It never ceases to amaze me how negative the HN community is to new ideas, technology and generally "trying new stuff" that has never been attempted before.
Drone Delivery - never going to work. Lots of solar power - too expensive. Autonomous cars - too risky
This is supposed to be a community of "Hackers" making cool stuff, and here we have a company talking about making cool stuff, and every single comment, without exception, is negative.
Yes, this is a very difficult problem to solve. Yes, there are many things they have not addressed yet. Yes, this needs a lot of work. No, they shouldn't just start doing this and see how many crashes happen. But yes, they need to keep talking, testing, learning and working towards a future where this is possible.
Does anyone in their right mind honestly think that in less than 150 years there will still be a single human-controlled vehicle (plane or automobile)?
Of course it's coming, and these guys are starting it. Now.
The same negativity could be said of the Wright brothers when they told people they were going to fly, or Henry Ford when he set out to mass-produce the automobile, or the people that said we'd have a global computer network and a computer in every home.
I honestly don't understand why the community here isn't more open to new ideas. Even ideas that never come to fruition are still worth analyzing. There is always something to be learned.
We should be talking about the interesting parts of this challenge and how they could be overcome, not saying "Not safe enough" Every. Single. Time.
> This is supposed to be a community of "Hackers" making cool stuff, and here we have a company talking about making cool stuff, and every single comment, without exception, is negative.
Most engineers are conservative and skeptical. If anything, as someone who is an aerospace engineer by education, I'm always surprised by the wild eyed optimism around here.
> The same negativity could be said of the Wright brothers when they told people they were going to fly
It could also have been said of the generations of idiots that jumped off cliffs to their deaths in flying machines that had no hope of working.
In any case, I don't think people are pessimistic about the technology. They're pessimistic about the ability of our social institutions to accommodate and manage the effects of that technology.
And it never ceases to amaze me how the tech community so easily blows off legitimate safety concerns.
You can't just "reboot everything" after a drone wipes out a Cessna or smashes a person's skull. Any drone capable of delivery is going to be big, powerful and not light.
>And it never ceases to amaze me how the tech community so easily blows off legitimate safety concerns.
I seriously doubt any drone proponent will be dismissive of safety concerns. If there are people who don't care about the safety concerns drones bring, this is just the other side of the same coin with people so resistant to the ideas of autonomous vehicles. Both are people not forward looking in their own way.
When Amazon says, "hey we want to use drones," reactions shouldn't be, "hell no there's no way you can make that safe," and instead, "great idea, let's make sure there is a discussion at large to reach a consensus on the safety standards required to make that happen."
Big companies very consistently skimp on things that are not directly related to the success of some undertaking. Sure, safety standards might be put into place, but that does not convince me in the slightest that Amazon is going to spend a lot of money making sure the drones are secure and bug free and can't be hacked easily, so on and so forth... Certainly not to the degree that commercial airplanes are vetted, and even those systems aren't invulnerable.
>It never ceases to amaze me how negative the HN community is to new ideas, technology and generally "trying new stuff" that has never been attempted before.
That's because the HN community has a high bar, and most "new ideas" are bullshit (when it's not a rehash of failed old ideas shot down 100,000s of times, like "perpetual motion machines").
> It never ceases to amaze me how negative the HN community is to new ideas, technology and generally "trying new stuff" that has never been attempted before.
Partly I think this is people setting themselves up to be able to say "I told you so!" at a later time. You look less silly predicting a failure that doesn't happen than if you extol the virtues of an idea that later turns out to be complete hogswash under further scrutiny.
Though to put a more positive spin on it: critical thinking is a much neglected skill. Sometimes things genuinely aren't well thought out, and identifying and documenting a problem are the first steps to someone coming up with a solution.
"Does anyone in their right mind honestly think that in less than 150 years there will still be a single human-controlled vehicle (plane or automobile)?"
You do realize that we don't even have clean water on a global scale?
These are two pretty unrelated issues, and it is a fallacy to compare the two in this context. It's not unlikely that the majority of transit in the western will be automated in the next century or two.
The technology to filter and clean water has existed since the Roman era, but its implementation is highly dependent on political and economic factors (fun fact: western civilization didn't match the Romans' quality of water engineering until the mid-19th century).
The technology for automated cars could well exist in 150 years, and its implementation depends on the cycles of industrial production and consumption. It's likely that much of the western world will have automated transit in 150 years, because everyone will eventually get rid of their 2015 toyota for a model 2077 automated Tesla-google car.
Yeah, so we spent a trillion dollars sending a dozen guys to the moon because people in Kansas were shitting themselves thinking about Soviet space superiority. Now tell me about the dozens of assholes who said we'd be terraforming Mars by now, or be flying between Tokyo and LA in 2 hours on hypersonic planes. Heck, tell me about DRAM latency since 1995, the fact that power generation is still dominated by coal plants that are less than 2x more efficient than they were a century ago, or the fact that the sexiest thing in aerospace right now is a company trying to get back to where we were in the 1960's.
Right, but still only twleve of us have been to the moon.
I think the parent commenter's point was that it's pretty naive to think that there will be no more human-driven vehicles at all. Change will happen quickly in some parts of the world, and other parts will take a long, long time to catch up.
Sadly, there's not as much financial incentive to get clean water to people often without the means to buy it. In places often wrapped up in corruption, war, etc.
With automated transport, the early movers could absolutely dominate the future of transport.
Identifying a problem is the first step to solving it. And there's far more likely to be people willing and able to take that first step than any subsequent one.
Drone Delivery - never going to work. Lots of solar power - too expensive. Autonomous cars - too risky
This is supposed to be a community of "Hackers" making cool stuff, and here we have a company talking about making cool stuff, and every single comment, without exception, is negative.
Yes, this is a very difficult problem to solve. Yes, there are many things they have not addressed yet. Yes, this needs a lot of work. No, they shouldn't just start doing this and see how many crashes happen. But yes, they need to keep talking, testing, learning and working towards a future where this is possible.
Does anyone in their right mind honestly think that in less than 150 years there will still be a single human-controlled vehicle (plane or automobile)?
Of course it's coming, and these guys are starting it. Now.
The same negativity could be said of the Wright brothers when they told people they were going to fly, or Henry Ford when he set out to mass-produce the automobile, or the people that said we'd have a global computer network and a computer in every home.
I honestly don't understand why the community here isn't more open to new ideas. Even ideas that never come to fruition are still worth analyzing. There is always something to be learned.
We should be talking about the interesting parts of this challenge and how they could be overcome, not saying "Not safe enough" Every. Single. Time.
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