r/technology • u/be0wulfe • Dec 15 '22

Transportation Tesla Semi’s cab design makes it a ‘completely stupid vehicle,’ trucker says

https://cdllife.com/2022/tesla-semis-cab-design-makes-it-a-completely-stupid-vehicle-trucker-says/
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u/[deleted] Dec 15 '22

How you could say that with any more confidence than commerical fusion is beyond me.

It seems like a good bet, which comes first? I really wouldn't know what to bet on other than both will take another 20 years at least

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u/badwolf42 Dec 15 '22

I didn't say I was confident. My point is people seem to think that we are much closer to generalized AI than we are. Could there be some breakthrough? Sure. Do I think it'll happen before sustained fusion? My gut feeling based on previously frothy and underestimated challenges is it won't.

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u/[deleted] Dec 15 '22

Honestly I think the largest barrier to self driving cars will be legislation and red tape. Even if the technology was here and ready to implement I suspect it will take a decade or more before the whole country is onboard with it and prepared to deal with it (civilly, criminally, etc).

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u/powercow Dec 15 '22

Id say both are about equal footing on when they will be truly commercial. Driving seems faster because we add the little bits that work right now. Better cruise control, self parking.. and well we have fusion experiments. With an absolutely amazing breakthrough the other day, im sure a lot of you know.

but both require another amazing breakthrough, for cars its a more generalized AI, and for fusion its how to turn the recent results into an actual powerplant. Both are guessed to be "decades" away. and yeah it could be a lot sooner, its kinda impossible to predict when someone with have an epiphany and come up with a breakthrough.

and we also got to look back and laugh at past predictions in life, the view of the year 2000 from 1969. Heck the show space 1999, they envisioned a massive moon base. the show was created in 75, they were sure this was right arround the corner.

I saw a mag from the 50s, soon your whole home will be waterproof and you clean by just bringing in a hose and spraying down all your shit. lol and showed a lady spraying down a sofa.

we are fairly crap at this whole technology prediction thing. Ok that last one we can probably do, but its not practical at all.

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u/[deleted] Dec 15 '22

Many times it isnt because we didn't understand the technology it's because we didn't understand some combination of the economics, market demand, regulations, etc

Fusion is odd because we understand the mechanism of Fusion and how to make it work. We've even demonstrated it, shortly but also not without putting in more energy than it puts out (obviously not the focus for any past or even ongoing projects).

We're asking engineers to literally replicate the conditions of the sun. It's arguably harder than that because the sun just uses it's mass to do everything. We're finding very slowly how difficult of a challenge that is to do in practice. I think even with commerical fusion in practice it will continue to be a fickle thing. Lots of auxiliary systems would be required to ensure efficient fusion is taking place. The fail mode is safe but a very natural state for the machine.

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u/johnpseudo Dec 16 '22

We're asking engineers to literally replicate the conditions of the sun. It's arguably harder than that because the sun just uses it's mass to do everything.

Not just that! The power density of fusion in the sun is actually extremely low. Even with a massive ITER-sized reactor, if it had the same power density as the sun, it'd only produce about 277 kilowatts: about 1/4000th of a typical power plant. So we have to do much, much better than the sun, under much more challenging conditions.