I was very impressed when I found out Google was running a free 411 phone information service just so that they could gather a ton of data to train new voice-recognition algorithms. That's real long-term thinking, and definitely makes them an AI company in my book.
Sadly now that it has served its purpose, it has been shut down. Granted I hardly ever need it now that I have a smartphone but it was very useful when I didn't!
I'm pretty sure it's the latter. Microsoft's MO lately has been to rip off anything that makes their primary competitors unique, so they can go on being a one-stop shop in any industry they believe themselves to be a part of. And since Google is both a big competitor and lacking any central concept to its business, Microsoft will pretty much rip off anything they do.
yet, microsoft has deployed voice recognition to some hundred millions users over time, so they could have copied that idea to improve something they were already selling.
You can still use it on Android. Open the Maps app, activate the voice search, then say what you're looking for. It shows the location with two buttons: navigate or call the phone number.
Agreed. I've had "GOOG-411" programmed in my contacts for ages. I called the other day for old time's sake instead of searching and found it was no longer operational. That was a little disappointing. :-/
Why do you think the search feature in Android phones requires an internet connection?
I don't know about you, but I haven't thought of Google as being anything other than an AI company for a while now. It has actually surprised me for a while now how little AI most of their products have, which I guess might be evidence that I was wrong.
Google has ALWAYS been an AI company. From the beginning, pagerank indexed information, made meaning out of this information, and could predict the most relevant url better than anything else in the market. Search was simply the first application.
AI is not a market - AI is a tool. Google is NOT poor at product development. However, it does seem that they have failed to build some products around AI tools (like Google Wave).
Sure Google (and others) will continue to make products by applying AI to market problems.. but they've been doing this their entire existence.
Read the article: "Search is just the problem they first applied AI to, and the one they've grown to dominate. In the future they will have much bigger fish to fry."
Basically the Wave protocol modeled real-time communication in a way that Google Wave Bots & Gadgets could be deployed to add value to conversations among groups. Google Wave was intended to be a playground where humans and AI algorithms could meaningfully share information.
This is a great article. Every now and then Matt can really knock one out of the park.
Of all the tech that we talk about on here, there are only a few items that really catch my attention. Christmas tree machines are one of them. Auto-drive cars is the other.
These two inventions, when complete, will massively change things. Good luck guessing when they'll be complete, though. Could be a decade. Could be a couple of hundred years.
If cars could become more like rooms that automatically go places, instead of complex machines that require constant care and oversight, vast amounts of productivity and leisure opportunities would open up.
It's a little strange, because another trend directly competing with automatic cars is telecommunications. If it were possible and culturally acceptable for all white-collar workers to telecommute full-time, all of a sudden there would be half as many cars on the streets. If there were efficient, cost-effective, and prompt delivery systems for local goods like groceries, there would be half as many again. It's conceivable that there won't be much private driving for reasons besides pure leisure 15 years from now.
So it's not clear to me whether automatic cars or "rooms that go places" will always remain as useful as they sound today.
(Practically speaking, though, I'd bet on it, since cars are pretty ingrained into American culture and since the auto industry is large and very committed to keeping individuals on the road.)
"If there were efficient, cost-effective, and prompt delivery systems for local goods like groceries"
Wouldn't trucks work? It sounds crazy at first, but I suspect one truck making the rounds every day, like the postman, would still be more energy efficient than hundreds of cars going back and forth to the supermarket?
Sure, that's more or less what I was thinking; UPS or FedEx, but local. Obviously, that would save a lot of time and energy. It's non-trivial, though, since the stores would suddenly need EDI systems that could communicate orders and shipments and statuses to these delivery guys. Big chains do this sort of thing all the time, but some local businesses would probably have a hard time making this suddenly happen out of the blue.
Offices are cheaper per person to run and provision than individual dwellings due to the extra density of workers, so this trend depends on the tradeoff between the energy saved by reducing travel and the energy spent heating/cooling/running individual home offices.
On the other hand, many countries are dealing with ageing populations. Self-driving cars will give the elderly and the disabled a level of autonomy that we take for granted. That's my bet on the big win.
But given that the homes exist anyway, from a pure monetary basis the home office ends up winning pretty much every time. (To be sure, not everyone has a home office they'd be comfortable working in full-time.) The issue, one of them anyway, is that F2F communication is a lot more interactive, higher bandwidth, and encourages unstructured interaction. I do a lot of conference calls and other forms of telecommuting but it's still enormously useful to go into the office a good chunk of the time.
I take major issue with his prediction that driverless cars would subsume subway usage - at least, in cities where mass rail transit is the norm instead of the exception. Five million ride on NYC's subway every day. No matter how good the algorithms, an additional 2.5m (riders typically ride twice a day - to and from work/school) cars on the streets of Manhattan and the boroughs would be catastrophic.
Not so sure I agree. When I try to think of the core difference between subways and robotic vehicles, the only one I can think of is the relative lack of stops and the absence of cross-traffic.
With a serious and reliable driverless car system, stops could be integrated in a way which made them minimally impede traffic flow and the cross traffic optimized to maximize the flow over the whole road network.
Keep in mind we are talking about (in the limit at least) a network of driverless cars which can communicate. If traffic signals are in on the deal, I see no reason we shouldn't be able to do far, far better than a subway system.
The time-frame for auto driving cars is actually more difficult to predict than that for general adaptive robotics because of the regulatory and social issues involved. I'm sure it will be decades not centuries though.
