We absolutely were talking about self-driving cars in 2006, when no less a "major player" than the US Government had already been investing in this "science fiction" idea for two years, in the form of the DARPA Grand Challenge races. The 2007 race even required compliance with traffic laws in order to win. Google's autonomous vehicle program is a direct result of this project - that's why they hired Sebastian Thrun, whose team won the 2005 race.

I don't know how serious it was, but part of the initial PR about the Grand Challenge included the goal that it would enable the US military to convert some significant fraction of their fleet of ground vehicles to autonomous operation within ten years.

I do think the previous poster was overstating their case a little, but not so badly as you seem to believe.

Hey I just wanted to remind you about the Principle of Charity[0] as well as HN's guidelines for commenting[1]. It's easy to forget when you feel strongly about something but that's a real person you're replying to and they are probably acting in good faith. We should be civil on HN even when we have strong opinions.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principle_of_charity [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Caltrans and UC Berkeley were very seriously working on technology to have cars fully autonomously run on freeways. In fact my father was involved in the project some odd 20 years ago. The difference is that today you have more advanced technology, more private interests, less government interests and more media involved.

Here's an article that talks about Volkswagen's self driving car project dating back to 2006: http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2370598,00.asp

> In 2006, Volkswagen showed off a self-driving version of its Gold car, named "53 plus 1" in honor of the original #53, Herbie. Autoblog.com posted a video of the car in action.

Should I go further back in history? Because we can.

Yes, the concept is revolutionary. But so is matter teleportation, and that's not going on sale next month either.

What do we call technologies that have been hyped for 10+ years? This is not just a knee-jerk contrarian point of view. Vaporware is actually the correct term we use for these products, not a slur.

It's not bullshit revisionism. People really have been talking about these things forever but not delivering them.

> Why do you feel the need to lie about recent history? Shouldn't you observe that if you have to make a nasty lie to support your argument, maybe your argument is wrong?

Settle down, nobody's doing any nasty lying, see the link above, this discussion has been going on longer than 10 years.

10 years ago, my peers at uni were building self navigating robots that could autonomously follow a path in a park without gps ...

I think you meant to say fusion. Fission reactors have been in productive use for decades.

For many years, fusion reactors also experienced exponential growth in a key progress/performance indicator:

https://www.google.com/search?q=fusion+progress&source=lnms&...

I would encourage humility when considering whether to make a claim about a field that you are not well informed of. Real progress is being made, by a number of different groups, in a number of different directions.