191–200 of 443 posts
I've been saying this for a while. The problem is that people are mostly familiar with the rate of overcoming traditional technical challenges (e.g., making your current computer/phone more compact, improving graphics quality, making cameras and screens with more pixels, etc.). What people don't realize is that full autonomous driving will require more than just faster/smaller/cheaper technical innovation - it will r…
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If we had autonomous planes it wouldn't significantly reduce cost or increase usage. But there is a lot of investment in autonomous drones. Planes also have a very high safety bar to begin with, which cars do not. Same thing about trains, there's very little value in doing so, and resistance in the form of unions in some locations. Some trains are fully automated though, here's an article with some more info: https:/…
MTA has 100+ years of legacy track. Imagine trying to retrofit anything into a 100-year-old codebase. Ouch.
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There are a lot of road design features that come from the fact that humans do make certain mistakes consistently. For example, the US's love affair with four-way stops comes from drivers' inability to safely navigate uncontrolled intersections, even when there's no particular reason they couldn't. Stoplights usually have a delay between the red light for one direction and the green light for the next direction becau…
What models of car read speed limit signs?
First step should be a car with driver assistance so sophisticated, a human driver can't crash it. Seems like a much more tractable problem, and one I personally would pay quite a bit of money for in a few years, when my son is old enough to drive.
One thing I would love someone to explain is how can people assume cars are going to be automated soon when both planes and trains haven't been automated for various reasons. They are different issues I have gathered but essentially shouldn't trains be dead simple but to this day at least the trains(not metras though) often have someone to stop the train in case of emergencies. Planes are more complex but have lower…
One of my friends is a train engineer. I can tell you that it's ABSURD how little automation is used in many train systems, and it's definitely not because of a lack of technology. To give an example, my friend has to memorize the required speeds for each different section and turn in every train he runs, and has to manually adjust the train's speed accordingly. Literally all of that can and should be done automatica…
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I disagree with the analogy to speech recognition. What makes speech recognition difficult is that it's highly dependent on context (sounds the same, but means something different depending on surrounding words, what the conversation is about, or even who you're speaking with). With driving, you should be able to make a good decision with just the instantaneous state, given enough information about that state (object…
Im skeptical you can do real autonomous driving without context. In DC, we have roads that flow one direction part of the day and another direction the other part. We've got roads that will be shut down unpredictably when there is a diplomatic event. We've got constant construction, where a two lane road might be reduced to one lane with a human holding a sign or using hand signals to usher cars through on their turn…
The difficult part - when there is an error in these signals, or things shut down, autonomous cars will suffer much bigger problems than human driven cars.
Its these edge cases that are the problem. We already rely on such mechanisms for planes(information comes from both gorund control and on-flight radar). But a lot of care and resources are is required to get to $n 9's level of reliability.
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Can you imagine writing a computer program than can drive a car in a video game, but not provide relationship advice to two freshly married people, or think of a fair and just and enforceable law to reduce discrimination at the workplace? Driving is quite a bit short of "same intelligence as humans"
what if there are 2 obstacles that the car can't brake fast enough to avoid so it has to decide which to hit. one is a person pushing a baby in a baby carriage, the other is a person pushing someone a wheelchair
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It's not one pilot, though. It's two pilots, times two shifts a day, plus some extras to cover vacation, sickness, etc. There was enough pressure to engineer away flight engineers, navigators, and radio operators in cockpits. I wouldn't expect them to pass on potential savings in the low-margin world of airlines.
And still, the pilot portion of the cost of operation for planes is in the single digits. You barely scrape into the double digits (maybe 20% MAX, closer to 10 I think) if you count all labor.
The crux here is not really about semi-automation for highway driving in personal cars, but about companies that can only hope to live up to their investors' hype if they get rid of human costs, like Uber. And the idea that the capabilities of a car-for-hire could be fully automated to the point of removing any human from the service is utterly ridiculous to anyone who has ever seriously considered what that problem…
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Maybe for this particular investment, but I'm pretty sure the wider intention was to legitimize business practices where the poor live tenuous lives as an app-directed servant class. Uber made this kind of neo-feudalism so socially acceptable that we now celebrate "Uber-for-X" as "innovation."
It already happened before Uber, except now the app is in the hands of the person being exploited, not the managers creating optimized schedules that make it near impossible for individuals to hold enough jobs to pay the bills.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/jun/17/uber-drivers...