My prediction is that robotic servants will be common place in homes by the 2020's and that almost all manual occupations will be replaced with automation during that decade. I have no idea how society and the economy are going to adapt to that reality however.
Decades I can accept, centuries seem a bit too pessimistic. If we really need centuries I would expect technical and not social issues to be the holdup.
Automation has slowly been creeping into cars over the last decade or so. Lights and wipers turn on and off automatically, cars brake and belts tighten when danger is detected, systems help you keep the lane and cars can park all by themselves (brake and gas are controlled by the driver, the car steers).
All of this is a far cry from a truly self-driving car but all of this has been implemented without much fuss. All the imaginable horror scenarios did not scare citizens or politicians. I think that’s good sign and I also think that many debates about potential social problems of the introductions of self-driving cars are driven by overly negative stereotypes of political systems.
I also think that it doesn’t really matter all that much if the US doesn’t want to do it. There are more than enough other rich nations out there.
I pretty much agree with you. I just think that acceptance of automation in non-life critical situations will come easier and probably first.
It's also true that we already depend on many life-critical software systems, in aviation and medical devices notably. In a rational world all that one would need to show is that statistically a self-driving car is safer than a human driver. That bar is probably not that hard to achieve. I'm just not sure how to predict how the general public will react to automated systems that can and will kill people in rare circumstances and whose correctness can at best only be defined in probabilistic terms.
If we can make food, medicine, and shelter almost free with the help of automation, then people would no longer need jobs to meet their survival needs.
I agree. What I have trouble seeing is how we will transition from a society where most people's share of economic production is based on employment to one that really doesn't need many humans to produce goods.
Humans will produce culture and luxury instead. We're already halfway there: Think of the percentage of people directly involved in producing first necessities compared to a thousand years ago.
At most unions only have any power whatsoever in traditional manufacturing corporations. They're practically non-existent in the service sector. If someone wants to start a company that fully automates the manufacture of iPhones or an automobile, how could unions stop him ?
Technical obstacles, financial obstacles - sure. Government obstacles - maybe. But unions ?
Scifi. Imagine you had nano-scale robots where, given a substrate to work with, they would assemble whatever the local environment needed to look like, then assemble two child bots coming from them like twigs on the branch of a Christmas tree. This is supposed to allow arbitrarily complex construction at prices which are rounding error next to current ones, solving scarcity, reshaping the world, and generally making for a nice backdrop for your novel of choice.
[Edit: Hmm, Daniel and I seem to have different etymologies for the word...]
FWIW your version is the one I've encountered before.
I saw it in a nice book called Indistinguishable From Magic by Robert L. Forward. It is half sci-fi, and half hard science fact. The format is that he first describes a hard science idea that could allow future technology to do something that looks like magic. And then he has a short story showing a world with that technology. Then he moves on to the next idea.
Christmas Tree robots were one of the ideas he considered.
They're going by the name "3-D printer" right now, but the overall idea is a home fabrication machine capable of producing complex 3-D goods (including moving parts, electronics, etc) on demand. Current 3-D printing is an extremely crude version of the eventual device.
So if you wanted a new microwave, go online and download the design. Then go to the Christmas Tree machine and have it print one up for you. Just like presents under a Christmas Tree, you ask for something, say the magic words, then it appears with a little bow on it. (It occurs to me they should have been named Santa Claus machines, but I don't make this stuff up, I simply repeat it)
Of course, we're starting off with extremely simple implementations. I think the current technology does stuff like figurines. Adding moving parts is probably a next logical step, then printable simple electronics.
There's a long way to go, but once realized, Christmas Tree machines will change everything.
Seriously, it is amazing how way ahead of the curve he was. ISMM was originally published when Tim Ferriss was only 1 year old, but the only real difference between it and 4 Hour Work Week is the scale that the Internet makes available. Every time some hungry hacker blogs about supplementing his income by selling photos on some stock photography site--man, it's deja vu all over again.
Carriages with compartments are one of the reasons I prefer travelling by train over other forms of transportation - they're basically an implementation of the travelling room concept, albeit non-private. You usually have to share the compartment with up to 5 other travellers, but a handful of people in a small room tend to be much quieter (and more friendly) than dozens in an open plan carriage. Sadly, compartments are increasingly rare nowadays, even in first class. I assume they're less space efficient in terms of passengers/m².
Major changes would have to made to cars so they could function like that for everyone safely, though. Even with robot drivers, I still wouldn't trust that I could be walking around cooking and playing ping pong while we're moving.
2. Children could own cars. Don’t feel like schlepping your kid to soccer practice? Just buy them a car
6. ... Make my car driverless (freeing me up to watch TV, read a book, catch up on emails, etc.) and able to travel at twice the speed, and spend the entire trip at top speed (rather than slowing down and speeding up on the highway) and I could feasibly live as far as 100 mph away.
7. Urbanization will reverse. Why pay $3,000/month for a flat in Manhattan when you can get from 100 miles upstate to work in 30 minutes?
This is bascially an apocalyptic scenario in my mind. I hate what the automobile has done to US cities, making everything the same vanilla spread and causing the car to become necessary to participate in modern life. I'm sad this blogger doesn't even think twice about the advantages of public transit (see: 6.) or more clever urban planning to reduce travel distances.
I like his basic thesis but I'm horrified by this example he puts forth. We should be moving away from the car, not towards it.
Why should we be moving away from the car? You seem to take this as an a priori fact. I see no advantages to public transit aside from less energy waste, unless you just occasionally long for the scent of hobos.
