Originally published at: Supercut of Elon Musk promising self-driving Teslas within a year since 2014 | Boing Boing
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How dare you defame the Great and Powerful Musk?! It’s all part of his master plan I tell you!
[Saving the usual fanbois and TSLA touts some keystrokes]
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Repeating something over and over makes it come true right?
Techknowhustler™
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The interesting thing about this is how carefully couched and unfalsifiable these claims were at every stage. He’s very, very careful to give himself an out while making claims that appear grandious if you don’t examine them much. He is giving the people who want to believe what they want.
I think Ford and GM are going to eat his lunch by quietly executing and avoiding disaster. Tesla will probably fire Musk and hire a COO from a car company.
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With these kinds of tech related developments breakthroughs are always just tantalizingly around the corner, its the kind of thing that could take a couple of years… or decades. See cold fusion, there’s the old joke of researchers constantly saying that viable cold fusion is 5 years away year after year. In my opinion true driverless systems will require more than just a car to have their own driving systems, it would need our roadway infrastructure to also fundamentally change to support these systems and add safety and redundancy. If this isn’t done i don’t think any amount of work dumped into a car for self-driving will be safe with acceptable margins of error.
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He has been over promising all kinds of things for a long time. I never think what he talks about is true - just that it is something someone is working on. And Tesla isn’t the only company working on it.
Self driving cars ARE the future. I predict in my life time, you won’t be allowed to drive on highways manually. Or if you are, you get one, maybe two lanes to drive manually on, and the rest of the cars are zipping by much faster in their own lanes.Older cars might have a retrofit option at least.
As @Grey_Devil pointed out, that will probably require some sort of system installed on highways as a redundancy to keep them on track. But between sensors on the car, and the ability for them to talk to each other on the road to avoid each other, it should be much safer and cars will be moving long in a much more orderly fashion at consistent speeds.
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I really hope you’re wrong about that.
The level of investment to make functional self-driving cars is not less than what is needed for us to replace cars (which would have an enormous positive impact on the world).
As I’ve posted before:
It requires trillions in investment into software, hardware, and public infrastructure with the end goal of our grandkids using basically the same mode of transportation as our grandparents. Its scientific revolution as brought to you by corporate board rooms who want the world to change as little as possible
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Or this meme about the promises made by Vitalik Buterin (now in his 20s) about a proof-of-stake version of his cryptocurrency.
Gilded Ages of unchecked capitalist greed are always hucksters’ paradises.
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Awwwww, shit.
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I’ve pondered on self-driving cars and transportation for a few years and my guess is that a likely way it’ll go down is further privatization of roadways (ie: tollways managed by corporations), and mass transit vehicles also owned/managed by them. The last bit that i’ve thought on a lot is that if cars are self-driving this also brings a new layer or factor of revenue that would separate the wealthy vs the common person, time. Roadways that have self-driving vehicles would have improved traffic but i can see a wealthy person paying a premium to have road priority that would allow for their car to get to the destination much faster than anyone else.
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Like I said to Mister44, I really hope you’re wrong about that. Both of you may very well be right, but I’m still hoping for fundamental change in personal transportation. Not just improvements to or new ways to profit off of the current environment-destroying, inequality-increasing system
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Can I get a supercut of Elon Musk paying his taxes?
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Me too. I am very much an optimist and would prefer to see better public/mass transportation and less corporate wasteful bullshit
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You beat me to it. They talk a lot about efficiency, reducing congestion, and environmental friendliness but put little effort into exploring how urban and regional mass transit* might be improved and made more attractive. Ah, capitalism…
[No, fanbois, Hyperloop doesn’t count]
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He’s an innovator.
He’s disrupted and refined the Friedman Unit.
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I heard it persuasively argued that robot-driver projects like Tesla’s (and Alphabet’s) get it exactly backwards. You can’t tell the human that he can mostly ignore the situation but be ready for emergencies, because the robot’s high success rate lulls the human into inattention. The solution is to have the human do all the driving, but to have a computer do all the obstacle-detecting, wayfinding, and path prediction these systems are capable of, and put it all in the driver’s head-up display. It motivates the driver to pay more attention rather than less, and gives him much a much clearer picture of the situation than drivers have had until now.
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The ultimate mode of transportation will probably look much different than what we have now. I have heard predictions that cars will be more of a service than a possession. You need a car, one shows up to take you to where you need to go. Maybe it is more of a mini-bus so that it can pick up several people to go to the mall or what ever people are doing in the future. Of course more dense city centers may have something else entirely.
These technologies are being worked on in parallel. But I can’t see where they merge.
Also, change is incremental. Rarely is there a giant leap right off of the bat. It starts small, and if found useful, it is picked up. Sometimes the obviously better thing looses out (like BetaMax) because humans are emotional creature and rarely make purely rational choices.
Your complaint about “changing as little as possible” I am not sure if it is fair, because big leaps are both huge gambles and oftentimes something too soon gets trashed canned because no one wants it. Which is why change is incremental.
Something like changing how people get from point A to B is going to take a huge paradigm shift. Remember Segways? They thought EVERYONE would want to tool around on one of those to get around. Turns out that mainly mall cops and tourists used them 
Yet now we do have little electric scooters littering up down towns. So maybe something personal for short distances will be the future.
Also freight, especially with the next-day-to-your-door expectations we are fast becoming used to, will continue to evolve how it gets around logistically. But that is a big thing to consider especially on highways. Solutions for freight may look differnt than solutions for people.
Very likely.
And guess how they’ll “solve” the Trolley Problem?
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FTFY.
Cold fusion (if we exclude Jones’s muon catalyzed cold fusion) is a pipe dream, or a scam (or both).
Hot fusion, OTOH, is “just” a technological problem: there is slow and unsteady progress.
Note: the WP article is even too forgiving about the E Cat and its “inventor”.
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My car has been self-driving for a decade. It’s driven by my self.
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