that a human must navigate a road-based vehicle manually) the downstream effects are hard to predict but undoubtedly will follow the same path all automation has: more efficient, less polluting, and more productive use of time and energy. When you're dealing with something as ingrained and as prevalent as the automobile, you're talking about a massive boost in these things across the entire world.

umsm 13y ago
You are assuming a society where everyone shares everything. I don't think that's likely with the introduction of cars that drive themselves. Most early adopters may not be "sharers" either, so they may not push the technology in that direction. I think jellicle is right, that this invention can cause just as much harm as good. When intelligent people make decisions, they consider the worst and best possible outcomes.
- gfodor 13y ago
  I don't consider Uber a "sharing service." Uber's model will probably be the model for the future, I don't see any reason why it shouldn't be, with the difference that they may maintain the fleet themselves. What is the upside to owning a car if you can dispatch one to your house to take you anywhere in a few minutes, or if you can have micro-rentals of a few days at a time where the car will not return back into the network if you really want "instant gratification" of hopping in the car the instant you want to go somewhere. Look at what Uber is done in cities if you want evidence that this model can have a massive effect on the incentives of car ownership. Add to this that the public will probably be incentivized to tax or otherwise limit car owners, and the value proposition gets even worse. It could turn out waiting for an automated vehicle from a network to arrive is still faster door-to-door, since it may have privileged access to high-speed roads or lanes that owned vehicles may not, due to regulation a la HOV, etc. edit: Also I don't disagree that in the early adopter phase autonomous cars may introduce inefficiencies. But the autonomous car is a 100, or even 1000 year invention, not a 10 year one. In many ways it may just be a single one-time event, when ground-based personal transportation for a civilization becomes automated, so it may have no shelf life at all.
  - teek 13y ago
    > To attack your specific example, why do you assume the cars will drive around passenger-less, and not merely continually make productive uses of themselves, such as by delivering other packages or acting as deliverymen for physical goods? Because they won't most of the time? Let's say that during peak rush hour, N people + M packages need to be transported. That means that in order to satisfy peak demand efficiently, we need N+M cars and road capacity. During off-peak hours, lets say that only 20% of the population needs to travel. That means you've got the other 80% of the cars sitting around doing nothing just like they are today. If the average distance to nearby parking is say 2 miles, then we have 80% of the cars just driving empty 2 extra miles to prevent themselves from taking up road capacity (while today we trade off by creating parking lots). Despite that, I do think there will be some improvement in terms of car use. Namely: * the average car size will shrink to probably that of a smart car (2 seats, little cargo room) * parking lots will shrink (but not disappear) due to effective stacked parking * vehicle efficiency will increase (human drivers are inherently bad at maintaining fuel/energy efficiency with acceleration/deceleration) The danger is that this once again will make car use "cheap" and like the article suggests, extends sprawl yet again. So we'll just have another half a century of poor land use just it might be slightly more efficient this time around.
notahacker 13y ago
If people wanted an immensely efficient and affordable taxi system instead of the illusion of freedom granted by owning their own four-wheeled icons of conspicuous consumption, they wouldn't need to wait for practical driverless cars.
- jerf 13y ago
  Taxis are not practical. They're too expensive, in most cases. If they weren't, they'd already be everywhere. You have to pay for the human, and in developed countries, the human isn't cheap enough. (This is, generally, considered a good thing.)
- gfodor 13y ago
  Every hour driving my own car is an hour I'd be paying a human to do the same task I can do myself in a situation where there is little else for me to do. Can you see how cost-inefficient this is on a labor basis until the need for labor is removed? Taxi drivers are up there with gas station attendants and toll collectors in terms of "jobs where the person who is being serviced could perform the same task easily for free." These types of jobs are extremely at risk to automation (see FaskTrak and self-service gas pumps) since if the person being serviced can perform their job, likely a computer can too. The reason Uber works in cities is not because it's somehow cheaper to take taxis on a per-hour basis than owning cars there, but because the need to do so is less frequent so the overall net cost per year is less than owning a vehicle where parking space is at a premium. As soon as you get into a situation where you need to use your car regularly for (relatively) long periods of time, like living outside of the city in America, the labor costs of the driver go through the roof and the "illusion of freedom" is a very real one.