And urban planning is not a solution. It's shutting the barn doors after horses got out. Most urban areas have already been not only planned but fully executed and there isn't public will to tear the whole thing down and start over.
Assuming we would have driverless cars, you don't have to worry about a gigantic shell of metal that is expensive, will break down at inopportune times, requires constant maintenance, copious parking space at any destination of your choosing, insurance, contributes to crappy air quality (thankfully reduced/solved by using electric power), and for which you have to spend hours shoveling snow if you are in a colder climate. There are tons of other problems if you focus on human-driven cars: drunk drivers, the need for designated drivers, comparatively high risk of being killed or maimed, having your kids nag you or someone else if they want to experience the world outside of their neighborhood, driving course costs (oh wait, in America we don't have to pay... in Europe, well, I hope you have several thousand euros). There are so many issues that they greatly outweigh the ones in a properly-made public transit system. I see cars as being useful for out-of-city excursions (but not inter-city, just take the train) or for hauling things, but these situations are not common enough that every single adult needs to own a car.
We don't actually have to tear down and start over, and I think you underestimate the North American will to destroy old buildings. We just need to use existing buildings more intelligently, turn asphalt seas into courtyards, allocate green spaces and keep residental and commercial buildings close together. I don't expect people to actually do any of this, particularly in the US where it would be seen as a communist plot, but I'm happy there are many places in the world where there is no need for urban replanning/reorganization on a grand scale.
With regards to public transportation, all I know is, after five years trying to make do with it, I am never going back to that hell. It's only barely cheaper than owning a car, and the trips took 2–10 times as long. (The city where I work has property very close to the businesses, but that property is ridiculously expensive.)
I think this is an extremely intelligent concern, and I agree with you that we should be moving away from cars.
I'm not sure what the repercussions of the self driving car will be though. SDC's, along with robotics, will eliminate the need to drive to the grocery store, or any store at all. And telecommunications surely will be pushing back against the need for central offices.
My hope is that SDCs will allow us to form more human-scale communities outside of the city, where we can live largely on foot, with local necessities (restaurants, bars, parks) within walking distance. All the crap that clogs up our cities and forces us to drive (stores, mostly) will be distributed to a network of warehouses that we will never visit.
We may take cabs more often from place to place, but I think overall SDCs could help us drive less.
It's all wild speculation at this point, but I think it's very interesting to see what will happen.
What's the point of owning a driverless car? Apart from luxury/status, it should be far cheaper to rent one as you go, in the driverless cab fashion.
Also, I can't help but cringe inside when people act as if the only benefit of living in the city is less commute time. As far as my life goes, I'd trade more commute time to live inside an urban centre with all the facilities at a walkable distance plus all the nice benefits of density.
For many people, whatever nice benefits of density there are (and I'm struggling to think of more than one or two... choice of places to go for fun, maybe?) seem offset by the harms of density, which are manifold. However, lower commute time is something nearly everyone wants, even if it's currently only 10 minutes, so it's an easy point to make.
Except for "Greater selection of goods, food and produce", all the ones you add seem like they could be costs rather than benefits, for many people. Closer proximity to other people in general, for example, was one of the harms I was thinking of. But I'm slightly more misanthropic than most Americans, I guess.
The one about greater selection isn't actually true, as far as I can tell. You can get pretty much anything shipped to your small town, and while you're less likely to just run across something at the store that you find you like, you'll be paying lower prices for everyday stuff. I live in the DC metro, and every time I travel to visit friends or family (who all live in far less densely populated areas), I'm struck by how much cleaner, cheaper, and open everything is, and how everyone seems friendlier and less suspicious.
An advantage neither of us mentioned, but which is pretty large, I think, is that people are less likely to have to move or change careers when changing jobs.
Closer proximity to other people in general, for example, was one of the harms I was thinking of. But I'm slightly more misanthropic than most Americans, I guess.
Misanthropy often comes down to a matter of quality rather than quantity. I've lived almost my entire life in small towns, and I'm not inclined to speak highly of the people I shared those towns with. For one, while small town folk are probably friendlier and less suspicious towards their own kind, you're also more likely to find various forms of bigotry. It's no coincidence that everyone I know of from my high school who happened to be black, gay, bisexual, or otherwise a minority desperately wanted out and for the most part have moved to denser areas.
I'm from the DC area, but now live in Columbia, SC. Every time I go back I'm reminded of how many different cultures, things to do, types of food, places to have a drink , listen to live music, etc... there are. I love Columbia, but you can't beat living in a major metro area if you like to enjoy new experiences.
Now keep in mind that I'm 22. Maybe as you get older, small towns with only a Waffle House and Jimbos Sports Bar (which closes @ 9pm) become more appealing. In most of rural America, the people are incredibly nice, but the poverty, lack of education, jobs, healthcare, and public services is appalling (theres a reason rural Tea Partiers are so angry). With that said, every place is what you make of it.
high density is sustainable, probably, whereas low density is probably not. how is that for a benefit? and don't discount how highly "fun" ranks in peoples' lives.
Low density is ultimately unsustainable, but not for a long time. The USA is a big country with mostly open space; it'll be a while before we fill it up.
Without a human driver, how will a cab company keep fares from trashing cabs? The issue of ensuring payment becomes a serious problem. Do you put credit card entry pads on the outside of the cab to prevent any of that? How long until someone superglues it?
With human drivers, there's a social norm to prevent misbehavior, and in extreme cases the driver can stop and insist that the passenger get out.
