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Comment by CSMastermind | Hacker News Reader

This reads like a CGP Grey video.

> the terrifying scenario in which half of all jobs are quickly lost to automation

This completely ignores the very long development that such advances will take and the fact that most jobs won't just be displaced over night. For years we've been able to replace toll collectors with baskets and yet there are still toll collectors employed. Change will happen but it won't be sudden and there will be plenty of time to adapt.

Anyone who believes we're going to have fully self driving cars in the next 7 years is living at the "peak of inflated expectations" on the Gartner hype cycle.

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What, do you consider 7 years as "long term" for social evolution?

And yes, count me along the people that expect fully self driving cars to be available in 7 years. I also expect truck driving to be an extinct profession by about there (10 years at most). City driving will probably live longer, and people'll probably keep driving their own cars.

But Google's cars can't even merge on the freeway yet, and they need vastly detailed maps which must be kept 100% up to date. (The existing car companies are trying to avoid the latter drawback, but there's no proof that they will be able to achieve this any time soon - it's just an ambition.)

Do you know what'll make the task of maintaining maps much easier? Self driving cars.

Yes, they can't merge on the freeway now. People keep not understanding the behaviour of exponential growth, and keep getting surprized once only in a single doubling things grow from "only half there" to "completely done".

(And I'll be among the first to call the end of Moore's law. But altough our electronics are not in exponential growth anymore, it's still growing increasingly fast.)

This is a kind of short-term thinking that gets humans into trouble. The writing on the wall is clear and the time to deal with it is now, not when you'll start having widespread riots.

According to the Gartner hype cycle you mention[1], Autonomous Vehicles are indeed currently at the Peak of Inflated Expectations, and are expected to reach the Plateau of Productivity within 5-10 years. So you're not even wrong.

[1] http://www.gartner.com/newsroom/id/2819918

I hadn't seen that before. Thanks for the link!

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