- sliverstorm 13y ago
  Ok, I'll bite. Why is it an illusion? I'm still young enough to remember the utterly transformative effect easy access to a car had on my life.
  - warfangle 13y ago
    Because you can still use a driverless car to go anywhere your manual car can? (see also: DUI checkpoints)
jellicle 13y ago
If people wanted to share things with others, the world would be an entirely different place. But people are selfish. The city block you're living on probably only needs one stand mixer, one waffle iron, one clothes iron. You could all just share one of these rarely-used appliances between you. Why don't you? We could already build the world you are envisioning, trivially. Any municipality in the world could create an excellent fleet of mass transit vehicles - I mean a truly excellent system, capable of getting you anywhere you want to go at a very reasonable price and high speed. But no place does that. It exists nowhere. Because people want their own cars. They don't want to share. And the cheaper these vehicles get - a requirement for your techno-utopia - the more people want their own. Do you think Bill Gates' car will be out delivering packages when he's not in it? Okay, now why do you think everyone else is different from Bill Gates? > Why do you even think that centralized parking garages will be as necessary when autonomously controlled vehicles can coordinate to efficiently fill any designated parking space that is road accessible? That doubles the road problem, not decreases it. The autonomous cars spend four hours in a traffic jam on the two-lane bridge in order to park in the $1.50 parking lot instead of the $2.00 lot. You don't mind because you aren't in them. Anyone who has to actually cross the bridge is screwed. Traffic jams are actually BENEFICIAL to autonomous vehicles - free unpaid parking and low fuel usage - as long as the vehicle isn't needed immediately. Autonomous cars will SEEK OUT and JOIN traffic jams, when not needed, to minimize their cost of operation.
- seanmcdirmid 13y ago
  Freaking American biases. There are cities in the world where infrastructure sucks, people are many, and parking is rare. I already take a taxi to and from work, this robo car thing will catch on really fast here, of only to optimize throughput in a very congested city where there is no room for new roads.
  - sliverstorm 13y ago
    How is what your parent described unique to America?
    - 13y ago
Someone 13y ago
unimaginative? I see plenty of ideas, and wouldn't call all of them obvious. I also think there is at the very least a core of truth in it. For example, that 30% time gain in not looking for a parking spot. If people now want to spend an hour on travelling and gain 10 minutes that way, it isn't strange to assume that they will be willing to move 10 minutes driving farther into the suburbs (cheaper house, larger garden, etc). So, I expect traffic to increase. An extra reason for that to happen is that time currently spent operating your car could be spent in other ways. For example, you could watch a full-length movie/do some yoga on your way to work every day. For a movie/yoga enthusiast, that could make the 1.5 hour trip preferable over the 1 hour one, especially since it will come with the cheaper/better housing. "the downstream effects are hard to predict but undoubtedly will follow the same path all automation has: more efficient, less polluting" You mean as in "living in a suburb and driving a SUV to work is less polluting than living in the center of town and driving a bicycle or walking to work?"
- greedo 13y ago
  Do yoga? In a car that upstream posters are saying will be the size of a SmartCar?
  - Someone 13y ago
    Upstream posters aren't very imaginative :-) The original smart was 2.5m long. That is surprisingly spacious if you replace the petrol engine with electrical ones in the wheels, the petrol tank by 10 cm of batteries in the floor and give up the back trunk (you wouldn't really need one for commuting) I also don't see why all people would start using smaller cars. If these driverless ones make economic sense, they can't be more expensive than current ones, and currently there are plenty of people driving cars larger than smarts. But yes, it probably wasn't the best example.
toasterlovin 13y ago
> The positive economic effects and the transformative effect driverless cars will have on society is pretty hard to overstate. I'm sorry, but (to me) something that makes it more convenient to be an utterly gluttonous consumer of energy is not a positive transformation for society. Modes of transportation that weigh 10-20 times their payload are not the solution. We should be focusing our attention on ones that weigh < .20 times their payload. Bicycles and feet.