Even if the cab companies put human toll collectors in driverless cabs, although that could work, there would be less respect for cabbies who are not driving. I fear that bad behavior would still flourish.
Once cars are driverless, they become investment vehicles (pun unintended). One might buy a car, then lease it out by the mile/km, with certain times during the day that it has return to one's location to pick up (assuming the spot market makes it cheaper to call one's car back rather than just lease another one). So cars become an investment that is on average an order of magnitude less expensive than real estate.
I've bought some Google shares as an insurance, in case they develop true AI. I hope the robots spare me if I can prove that I financed their creation.
I'd say google IS an AI company. They do doc classification, nlp, speech to text, vision, etc. They may not be great at some parts of it, but their systems are constantly being trained and getting smarter as they release more products and acquire more data.
Anyone else a little put off by the sentence, "To put that another way, if Google managed to scoop up just 2% of that industry they’d have more than doubled their revenue"?
That sounds an awful lot like the refrain from naive entrepreneurs to investors: "the market is 100 billion dollars; if we capture 1%, we're a billion dollar company!" In fact, I think we could describe it as a basic entrepreneurial fallacy.
OTOH, Chrome went from 1.5% market share in Jan 2009 to 9.9% at the end of 2010. So I'm not going to say they can't do it, but I think Matt's piece is weakened by the presence of the 2% fallacy.
Traffic is caused by human error? I suppose flooding is caused by "water error", then?
Traffic is caused by too many vehicles attempting to use a limited resource at the same time. Driverless cars may make this more tolerable (certainly riding the bus does) but the idea that this will make traffic obsolete is laughable.
In my experience most traffic jams are caused by bad merging, not lack of capacity. A few years ago I regularly drove a stretch of road that went from 2 lanes to 3 for a few miles and then back again, without gaining a significant amount of traffic in between (I have no idea why the road was designed that way, maybe one of the side roads feeding into it got a lot of traffic at a different time of day or something). Every day there would be a traffic jam where the third lane ended. Someone waits too long to merge and traffic has to slow to let them in, or is nervous about moving over and has to be given space, or whatever, and it just compounds until traffic literally stops at that point. I see the same thing all the time at on/off ramps, turn lanes, etc.
I've read several articles pointing out that traffic seems to be an emergent behavior, and can be predicted like the flow of a gas, regardless of the individuals involved.
I commuted from NYC to NJ for a while (by circumstance, not choice) and traffic wouldn't slow much at all at merge points.
Driving back in Pennsylvania, state of my birth, I was gob-smacked when people all tried to merge into one lane a mile before the merge point, bringing traffic to almost a complete halt. Of course, I was probably one of those people before driving in New York, and never thought much of it.
We will probably never be able to get rid of traffic completely, but we could greatly increase the capacity of a road. If every car was driven by a robot, then the distance between cars could be much smaller than it is right now.
Precisely. Traffic is not caused by human error, Traffic is made worse by the margins of safety required by human error. Take human reflexes and perception out of the equation and you don't eliminate the problem entirely, but you allow for increased efficiency.
The truth is, we already have enough road. Compared to machines, our reaction times are very slow, and because of that we can't use them efficiently since we need to give each other space to slow down / change lanes. If the cars are able to communicate their intended destinations along with other things ("I'm speeding up, go" / "I'm slowing down, don't hit me" / "SYSTEM FAILURE") then we can pack more cars into the same amount of space.
I wonder if computer-controlled cars coordinating with each other (maybe not explicitly but using "swarming"-type schemes) could ease traffic congestion somewhat. But yeah, it'd only be somewhat, certainly not the end of traffic.
Not only will children be traveling by robotic car without the need for parent or bus driver, so will that quart of milk you need from the store, that dry cleaning and your grandmother.
Oh, and cab fare from the airport will cost less than the tolls. In fact, cabs will be so cheap and numerous that most people won't bother owning a car for anything other than recreational purposes.
This might be the most rose-tinted article about Google I've ever read.
There are nothing but complaints about Google's lack of personal customer service in regards to their AdSense program - what makes you think that future AI projects from the company would be any better?
Just because Google's made a self-driving car doesn't mean they're automatically the front-runner in that category. What about all of those teams that compete in the DARPA robotic car competition every year?
Also, the advantages that Maroon mentions (especially the safety ones) would most likely only come to fruition once self-driving cars become ubiquitous - something that its hard to imagine happening within the near future (or at least during the current incarnation of Google as we know it).
"What about all of those teams that compete in the DARPA robotic car competition every year"
I imagine that Google is hiring them. Sebastian Thrun, leader of the team that won the first DARPA Grand Challenge, is now part of Google's driverless car project.
After reading through much of the discussion regarding Matt's many interesting points, it's somewhat troubling that nobody addresses the most obvious problem with the realization of sufficiently good AI. In both cases mentioned, in regards to cars, taxis, buses, and call centers, you displace thousands to millions of human workers. While this is all very nice in our tech fantasy lands if these scenarios come to pass you have another mass displacement of low -> middle skilled workers.
It's of my opinion (I also remember reading about a global conference regarding this issue),that our current society can't withstand another displacement event of this size, even if it does come gradually. In the United States anyway, we can already see massive unemployment due to certain jobs just not existing anymore, for example, token booth clerks, replaced by automated kiosks, cashiers replaced by automatic kiosks, conductors replaced by automated trains, etc. etc.
