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Comment by blackhaz | Hacker News Reader

I don't understand what's the message here, asides from that the author is bitter. Musk and his team have made incredible progress in many important directions, to the point that it feels the next industrial revolution is just around the corner. Let him go all in.

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>>I don't understand what's the message here

You really don't? 8 years ago Tesla did a (fake) video of their car "self driving" on real streets. 8 years of promises and in effort to convice their investors that they are actually making progress towards that goal is.....a movie set with fake streets to drive on? While Waymo is delivering real self driving taxi rides in the real world? What isn't clear about this message to you, exactly?

> a movie set with fake streets to drive on? While Waymo is delivering real self driving taxi rides

"Tesla FSD Supervised Tops 1.6 Billion Total Miles Driven": https://teslanorth.com/2024/08/07/tesla-fsd-supervised-1-6-b...

Seems obvious that movie sets are like red carpets, no?

Do you see the word "Supervised" there?

Do you think the data from the one doesn't apply toward the other? Is politics really enough to get people to stop believing in incremental problem solving? Can we communicate entirely in question form?

If the data from supervised driving can he used for unsupervised driving, that increases the depth of Tesla's failure to keep up with competitors like Waymo, who are doing a better job with less data.

I don't really know what you're trying to say with the politics distraction, so I guess the answer to your last question is "apparently you can't."

> If the data from supervised driving can he used for unsupervised driving

So you're unaware of the AI day presentations about their driving training pipeline. Learning about their engineering in that regard really changed my perception of the likelihood that they could solve the problem. Give it a watch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ODSJsviD_SU

> failure to keep up with competitors like Waymo

Looks like each of them lead in different ways to me. Waymo leads within certain specific city limits, Tesla leads on the open road. These seem to be direct consequences of their engineering decisions. Question is which will converge on working everywhere all the time.

This, and that when you get involved in politics, a big percentage of people is going to scrutinize you more thoroughly. Before, it was fun to believe everything he said, but now it is less so.

I agree with the tesla stuff but last I checked waymo had self driving only for pre-mapped roads and a lot of human assistance in the background. There was a lot of fuss about it when veritasium released a sponsored video about them.

So, what's your message exactly?

Which part of it is unclear, maybe I can help.

I think the issue here is that elon is one of many people who make their money not from building the next technology to underly an industrial revolution, but from making you feel like one is just around the corner. It’s an aesthetics vs functionality divide. Aside from spacex, which I’ll grant is really impressive, what novel technologies has musk helped develop that you feel will (or currently are) transforming the world in such a dramatic fashion?

Making paraplegics play chess with their mind and making EVs mainstream after they were considered dead.

Good things that help people, but not transformative.

I disagree. One is a huge step towards neural interfaces and the other is a big leap forward for the environment.

There was already plenty of medical bci research, neuralink is just continuing that work with a talented group and lots of money from Musk. Neural interfaces are definitely a powerful idea and they would be a huge deal if made consumer-grade, but neuralink is far (decades probably) from making it sufficiently non-invasive to be viable for anything other than medical uses, and that prevents it from changing things dramatically. If Musk funded fusion research, I wouldn’t say he’s ushering in the next industrial revolution, I’d say he’s contributing money to a noble research effort.

Popularizing electric cars, while similarly noble, doesn’t qualify as revolutionary in my book. The move to electric is fundamentally just an increase in the energy efficiency of cars, which is great, but not a transformative leap. Furthermore, EV’s have been doing kinda bad here in the US as of late and automakers are having to scale back their rollout because of lacking demand. Maybe eventually we’ll be able to credit Musk with a big cut in car emissions, but in the best case scenario where we magically made the switch and powered every electric car with solar, we’d be cutting US emissions by a fifth.

Again, the parent comment compared Musk’s contributions to the industrial revolution, which saw a complete transformation in how humans do labor. It wasn’t a percentage gain in efficiency, it was a force-multiplier that spawned whole industries.

I think you consider progress a matter of technology, and disregard economics, project management and culture.

I disagree. I think that I’m measuring progress partially in terms of change, and that in order to feel like Musk was heading a revolution, I’d need to see the possibility for great change as a consequence of his actions. That change could be social/political, but I’m not seeing any. Right now the world I imagine coming about with Musk looks mostly identical to the world I imagine would have happened without Musk.

> to the point that it feels the next industrial revolution is just around the corner

Ah yes, the never-ending corner.

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