by gfodor 13y ago

umsm 13y ago

You are assuming a society where everyone shares everything. I don't think that's likely with the introduction of cars that drive themselves. Most early adopters may not be "sharers" either, so they may not push the technology in that direction. I think jellicle is right, that this invention can cause just as much harm as good. When intelligent people make decisions, they consider the worst and best possible outcomes.

gfodor 13y ago
I don't consider Uber a "sharing service." Uber's model will probably be the model for the future, I don't see any reason why it shouldn't be, with the difference that they may maintain the fleet themselves. What is the upside to owning a car if you can dispatch one to your house to take you anywhere in a few minutes, or if you can have micro-rentals of a few days at a time where the car will not return back into the network if you really want "instant gratification" of hopping in the car the instant you want to go somewhere. Look at what Uber is done in cities if you want evidence that this model can have a massive effect on the incentives of car ownership. Add to this that the public will probably be incentivized to tax or otherwise limit car owners, and the value proposition gets even worse. It could turn out waiting for an automated vehicle from a network to arrive is still faster door-to-door, since it may have privileged access to high-speed roads or lanes that owned vehicles may not, due to regulation a la HOV, etc. edit: Also I don't disagree that in the early adopter phase autonomous cars may introduce inefficiencies. But the autonomous car is a 100, or even 1000 year invention, not a 10 year one. In many ways it may just be a single one-time event, when ground-based personal transportation for a civilization becomes automated, so it may have no shelf life at all.
- teek 13y ago
  > To attack your specific example, why do you assume the cars will drive around passenger-less, and not merely continually make productive uses of themselves, such as by delivering other packages or acting as deliverymen for physical goods? Because they won't most of the time? Let's say that during peak rush hour, N people + M packages need to be transported. That means that in order to satisfy peak demand efficiently, we need N+M cars and road capacity. During off-peak hours, lets say that only 20% of the population needs to travel. That means you've got the other 80% of the cars sitting around doing nothing just like they are today. If the average distance to nearby parking is say 2 miles, then we have 80% of the cars just driving empty 2 extra miles to prevent themselves from taking up road capacity (while today we trade off by creating parking lots). Despite that, I do think there will be some improvement in terms of car use. Namely: * the average car size will shrink to probably that of a smart car (2 seats, little cargo room) * parking lots will shrink (but not disappear) due to effective stacked parking * vehicle efficiency will increase (human drivers are inherently bad at maintaining fuel/energy efficiency with acceleration/deceleration) The danger is that this once again will make car use "cheap" and like the article suggests, extends sprawl yet again. So we'll just have another half a century of poor land use just it might be slightly more efficient this time around.

notahacker 13y ago

If people wanted an immensely efficient and affordable taxi system instead of the illusion of freedom granted by owning their own four-wheeled icons of conspicuous consumption, they wouldn't need to wait for practical driverless cars.

jerf 13y ago
Taxis are not practical. They're too expensive, in most cases. If they weren't, they'd already be everywhere. You have to pay for the human, and in developed countries, the human isn't cheap enough. (This is, generally, considered a good thing.)
gfodor 13y ago
Every hour driving my own car is an hour I'd be paying a human to do the same task I can do myself in a situation where there is little else for me to do. Can you see how cost-inefficient this is on a labor basis until the need for labor is removed? Taxi drivers are up there with gas station attendants and toll collectors in terms of "jobs where the person who is being serviced could perform the same task easily for free." These types of jobs are extremely at risk to automation (see FaskTrak and self-service gas pumps) since if the person being serviced can perform their job, likely a computer can too. The reason Uber works in cities is not because it's somehow cheaper to take taxis on a per-hour basis than owning cars there, but because the need to do so is less frequent so the overall net cost per year is less than owning a vehicle where parking space is at a premium. As soon as you get into a situation where you need to use your car regularly for (relatively) long periods of time, like living outside of the city in America, the labor costs of the driver go through the roof and the "illusion of freedom" is a very real one.
sliverstorm 13y ago
Ok, I'll bite. Why is it an illusion? I'm still young enough to remember the utterly transformative effect easy access to a car had on my life.
- warfangle 13y ago
  Because you can still use a driverless car to go anywhere your manual car can? (see also: DUI checkpoints)