Furthermore, there is always less need for highly skilled workers as the top, so say you displace 1000 construction workers due to automation, you may only need 100 foremen, leaving those previously 900 workers unemployed with no prospects of employment even with sufficient education. It's a major problem in my opinion, and possibly a problem we'll have to deal with in our lifetime, especially if we see minor to significant improvements in AI and automation.
I don't see the problem; lowering scarcity lowers the need for employment. A king's feast from the 1800s can be bought today with welfare money. When we eliminate the need for all jobs, we can just relabel ourselves "socialist" and call it a day.
This is not the state today. the basics (housing, healthcare , education ) are pretty expensive. add to that the stigma of not working , and being unemployed is quite bad.
I think disruptive innovation for the needs of the unemployed in those fields , could be a huge and important field in the next decade.but this would probably need suport from government , because there are heavy regulations around those fields.
Did no one stop to think about this? It is extremely far-fetched at best.
>safety regulations could be greatly relaxed.
No, at least not if the author's vision of 200mph average speeds is to be taken. When a mistake or malfunction happens at that speed, safety mechanisms will be imperative. Furthermore, having a mechanical car does not prevent: someone else running into you, a deer running in front of the car, etc.
> children could own cars
But they wouldn't, because the purchase would still be in the name of the parent. Furthermore, do you see parents sticking their 6 year olds on the subway just because they can? No. A very few do it and get ostracized by society.
> 3. The beverage industry will go.
False assumptions without supporting data, but I have no facts to counteract it.
>4. Speed limits will be unnecessary
Oh really? So we won't need limits for the existing drivers who aren't using driverless vehicles? How will the 200mph traveling car navigate around all the 60mph traveling ones? Furthermore, is every car going to be programmed to go slow in pedestrian zones? How do you enforce that without speed limits? The current Google Car wasn't jetting 200mph down the 101, it was driving under the speed limit in residential neighborhoods.
> The map will shrink greatly.
No. Fuel costs and traffic don't just magically disappear because of your fantasy land.
> Urbanization will reverse. Why pay $3,000/month for a flat in Manhattan when you can get from 100 miles upstate to work in 30 minutes?
I will. Just because you can live outside the city and travel to it at a faster rate does not make it a given that one would choose to. Urbanization has been the greatest driving factor of population trends in the last century. If anything, if what is proposed came to pass, you would see increased urbanization of small towns/suburbs.
>Airlines will be devastated. Why fly from New York to Chicago?
No. It will still be faster to fly. Are you serious? I mean gee why fly from New York to London when I can take a speed boat and have it take three days? I mean, seriously?
>9. Other forms of public transport won’t fare much better. A driverless cab won’t cost much more than a bus (which also will be driverless) but will be a hell of a lot nicer.
I'm sorry, I don't live in fantasy land where fuel costs suddenly become irrelevant. Fuel costs make up at least 16% of the overall cost. And there will still be a premium because people will be willing to pay it.
Yes, a driver less car will make someone a lot of money. Does this equate to the above points? No, the author's hypothesis has no basis in reality and no facts to back it up.
do you see parents sticking their 6 year olds on the subway just because they can?
Maybe not 6, but certainly 8 year olds are quite capable of using public transport and happily do so in many parts of the world. I know I was taking the bus to the library when I was 8 or 9 and the train into town when I was 10, and that wasn't strange in the slightest.
There's also a big difference between asking a child to navigate public transport and putting them in a trusted taxi to school, which is all an automated car is. If the trusted taxi is cheap enough, you'd only have to be confident that the child wouldn't hurt themselves en route.
I definitely agree with your sentiment, but then I go talk to parents. Parents are protective of their kids. Some are loose, but others are not. I don't have kids, but have worked with them extensively, so I will refer you to some discussions around the issue:
Regarding independence of young children, Penn and Teller did a fascinating episode about stranger danger. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IfrSoiaLixg The full episode is on Netflix. You may not agree with all the ideas, but watching the full episode probably won't be boring to you if you feel strongly about this topic one way or another.
Some or all of it may end up being B.S. After all, where's my flying car. But much of it may end up being true. In 1975, someone told me that everyone would some day have their own, personal phone number, that was just for that person, and I thought that was pretty far fetched. Who really knows?
"Theories have four stages of acceptance:
i) this is worthless nonsense;
ii) this is an interesting, but perverse, point of view.
iii) this is true but quite unimportant.
iv) I always said so."
- J.B.S. Haldane, 1963
"All great truths began as blasphemies" - George Bernard Shaw
Yeah, but how would you drive a driver-less car on a Somalian road, for example? Or through Cairo, or Istanbul, cities not known for their tight traffic regulations? After all we've had the Prius for ~10 years and it has failed to take over the world.
> No. It will still be faster to fly. Are you serious? I mean gee why fly from New York to London when I can take a speed boat and have it take three days? I mean, seriously?
I never consider flying from edinburgh to london, a journey I make fairly regularly. the flight takes 3/4 hours less, but door to door ends up around the same time, and is far far less comfortable than the train.
> I will. Just because you can live outside the city and travel to it at a faster rate does not make it a given that one would choose to.
I dont think he was trying to say every single person would move out of the city, just that it would be an attractive option for more people, which isnt really arguable in the hypothetical situation that commutes are fast and comfortable
Agreed, but I could imagine one implication that might be revolutionary for urban areas. With driverless cars, it might easily become much more economical not to own a car at all. Even when one does own a car, they don't have to park it within short walking distance form their destination, as the car parks itself.
