[DanielBMarkham]

Absolutely yes. I can't wait for that day. We'll end up saving more lives per year than if we somehow banished war, at least in industrialized countries.

What's weird is the period we're entering, where the technology is becoming more and more capable, but we're still a very long ways away from full auto. Yet the hype machine says it's just around the corner. I'm betting we're still 10-15 years out. So how do we handle situations where the driver has to pay a little attention, but not that much? In airplanes, this has been a very dangerous area -- and things in airplanes usually happen much, much slower than they do in traffic.

[TeMPOraL]

> What's weird is the period we're entering, where the technology is becoming more and more capable, but we're still a very long ways away from full auto. Yet the hype machine says it's just around the corner.

I think it would be worthwhile to figure out how to shut down the hype machine, or at least tune it down a few notches. Dreams and visions are fine, but every time I switch the current tab from HN to Facebook, I get to see overhyped bullshit predictions about AI, nanotech, self-driving cars, etc. being just about the corner, as evidenced by whatever misinterpreted paper or video news sites could find that day. And the non-tech crowd is totally buying that. Not just regular folks, but also investors and politicians and all the other people who then end up causing resources to be wasted because they buy into the bullshit.

[Fricken]

It's interesting, though, to see rise of the robots talk breach tech circles and enter into mainstream economic and political discussions. Between the arrival of imagenet in 2011 and now the drums have been steadily getting louder.

In 2013 an oft-cited and alarming study out of oxford suggesting most jobs will be automated over the next decade was released. It was followed by a series of influential books whose authors ran the lecture circuit: 'The Second Machine Age', 'The Zero Marginal Cost Society', 'Superintelligence', and 'The Rise of the Robots'.

There were some bold bold and well publicized statements from respected luminaries such as Bill Gates, Elon Musk and Stephen Hawking.

Aggressive maneuvering to hoover up machine learning talent, and bold investments from automakers pursuing autonomous driving has only added gasoline to the fire.

Automation became the talk of the town at Davos in Switzerland. There's been a rising chorus from Basic Income supporters.

Now the hype is out of control. Nobody is actually looking at the technology. It's okay, though. Hype is self-correcting.