jellicle 13y ago

If people wanted to share things with others, the world would be an entirely different place. But people are selfish. The city block you're living on probably only needs one stand mixer, one waffle iron, one clothes iron. You could all just share one of these rarely-used appliances between you. Why don't you? We could already build the world you are envisioning, trivially. Any municipality in the world could create an excellent fleet of mass transit vehicles - I mean a truly excellent system, capable of getting you anywhere you want to go at a very reasonable price and high speed. But no place does that. It exists nowhere. Because people want their own cars. They don't want to share. And the cheaper these vehicles get - a requirement for your techno-utopia - the more people want their own. Do you think Bill Gates' car will be out delivering packages when he's not in it? Okay, now why do you think everyone else is different from Bill Gates? > Why do you even think that centralized parking garages will be as necessary when autonomously controlled vehicles can coordinate to efficiently fill any designated parking space that is road accessible? That doubles the road problem, not decreases it. The autonomous cars spend four hours in a traffic jam on the two-lane bridge in order to park in the $1.50 parking lot instead of the $2.00 lot. You don't mind because you aren't in them. Anyone who has to actually cross the bridge is screwed. Traffic jams are actually BENEFICIAL to autonomous vehicles - free unpaid parking and low fuel usage - as long as the vehicle isn't needed immediately. Autonomous cars will SEEK OUT and JOIN traffic jams, when not needed, to minimize their cost of operation.

seanmcdirmid 13y ago
Freaking American biases. There are cities in the world where infrastructure sucks, people are many, and parking is rare. I already take a taxi to and from work, this robo car thing will catch on really fast here, of only to optimize throughput in a very congested city where there is no room for new roads.
- sliverstorm 13y ago
  How is what your parent described unique to America?
  - 13y ago

Someone 13y ago

unimaginative? I see plenty of ideas, and wouldn't call all of them obvious. I also think there is at the very least a core of truth in it. For example, that 30% time gain in not looking for a parking spot. If people now want to spend an hour on travelling and gain 10 minutes that way, it isn't strange to assume that they will be willing to move 10 minutes driving farther into the suburbs (cheaper house, larger garden, etc). So, I expect traffic to increase. An extra reason for that to happen is that time currently spent operating your car could be spent in other ways. For example, you could watch a full-length movie/do some yoga on your way to work every day. For a movie/yoga enthusiast, that could make the 1.5 hour trip preferable over the 1 hour one, especially since it will come with the cheaper/better housing. "the downstream effects are hard to predict but undoubtedly will follow the same path all automation has: more efficient, less polluting" You mean as in "living in a suburb and driving a SUV to work is less polluting than living in the center of town and driving a bicycle or walking to work?"

greedo 13y ago
Do yoga? In a car that upstream posters are saying will be the size of a SmartCar?
- Someone 13y ago
  Upstream posters aren't very imaginative :-) The original smart was 2.5m long. That is surprisingly spacious if you replace the petrol engine with electrical ones in the wheels, the petrol tank by 10 cm of batteries in the floor and give up the back trunk (you wouldn't really need one for commuting) I also don't see why all people would start using smaller cars. If these driverless ones make economic sense, they can't be more expensive than current ones, and currently there are plenty of people driving cars larger than smarts. But yes, it probably wasn't the best example.

toasterlovin 13y ago

> The positive economic effects and the transformative effect driverless cars will have on society is pretty hard to overstate. I'm sorry, but (to me) something that makes it more convenient to be an utterly gluttonous consumer of energy is not a positive transformation for society. Modes of transportation that weigh 10-20 times their payload are not the solution. We should be focusing our attention on ones that weigh < .20 times their payload. Bicycles and feet.