Free from strict parking requirements and regualtions cities can become much more friendly to pedestrians, and buildings (especially medium-high ones) may become cheaper and more free in their design.
The problem of dealing with drivers in outdated cars with drivers could be fixed with dedicated lanes. Most large cities have dedicated lanes for 2+ passengers or buses, it should be doable to have them allow driver less cars too.
You really shouldn't complain about someone not having any facts and then fail to provide them yourself. Watch, I'll do the same thing:
>No, at least not if the author's vision of 200mph average speeds is to be taken. When a mistake or malfunction happens at that speed, safety mechanisms will be imperative. Furthermore, having a mechanical car does not prevent: someone else running into you, a deer running in front of the car, etc.
One would presume eventually there would be heavily monitored dedicated freeways for automated vehicles to travel. You could build a single lane tunnel between major cities even, since a single lane is all you need since accidents will become exceedingly rare.
Once you have a dedicated, single lane enclosed highway, a monitoring system can be aware of deer and outside complications and you can surely get up to high speeds.
>But they wouldn't, because the purchase would still be in the name of the parent. Furthermore, do you see parents sticking their 6 year olds on the subway just because they can? No. A very few do it and get ostracized by society.
You do realize how many school children take a school bus every day?
>Oh really? So we won't need limits for the existing drivers who aren't using driverless vehicles? How will the 200mph traveling car navigate around all the 60mph traveling ones? Furthermore, is every car going to be programmed to go slow in pedestrian zones? How do you enforce that without speed limits? The current Google Car wasn't jetting 200mph down the 101, it was driving under the speed limit in residential neighborhoods.
The OP is basically looking on a 25-50 year timeline not a 10 one. Think dedicated automated smart roadways and situations where "manual" driving is as rare as a VHS VCR today.
>No. Fuel costs and traffic don't just magically disappear because of your fantasy land.
You're assuming today's fuel costs. Future cars will be much more efficient, and will be electric so the delivery mechanism will be more efficient as well. Also note automated drivers will be able to use the transmission much more effectively, since they'll be able to be aware of the layout of the roadway and adjust gears accordingly.
> I will. Just because you can live outside the city and travel to it at a faster rate does not make it a given that one would choose to.
He never said nobody will want to live in the city. He said that "commuting" as we know it will be a thing of the past, as you won't be actually losing any time to transportation. So, many people that currently would dread living so far away (but would love to for better scenery, access to schools, etc.) due to the horrific commute may reconsider it once they can actually be productive during the trip. (Not to mention the trip will be a lot faster than it is today for the reasons above.)
Edit: Oh, and to his point about flying. If you do the math, I think you'll find at 200mph door-to-door time between many cities is close to what you'd expect for a flight if you take into account time traveling to and from the airport and time in the airport. This, combined with the fact that traveling by automated luxury car will certainly be more enjoyable than traveling by coach, even if the trip is slightly longer, will make an interesting tradeoff between air and road appear.
> since a single lane is all you need since accidents will
> become exceedingly rare.
So you've got a single-lane highway, packed with cars going 200mph? Accidents will be exceedingly rare? No matter how rare that accidents end up being, they will be national (if not international) news stories just due to the amount of cars/injuries/deaths involved. How many people are willing to hop right back onto a theme-park roller coaster right after one of the cars flew off and killed everyone riding in it? Terrorist attacks on the level of 9/11 are exceedingly rare, but that doesn't stop all kinds of silliness from spawning from it.
> Future cars will be much more efficient, and will be electric so
> the delivery mechanism will be more efficient as well.
This is like the assumption that there is no need to spend all kinds of time worrying about alternative fuel sources, because as the price of oil goes up people will just auto-magically develop new and more efficient fuel sources. It's a law of nature, don't-ya-know! Housing prices will always keep rising. The economy will always keep growing. Trends are always positive, never negative. Inflection points are a thing of the past! We've optimized them out of the system. They now only exist in history books.
You're not being fair to the GP. The things mentioned are just contemporary common sense about the obstactles. If you want to predict the future, I'd say the onus is on you to refute those points rather than the GP providing specific reasoning why all his points won't be overcome.
This all basically comes down to, if one assumes all these things about the future, then the author's claims hold merit. The author should have made that disclaimer if that were the case. Throwing everything into assumptions isn't the way to go. As for facts, especially regarding the idea of 200mph door-to-door I do some in another reply: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2065066
However, the refuting facts should really come from a scientific study, not from me. I'm sure Google is studying such things right now. I'd of course be glad to do some research for some more factual assertations and put it into a blog post if I thought I was going to have a top-voted HN link to it.
Contrary to what you may think, I was being thoughtful of this but did not think it required rehashing. You however, exactly reiterate my point, you didn't do any due diligence, just put certainly in italics. How about some facts instead?
Simply go to maps.google.com and search for Chicago, IL to New York, NY. Ok, 14 hours trip currently. Now, let's take a premise of 200 miles per hour. Now, tell me, can you travel 200mph anywhere in Chicago? Can you travel 200mph in Manhattan or anywhere close to it? No. Does your car contain enough gas to go 800 miles w/o stopping. Doubtful, especially at those speeds where your mpg is going to drop off drastically. Even assuming you could achieve 200mph sustained on the interstate you still have toll booths, traffic, weather, construction, curves, exits, onramps, and other real-world traffic scenarios to deal with. This is not a flying car, this car travels on the ground like the rest of them. At the absolute very best scenarios you are still looking at 5 hours to make the trip. I would argue a detailed scientific study on the feasibility of it would put the actual travel time closer to 7 hours even with a car that had a potential of 200mph.
