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Comment by isoprophlex | Hacker News Reader

_And you can start testing [that] by sending them different kinds of advertising to see some kind of behavior in the [listening] patterns.” These are insights that are then quickly shared throughout GM’s various divisions. _

What the actual fuck. It's a car that you've paid several tens of thousands for.

Google pestering you for personal data in return for '''''free''''' services is terrible because they are a monopoly, but in a sense we're to blame by expecting not to pay money for maps, mail, search. But this is about a car, on average one of the most expensive things a person owns.

Makes you wonder... How will we look back on this day and age 40 years from now?

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> you wonder... How will we look back on this day and age 40 years from now?

The cynic in me wants to say we will look back and wish our things still had off buttons.

I'd be happy if my next car had physical buttons. Putting everything on a screen you must look at is one of the most distracting and dangerous things I can think of. I've yet to see a digital display I like better than buttons and dials for volume, tuning, and temperature control.

  one of the most distracting and 
  dangerous things I can think of

No worries there. You won't actually be driving your own car by then. It'll be driving itself.

Seems like the self driving aspect should have hit before the car-full-of-distractions aspect.

I don't believe that this is actually happening for at least 50+ years. And by that point, indeed, I won't be driving myself, but for slightly different reasons.

I work in the same building as Waymo. They’re very serious about self driving. I don’t know anything about their operations internally or how well they can handle inclement weather, but I think 50+ years is overly pessimistic. Self driving cars work today in clear driving conditions. Personally I feel like it may be more than ten years until we see them everywhere, but maybe it would be less. 50? That’s just silly. I don’t think it’s such a technical challenge we couldn’t solve it sooner.

I mean in the 60s there was a famous project where the idea was to "solve" image recognition, with an estimate of few months tops. It's 2018 and the best of the best image recognition algorithms will say with 99% confidence that a sofa in a zebra print is in fact, a zebra, and our technological leap from 60s is just unimaginable. We have so much more computing power, yet we can't crack it fully. I feel like autonomous driving is the same - it's going to be amazing in some general cases, but it's going to fall apart at any normal situation that can happen on the road - and it's those edge cases which will take decades to work out fully and reliably. So yes, I genuinely don't believe that we will see a fully autonomous vehicle that can work in any conditions, on streets of San Francisco as well as rural Ukraine equally well and without any human input.

Sure, they will not be deployed universally but they will soon be common for interstate trucking and taxis. Also expect to see different adoption in the US than Europe and Japan (like Norwegian and Japanese cell networks vs the US). Needless to say, I agree rural Ukraine may have different needs than San Francisco. But that has nothing to do with adoption in San Francisco. Adoption does not have to be 100% to be significant.

I'm surprised consumer reports and the like isn't giving all cars bad reviews for that.

Late last year a study funded by AAA was published. [1] [2]

__For example, the Tesla Model S 75 enabled internet usage on the 17-inch LCD touch screen that allowed the driver to perform a large number of tasks that were not driving-related (e.g., checking and composing Facebook posts)

It's insane how much of a problem distracted driving is with mobile phones right now. I can't see "improving" cars by making them "smart" helping.

[1] https://www.caranddriver.com/news/eyes-off-the-road-study-co... (props to them for linking to the actual study rather than vaguely summarizing the paper)

[2] Actual study. PDF warning: https://publicaffairsresources.aaa.biz/wp-content/uploads/20...

> I'd be happy if my next car had physical buttons.

Some constructors are coming back from the "no physical button" fad. At least for the things you should able to use while driving. The problem is the development cycle there is not in weeks or months but multiple years.

Airplanes (those with a Garmin G1000 specifically) do it perfectly- a nice large non-touch screen that has manual buttons and backup vital instruments.

The cynic in me says we'll feel about it exactly as we're told to feel about it.

Or the dissenting voices will be filtered/silenced.

"Citizen! Your opinion does not agree with groupthink. You will be driven to a reeducation center."

> It's a car that you've paid several tens of thousands for.

Just going to show that paying money for something doesn't guarantee that you aren't also the product.

40years? try 10years when everyone will be using ride-sharing companies that have all sort of cameras and the passenger doesn't have any expectation of privacy to begin with.

The choice is about who collects all the data from all the cams and things around you - The Party (China), The Gov (UK), or the Corporations (US).

Why not all three? Everyone has showed up to the data party in the US as far as I can tell. Even the political parties are independently hoovering up data for their campaign strategies.

Well, the cooperation is a key.

> During the 2012 campaign, Barack Obama’s reelection team had an underappreciated asset: Google’s executive chairman, Eric Schmidt. He helped recruit talent, choose technology, and coach the campaign manager, Jim Messina, on the finer points of leading a large organization. “On election night he was in our boiler room in Chicago,” says David Plouffe, then a senior White House adviser. Schmidt had a particular affinity for a group of engineers and statisticians tucked away beneath a disco ball in a darkened corner of the office known as “the Cave.” The data analytics team, led by 30-year-old Dan Wagner, is credited with producing Obama’s surprising 5 million-vote margin of victory.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2013-05-30/googles-e...

That doesn't explain the 10 million vote margin of victory for Obama in 2008.

Or a corporation that is legally required to delete the footage a few days later and can only process it to resolve customer complaints and to bill damaged cars (EU).

In the US the government tracks everybody, and they're probably better at it than in the UK. Remember Snowden? He didn't work at Google. Both the government and opportunistic companies track everything they can.

To be fair, Snowden said that the UK was collecting far more information on its own people than the US was.

He already said the UKs surveillance apparatus was terrifying in comparison.

The more interesting question is what are you going to do about it?

I simply don't buy cars that spy on me.

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