[czr80]

It's fascinating how successful Google has been at marketing itself to geeks - it doesn't matter that none of the really cool stuff has actually shipped (and perhaps will never ship). The dream is there, and that's enough to get the kids in to work on improving advertising (while dreaming of changing the world).

Is that cynical? Probably, don't mind me. It's just reading these comments you'd think self-driving cars, say, were a done deal, and yet when I read things like this they seem an awfully long way away:

>The Google car has now driven more than half a million miles without causing an accident—about twice as far as the average American driver goes before crashing. Of course, the computer has always had a human driver to take over in tight spots. Left to its own devices, Thrun says, it could go only about fifty thousand miles on freeways without a major mistake. Google calls this the dog-food stage: not quite fit for human consumption. “The risk is too high,” Thrun says. “You would never accept it.” The car has trouble in the rain, for instance, when its lasers bounce off shiny surfaces. (The first drops call forth a small icon of a cloud onscreen and a voice warning that auto-drive will soon disengage.) It can’t tell wet concrete from dry or fresh asphalt from firm. It can’t hear a traffic cop’s whistle or follow hand signals.

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2013/11/25/131125fa_fact_...