Compare this to flying. The trip takes approximately 2 hours (please check any airline site so you can see for yourself). Let's be generous and add 1.5 hours on the before side and .5 hours on the after side to give us a rough approximation of total travel time from home to destination. That is a total of 4 hours.
The airplane wins hands down. Try thinking about the problem instead of going with assumptions.
I wrote a big counter-argument before remembering my oft-ignored rule about avoiding stupid arguments online. My apologies for wasting your time. I'm sure we both have better things to do.
I get to the airport 2 hours early, plus 30 minutes driving time to and from the airport. So that puts total flying time at 5.5 hours. Add in invasive airport security, baggage fees, entertainment fees, wifi fees, parking fees, etc. For a family of 5, flying costs thousands of dollars. And once you get there, you don't have a car so you have to rent one!
We're not talking about this next year, we're talking decades away. Toll Plaza's, seriously? We have Ez Pass already, you don't think that can be upgraded to handle faster cars?
If it was between paying more for 5.5 hours of flying and paying likely less for 5, 6 or 7 hours of having a car drive me, I would choose the car every time. Heck, if the car can only average 100MPH, I'd leave at 10pm and sleep the whole way!
Just want to point out, regarding gas mileage: If the cars have a dedicated lane, that lane can have a power line running through it. You're basically talking about personal light-rail at that point, for which going 200mph is a solved problem.
Gmail, Docs, and News are not dominant in their category, Images is just another form of search, while Reader is dominant but increasingly irrelevant.
You forgot Android, which in the long run will probably prove to be their only really big hit other than search, at least that they've released so far. The others just don't matter that much.
I find it interesting that the responses on plausibility seem to be based on technical or social feasibility. My gut instinct is that resource shortages are going to change the world in unanticipated ways, and what is currently imaginable due to the inexorable march of "progress" will no longer be economical. Hopefully the transition is smooth so we can keep the best of technology (such as the internet) without the waste and depletion of the environment that capitalism so far has failed to account for. Maybe after we figure out the sustainability thing, fully automated ad-hoc transportation could be worked out in the far future.
I really like this article. Yes, if Google can pull off AI solutions like cars that drive themselves and appliances that cook for you (all are pretty straightforward problems that can be solved with programming) then they will really OWN.
The problem with the former is the huge liability risk. When a car's breaks fail, we blame the car manufacturer. Imagine if a car crashed, or caused some sort of accident -- any accident! The blame would rest solely on Google's shoulders, whereas right now it's split between the driver and the car.
Trains, buses and taxis do much of this already. I met people in Japan 5 years ago that were do daily commutes of 30-45mins of much bigger distances than a car could in that time. London to Paris is quicker and easier by train than by plane already.
Public transport has long been used by the young and/or intoxicated.
Self-driving cars will be important in 10-20 years that is obvious. You can look into that certain future by watching how far R&D has come in recent years.
But I strongly doubt that cars as we know them today will still be around. Todays car design - fast & heavy - is absurd and only serves to satisfy the image we have of a car. 'Sensible cars' are often not perceived as cars at all <http://www.google.at/images?q=smart>.
Making cars slower triggers a positive cycle of being more efficient (half speed = 1/4 energy), safer and allowing for lighter designs.
The problem of efficiency is not somehow magically solved by making cars 'electric' but only by making cars slower and lighter.
> The map will shrink greatly. Right now I live about 30 miles from my office and the commute is on the very edge of what I can stand. Make my car driverless (freeing me up to watch TV, read a book, catch up on emails, etc.) and able to travel at twice the speed, and spend the entire trip at top speed (rather than slowing down and speeding up on the highway) and I could feasibly live as far as 100 mph away.
The metro already does that for me pretty well. Granted, I live in an European city.
I'm surprised that the whole AI argument made in this post centers around self-driving cars, when the fact that google can recall for you very relevant results from its multi-billion page memory in a jiffy doesn't seem AI enough.
As for self-driving cars, it seems to me that public transport can provide much of what the poster wants. I travel by bus for about 2 hours every day -- seems taxing, but I'm productive on my rides since I always get a nice seat and can hack on.
This post and thread make me feel like I'm watching a 50s futurist vision of the world. I like it ;p The driver less cars need to fly too.
I hope google expands and manages to make money from more than just ads. Driverless cars would be awesome if they can pull it off soon. I just drove from Florida to Canada and back and I was thinking all trip I needed a driverless car. Most of the road could have been driven by todays AI no problem. Driving is so mindless.
If you don't want to drive, move to NYC. A significant fraction of the population there never gets a driver's license because they see no real need to.
I had an internship in NYC last summer, and that was one of the most amazing things about the city. I was glad I didn't have a car with me. The subway was excellent.
Google's CEO doesn't think pilotless planes are possible by 2030: http://www.longbets.org/4. Part of his reasoning: the FAA changes so slowly that if this were even all possible, the adoption and certification would all take at least 50 years. I don't see why the same wouldn't be true (perhaps on a smaller scale) for the auto industry.
Current airliners are exactly as driverless as Google's cars: they have an autopilot that does virtually all of the flying, with one or two human pilots set to take over in case they have to, just as the driverless cars Google is developing have a human driver set to take over in case they have to. (That's what makes them compatible with CA state law, as Google has been field testing their driverless cars for some time now.)
Yes, but don't discount the massive differences in environment.
