Your point reminds me a bit of Theranos, and how they were able to coast on a completely fraudulent but awe-inspiring idea.
It might not be related, but whenever I read stories this, I'm reminded of the ways that tech is marketed in the world. It's impossible for the public to understand whether or not a certain technology is feasible, practical, or even possible, but marketing teams get an unbelievable amount of leeway when marketing products and services. And they get to do it without really telling you what data is collected and how it's used, etc., etc.
The power asymmetry between what tech companies are allowed to say versus the limited technical understanding of the public is brutal, and not getting any better.
Perhaps not the general public, but everyone in the clinical lab industry knew that there was no way that Theranos could achieve accurate results with a tiny blood sample. A single drop of blood extracted from just under the skin is not representative of the blood in the patient's circulatory system and contains too many contaminants. This is fairly straightforward biology and has been know for many years.
True. Still, Theranos happened and flew fir quite a while. The problem here is the smaller the population of people able to judge new tech (which is generally speaking getting smaller everyday tech becomes more specialized and advanced) the longer it takes for reality to catch up with the money.
Which also means that it is ny impossible to distinguish between a growth company with a solid product and one that is just trying to out run reality.
But I read on these very forums, by prominent posters, that the only reason we were skeptical of Theranos was that we didn't want to see a young woman succeed! What happened?
Having bold dreams are important too. Trying hard and failing is a perfectly useful data point. Pretty sure there would have been many naysayers 20 years ago, when presented with what is today's mobile technology.
I don't think they're the same thing though. Touchscreen phones with high speed internet was an unsurprising goal, even if the pace of smartphone adoption has been fantastic.
Driverless cars... unless there have been some fundamental breakthroughs in AI tech that allows for such a fully unsupervised system, its hard to see how this can be a possibility.
Now, reducing the complexity far more... assisted driving tech is already pretty mainstream. Autonomous driving for predictable, long haul routes (inter-city trucks on US highways) is an exciting market too.
Everyone is wrong about long haul trucks, frankly. It will be easier to get fully autonomous cars than trucks. They're much longer and wider. They're at least twenty times heavier. They require much more room to maneuver, to start, and to stop. If they're involved in a crash, they cause a lot more damage.
Not to mention that there's nothing really predictable about a long route. Traffic, weather, construction, and every other variable is more likely to change over a longer route as well. It would be far better to focus on making autonomous cars first.
All those extra difficulties of long haul relative to cars are big challenges to humans because the scale is so far off from the baseline of our embodied intelligence, but not much of a difference to machines.
A human driver eyeballing a difficult curve will easily be half a meter or more off over the length the trailer. But for a machine it it does not really matter wether it plots a path for a Twizzy through the LIDAR point cloud or for a semi-trailer, as long as the model is accurate. Humans have all their relevant sensors at a single point, awkwardly mapped to vehicle dimensions with mirrors and guesswork, therefore human driving gets worse with increasing vehicle size. A driving machine however can take input from all over its body, its "skilll does not deteriorate with increase in vehicle size (arguably it might even improve because a bigger vehicle will have more computing and a wider range of sensors at the same fraction of total mass and cost). The bigger the rig the easier it becomes for robots to compete with humans.
It's not that trucks will have it first, per se. It's that trucks spend a much larger fraction of their time on freeways, so they can get a much bigger benefit from a system that only works there.
Specifically on freeways, the difference in difficulty is pretty minor. The lanes are wide and you don't need to accelerate very rapidly.
> It would be far better to focus on making autonomous cars first.
Mu. The same system's going to be on both types of vehicle.
In 1999 we had all the basic ingredients for a modern smartphone. The components were too slow, expensive, heavy, power hungry, and unreliable to allow for building a viable consumer product but no one really claimed that improvements were impossible.
My smarthphone has issues sometimes: no mobile data, or no GPS, or a Bluetooth-device fails to connect, or an outright crash. Not very often, perhaps once a month. Not too big a deal for a phone: I can simply can reboot it.
If an autonomous car has issues even 1/10 as frequently, I won't ever trust it to transport me.
It might not be related, but whenever I read stories this, I'm reminded of the ways that tech is marketed in the world. It's impossible for the public to understand whether or not a certain technology is feasible, practical, or even possible, but marketing teams get an unbelievable amount of leeway when marketing products and services. And they get to do it without really telling you what data is collected and how it's used, etc., etc.
The power asymmetry between what tech companies are allowed to say versus the limited technical understanding of the public is brutal, and not getting any better.