
Can any one explain the Si Valley fascination with (driverless) Automobiles? - chrodobert
Having read a lot about the technology I think that true, SAE level 5 driverless cars are not on the near horizon. Maybe they will never come to pass. If and when they do it seems that current industry leaders such as GM, Toyota, etc, will have the economic comparative advantage  starting from integrating  incremental automation features (e.g. lane tracking assist, etc), into mass produced auto-mobiles. What explains the SV tech industry&#x27;s fascination with driverless cars over the past 5-10 years? Where did it originate? It seems that there about 100 other areas where silicon valley could innovate, why did the SV big companies choose this seemingly quixotic quest? I am interested in what is behind it from an economic history perspective. You may disagree but it seems to me that silicon valley expectation and hype are even further diverged from reality now than they were during the dot-com boom 20 years ago. Is it a problem of too much easy money to fund Juicero-like startups? What explains it?<p>Wouldn&#x27;t Alphabet shareholders prefer a dividend to wasting money on projects outside the company&#x27;s areas of core competency on dubious products? Surely people understand that exponential growth can not continue ad infinitum and that it may be better to take profits than just piss away money.
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nabla9
Two things

1\. Economic productivity gains are measured in trillions per year globally.
Expected value for the research is good. Transportation costs are significant
bottleneck in the economy. They make up roughly 8-9 percent of GDP. Wages are
becoming the bottleneck in transportation costs. Internet economy can increase
productivity but but if the end people who deliver packets, move pizzas, or
transport anything have hourly wages.

2\. R&D into autonomous cars is related to autonomous robots, robot vision
etc. Google is betting heavily into AI and driversless cars can be seen as one
piece of the puzzle. Navigation in real environment and spatial understanding
of surroundings is core technology in many other things.

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tiredwired
40,000 people in the US were killed in car accidents in 2016. Millions more
were injured. Seems like a worthwhile thing to disrupt.

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chrodobert
Does silicon valley think they can do anything, regardless the industry,
better than the incumbents? It is easy to disrupt (when capital is cheap) but
harder to improve. I think expectations of technological progress have become
untethered from reality (as happened in the last dot-com boom and bust 20
years ago). This time the bust may be even worse.

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chrodobert
It also seems to me that improving public and mass transit would be a more
proximate solution to traffic deaths. Every one will die of some cause or
another. as medicine improves the share of deaths due to accidents should
increase. Even with increasing medical capacity to treat diseases traffic
deaths only account for 1.5 % of all annual deaths. Maybe silicon valley would
be better to spend its talents improving health care and preventative
medicine. But that is not as sexy to pitch to wall street and the public as
Jetsons fantasies. Recently Silicon Valley's contribution to healthcare was
Theranos, who Tim Draper still believes was unfairly maligned by the press.