An airliner is a vehicle with federally-mandated maintenance and inspection periods, operating in a tightly controlled space in which new vehicles entering and exiting are known and managed by controllers and in which the transport medium (air) by and large doesn't change characteristics much for the duration of the flight.
Versus an automobile with a robot driver that has to handle crazy pedestrians, dogs, motorcycles, cyclists and other cars randomly entering its area of travel, wide variations in road widths, speed limits, road surface texture (dry, sandy, wet, ice covered can all be encountered in less than 1/4 mile of travel), random road construction and other non-robotic drivers.
This doesn't mean that a solution is impossible, but to point to airliners to say "see, it can happen" is a bit of a stretch.
This is a misunderstanding of the discussion at hand. The word driverless in the context of this article and the person I was replying to implies the lack of a human failsafe.
Schmidt and Matt address this in their arguments. For example, Matt mentions that the beverage industry will skyrocket because people can now "drive" home drunk. The human can't take over in an emergency in that situation. Pretty much every advantage of driverless cars that Matt listed are not possible if the human is required to be alert enough to take over. Further, the person I was responding to claimed he would never have to learn how to drive. If a human is going to take over in an emergency, s/he will still have to learn. Point being, the discussion at hand is about driverless vehicles without using a human as a backup.
Brad Templeton delivered a superb talk on robotic cars at the Singularity Summit 2009 (http://www.vimeo.com/7337628). It expounds on the technology's implications, supporting Maroon's assertion that even a small slice of the market will easily eclipse Google's stake in search. Of particular interest:
* Transportation is more dangerous than we think, and this is largely due to human factors. (Driver inattention is a factor in 80% of crashes; alcohol in 40%.)
* The purchase of private vehicles forces us into a "one size fits all" model. If someone goes skiing only once a year, he will purchase an SUV; if someone spends 90% of his mileage traveling alone to work, he'll still purchase a five-person sedan so he can haul around friends occasionally. By moving to a grid-like service that provides cars to us on demand, we will be able to choose the vehicle best suited to the type of trip we're making.
* Robotic cars could eliminate our dependence on foreign oil. Energy usage would be dramatically lower due to people using a vehicle only as large as they need for a given trip. Vehicles powered by alternative energy have a chicken-and-egg problem -- no one wants to build the infrastructure to deliver energy until people buy the vehicles, but no one wants to buy the vehicles until a ubiquitous energy infrastructure is in place. Robotic cars, however, would have no qualms with traveling halfway across a city to refuel, nor with waiting two hours in a lineup before refuelling.
* The transportation infrastructure will also become substantially more efficient, as cars will be able to travel much closer together without compromising safety. As a consequence, energy usage can be reduced another 30% by having cars draft one another.
* Before robotic cars would be accepted by the public, they'd have to meet much more stringent safety standards than we apply to human drivers. No one would accept a robotic car that killed a human, even if robotic cars on the whole were twice as safe as human drivers. Templeton figures we'll need cars on the order of 100 times safer than human drivers before they will be widely accepted. To convince people of the cars' safety, Templeton proposes the "school of fish" test -- imagine walking out onto a track swarming with cars travelling at 40 miles per hour, and having every car swerve around you no matter how hard you try to make them hit you.
* Robotic vehicles will record video everywhere they go, for this will prove invaluable in determining the cause of accidents. Any modifications to the driving software will then have the ability to be tested on the "trillion mile road test" -- they will have a corpus of testing data composed of the recorded footage of every trip ever made. New software will be tested against every vehicle accident that has ever occurred.
* The privacy implications of this universal recording are disconcerting. Templeton raises the spectre of a situation like that in Minority Report, where police can remotely override your control of a vehicle, locking you inside and transporting you to a destination of their choosing.
I see it as Google's role to index all information, scan all the books and so on, to make sure that the AI will see that our histories are intertwined, that man and technology evolved together and it shouldn't eliminate us.
I wonder where my motorcycle will fit in this world. Oh, well, I'll be so old I probably won't be able to ride anyway, unless rejuvenation has come about as well.
Self driving cars are 15 years away. The self driving cars will have to deal with the chaotic human drivers, and this will require Strong AI. Once we have this, driving around will be one of the small issues of the day.
They have been driving on real streets with real people. The only serious incidents that have happened with them is that one got rear-ended by a human while it was stopped, and a journalist noticed them so Google had to admit that they exist.
Nah, not strong AI. A person in a car is much simpler than a full-out person. You have fewer motivations, fewer actions, fewer /states/ (he's confused / drunk) - unless you're playing Death Race 2000 or something. If worse comes to worst you could have human drivers label the worst situations, letting the machine figure out the characteristics letting it predict such a state, and probably there are just a few reactions to many states anyway.
I hope they are further away. For me a bus is self driving car, but driving a car is also a pleasure not only the means to get from a point A to a point B.
Driving a car a short distance in light traffic is fun.
Driving a car long distances, or in heavy traffic, or in dangerous conditions (snow and ice or heavy rain) is some combination of tedious, exhausting, and stressful.
To the extent that that's true (driving in heavy traffic is definitely not fun), balance it against the tens of thousands of people killed in car accidents every year, most of which are due to human error.
Presumably autonomous cars would not replace the ones on closed courses, and you could still enjoy driving a car the way you enjoy all other pleasures which require specialized equipment and facilities.
I'm not saying its impossible, but that's pretty ludicrous to state as fact. Even many enthusiastic Strong AI proponents would hesitate to give such an aggressive bound.
