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Comment by scottlocklin | Hacker News Reader

Yeah, well, "duh." What boggles my mind is people will read this, nod sadly, and continue not to notice that a whole bunch of what they think they know about machine learning, autonomous vehicles and so on is also marketing department hype.

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I don't know if that's fair. To take self driving cars as an example, I've seen cars driving themselves around mountain View and Waymo isn't promising much more than that. Watson had ads with an intelligent voice but they were selling a bunch of programmers to make expert systems like it was the 80's but in java this time. I think by comparison those other fields are promising less and delivering more. Even if there is still a gap between what people think will happen in the next 10 years and what we can likely deliver in the next 10, it's nowhere like what is described in the article.

C'mon man! Google allows one to check on their promises and their progress. For example, from 2012:

http://www.computerworld.com/article/2491635/vertical-it/sel...

"Such "autonomous vehicles" will be a reality for "ordinary people" in less than five years, Google co-founder Sergey Brin said Tuesday."

How's that working out for you Sergey?

Self driving tech hasn't moved appreciably since the 90s. Computers are better. More people are trying it. Reality is, it's just collision avoidance with GPS. They rely on maps; what happens when the maps change? What happens when a kid runs out in front of one of these things?

Sergey isn't taking people's money based on that promise. As an engineer I don't beat people up about realizing how hard problems are and not releasing crappy products. Missing estimates happens. It's another thing entirely to try and pass off a product as something it isn't to a buyer.

I dunno it kind of looks like they're going to eventually take someone's money based on similar promises.

http://money.cnn.com/2017/05/24/investing/google-waymo-self-...

I mean, the fact that they've been using funds from advertising to research this problem is admirable in some sense, but they are actually taking someone's money to do this.

Hype from marketing departments on technical matters is not to be trusted.

That someone being the shareholders who could have gotten that money as dividends.

"just collision avoidance with GPS"

This is basically what all driving is, no? Go on the road, don't hit other cars, obstacles or people and navigate to a destination.

Computer programming is just typing words!!!

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