There's this prevailing narrative that someday self-driving cars will eliminate all human-controlled driving and that these types of stories are like milestones in the path to that future utopia.
But I don't think that's the case anymore than the narrative that LLMs will eventually displace all software engineers.
The invention of the automobile didn't eliminate all horses, but it certainly replaced the vast majority of horses.
In 7 years we've gone from GPT-2 to Fable and Astra. There seems to be no sign of slowdown, except from the top AI labs who want to slow down out of caution. It would be incredibly surprising to me if in another 7 years, my software engineering skills were still useful. AI capabilities will get to the point where even the best human is adding noise to the system, similar to today's chess engines and calculators.
Self-driving cars will take longer to roll out because they require new hardware and changes to laws, but I don't see how a career such as "truck driver" or "cab driver" exists in 20 years. At most it would be for a few niche uses and tourism novelty (similar to steam locomotives or horse-drawn buggies).
I mostly agree. However, I do actually think that many of the skills you use as a software engineer will still be useful in 7 years. It's just that, as you suggest, no one will let us near any actual code.
>It would be incredibly surprising to me if in another 7 years, my software engineering skills were still useful
This profession has always required reskilling/ changing based on new technologies. How many people are still meaningfully employed as pascal programmers?
Almost every career requires staying on top of new developments to remain competitive. Even mechanics must learn about new systems in vehicles to be able to repair them. Not many people are still meaningfully employed as Model T mechanics.
The difference with LLMs is that they are a substitute for more general cognitive skills. Right now they are also a complement (using them increases the productivity of humans writing software), but it's only a matter of time before they improve to the point where they fully substitute. And it seems quite likely that the timeline for that is significantly shorter than my remaining career.
If you are confident that there will be specific tasks that LLMs can't accomplish in 2033, I'm happy to entertain such ideas. But considering the current rate of progress, I can't think of anything like that.
Self-driving cars and trucks will eliminate human-controlled driving in the same way that engines (ICE, electric, steam, whatever) have eliminated human and animal powered transportation.
Yes, there are a few people around who ride horses, have an ox-cart or pedal their own bikes, but in a commercial sense, those are rounding errors.
Compilers have already replaced software engineers producing native code by hand. (Apart from a handful of exceptions.) LLMs will and do have a similar impact one level higher.
I'm really, really happy when I see my less technical friends suddenly vibe-code things they have dreamed up!
People replying to me keep confounding human-controlled transportation with the transpo tech itself. Yes horse and buggy is long gone. But human-controlled transportation is still here, over the course of driving horses, gas cars, and now EVs.
We had trains without drivers on board for ages. Lifts also lost their attendants; and some buildings here in Singapore don't have controls inside the lift.
I don't know what that means. But presumably you are talking about some difficult technical feat that one can perform with a vehicle?
I'm fairly sure, if it's something mechanical and a human can do it, the computers won't be far behind. But even if not, we can redesign the vehicles to make it easier for a computer, eg we can make all axes or even all wheels independently steerable and control their velocity individually. A human would be overwhelmed with that, they can barely keep hold of a steering wheel, but a computer wouldn't mind too much.
Have a look at how the shipping container took over global logistics. They also had to redesign nearly everything about that industry, but the savings and efficiency gains were too juice to ignore.
> The point is there's a million of these edge cases for which autonomy will not economically compete for another hundred years.
My prediction: anything a human can do by just manipulating the controls of the car (steering wheel, gas, breaks) will be automated fairly quickly. Especially stuff like parking maneuvers (I assume that's what you describe?), because those happen at low speeds and mostly involve fixed non-moving obstacles. And it's pretty easy to generate training data. When the autonomous system attempts these edge cases, they can simulate a myriad attempts with the on-board computer. There's not a lot of physics going on at low speeds. (Or rather, pretty simple approximations are enough.)
The harder parts are dealing with moving and ambiguous objects (pedestrians, other cars, cyclists etc) at speed. But the industry is well aware of that.
About what will take longer: at the moment a truck driver provides a lot of incidental labour around the truck. Like helping with loading and unloading, minor repairs, etc.
If you have no person on board, you need to redesign how the industry is organised. If you need human help to unload at the destination, you need to preposition a human there, you can't rely on the truck coming with a human.
The logo of shopping lines is painted on co tainers because they own them. Cars on the other hand are owned by people. Millions of people own cars and may never switch go a self driving model. The average age of a car on the road keeps climbing because the quality of new cars is worse.
I'd like to see cars with better autonomy features but theyre still far too expensive and non standardized. When the computer breaks or needs an upgrade the whole car is junked. The purchase data shows people aren't asking for autonomy.
Mullvad CEO is the primary donor to a European political party that supports "re-migration"; a far right policy ideal that is literally about sending migrants back to where they came from.
You're purposely minimizing the Mullvad CEO's actions by making an incongruent comparison.
Proton CEO made some vaguely pro-Republican (U.S) comments one time.
Mullvad CEO is the primary donor to a European political party that supports "re-migration"; a far right policy ideal that is literally about sending migrants back to where they came from.
You know, many people groan about consumerism and advocate being a creator... but at a certain point, someone has to consume all of those creations, otherwise it's just navel-gazing slop being churned out for one's own self-satisfaction.
A 2006 car is pretty safe. It won't have gizmos like lane departure warnings or automatic braking but crash safety will be about as good as a new car, especially if you buy one that had good crash safety ratings at the time, such as Mercedes or Volvo.
The washing machine does. Either this conversation has come full circle or HN, circus of productivity hacks, is exceptionally ineffective at doing laundry.
Are you being serious? My unwashed laundry only smells when you press your nose to it. In the hamper it’s fine for the 1-7 days it generally waits.
Although this thread has hit on an interesting method of distributing folding into daily tiny sessions - especially for the childfree, who produce just a single dirty outfit per day after all.
The method would be that you don’t own any clothes that wrinkle, and wash a load of laundry each week, then you hang up your towel, and just sit the clean basket by the dresser, and each morning before you get dressed, you also fold and put away (or wear) “n” items where “n” is the average number of items you wear each day. At the end of the week you should have an essentially empty “clean” basket and a new dirty basket. If you were very disciplined about this you could just have the basics in rotation at all times, meaning you only own like 8 pairs of underpants, 16 socks, etc. and those simply come out of the clean basket straight onto your body.
But I don't think that's the case anymore than the narrative that LLMs will eventually displace all software engineers.
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