251–260 of 443 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
So are flight attendants impossible to automate/do without? Or are there perhaps other forces -- beyond technical ones -- keeping humans in the plane?
AFAIK, the FAA requires a certain number of flight attendants for safety reasons.
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The economics couldn't be more different. Driver salary is 26% of the cost of trucking. Driver salary is 52% of the cost of a taxi. Those numbers are in the single digits for aircraft and trains. We could replace pilots and train operators, technologically speaking. But the incentives are not (yet) large enough to overcome the regulatory and cultural barriers. We'd rather have that extra order of magnitude of safety,…
>Driver salary is 52% of the cost of a taxi. If you drop the utilization, the cost of the driver as a percentage probably goes up a bit. But here's the thing about those numbers. Yes, driver salary is a big chunk of taxi cost but flip things around. It's only about half the cost. In other words, there's this widespread assumption that autonomy totally changes the nature of automobiles and automobile ownership even th…
IMO the killer app is in freight anyways.
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…
Computer speech recognition now has a greater accuracy than human speech recognition, but the types of use cases for talking to a computer are much less sensitive to error. Short snippets and phrases that are designed to get something done right now.
Compare ordering paper towels with Alexa, to asking a friend for a paper towel when your hands are messy. If your friend mishears you, they can just look over, see your dirty hands, and figure out you probably asked for a paper towel. Alexa has no such benefit, computers are held to a much higher bar.
> People thought intelligent voice-computer interfaces were just around the corner,
I would argue it isn't recognition accuracy that makes complex scenarios hard. I've seen context aware recognition being rolled out for keyboards recently (Android's keyboard does it now days, it'll correct the past word based on what the next word is), and it seems like Android does the same for speech reco, based at least on observed behavior during use, but I'm just guessing.
The real hard part is making computers smart enough to do useful things.
We are a long way off from
"Book tickets at The Altair for between 6pm and 7:30pm next Friday and add the reservation to my calendar and my wife's calendar"
being possible in all but a few contrived scenarios. (Now that said, the above scenario is getting easier and easier if you ignore voice, ML is good at figuring out emails that have schedules in them, and forwarding them to other people is now simple, everything is much better than 5 years ago!)
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Their web site has no useful information. It's hard to say much about that.
There's this FastCo piece [0] that talks about their tech and has some videos. [0] https://www.fastcompany.com/40406052/this-sensor-technology-...
Toyota got into autonomous driving late. Then they hired Gil Pratt from MIT. Pratt used to run the MIT Leg Lab, which Raibert ran before Boston Dynamics, but Pratt didn't do much there. It's clear that autonomous driving can be made to work, because Google/Waymo is doing it. It's hard and expensive and it takes a lot of sensors. It also takes extensive testing. Waymo drives 25,000 autonomous miles a week. Volvo has l…
Of all the companies you mentioned, only Toyota is a top ten automaker, and is indeed number one by many measures. I guess you think experience and a track record of phenomenal success is a disadvantage. I could agree with you in some contexts, but not this one. The autonomous car hype is the emperor’s new clothes, and Toyota is not your average industrial behemoth. Those guys literally wrote the playbook on nimble m…
Toyota got into autonomous driving late. Then they hired Gil Pratt from MIT. Pratt used to run the MIT Leg Lab, which Raibert ran before Boston Dynamics, but Pratt didn't do much there. It's clear that autonomous driving can be made to work, because Google/Waymo is doing it. It's hard and expensive and it takes a lot of sensors. It also takes extensive testing. Waymo drives 25,000 autonomous miles a week. Volvo has l…
Of all the companies you mentioned, only Toyota is a top ten automaker, and is indeed number one by many measures. I guess you think experience and a track record of phenomenal success is a disadvantage. I could agree with you in some contexts, but not this one. The autonomous car hype is the emperor’s new clothes, and Toyota is not your average industrial behemoth. Those guys literally wrote the playbook on nimble m…
Sounds a lot like what people were saying about Nokia in 2007. It had near monopoly and was really good at executing pre-iphone smartphones, however they were never as invested in software as Apple or Google were and we all know how this ended.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The economics couldn't be more different. Driver salary is 26% of the cost of trucking. Driver salary is 52% of the cost of a taxi. Those numbers are in the single digits for aircraft and trains. We could replace pilots and train operators, technologically speaking. But the incentives are not (yet) large enough to overcome the regulatory and cultural barriers. We'd rather have that extra order of magnitude of safety,…
>Driver salary is 52% of the cost of a taxi. If you drop the utilization, the cost of the driver as a percentage probably goes up a bit. But here's the thing about those numbers. Yes, driver salary is a big chunk of taxi cost but flip things around. It's only about half the cost. In other words, there's this widespread assumption that autonomy totally changes the nature of automobiles and automobile ownership even th…
Look longer term.
Parking spaces in cities cost ~30k. (And in some cities, a lot more than that). Included with a house, they are still part of the price (no free lunch).
Over a 30 year mortgage, that is 1k a year.
In California, car insurance is almost 2k a year. (Oddly enough, 1.1k in New York State!)
So 3k a year just to have the privilege of driving a car.
Apparently an average new car now days cost 31k. (Which seems insane to me, but that is what people are buying).
Being generous and rounding down a bit, that is another 5k a year.
So now 8k a year, before gas, before maintenance, before any warranty problems, before screws in tires, etc.
If mass transit can replace commuting to work, then weekend outings with automated taxis become very doable. If you give $5 per ride (on par with UberPool, though I realize that isn't profitable), it is 1600 rides a year to break even with owning a car. (Though ownership goes down after the car is paid off, 600 rides a year to break even!)
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Toyota presumably treats reliability differently. When Toyota talks about "full autonomous driving", they really mean fully autonomous in a safe and predictable manner. When Uber or Tesla says the same, the implication is that a "good enough" level will be good enough - and that level can be achieved much sooner than whatever Toyota is talking about.
http://www.safetyresearch.net/blog/articles/toyota-unintende... They might do better with hardware than software ...
The argument he puts forth is that pedal error on the drivers part is an explanation for the unintended acceleration.
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There's also automated take off. Fighter pilots taking off carriers have to grab a couple of handlebars in the cockpit, whose purpose is only that the pilot doesn't instinctively intervene during take off.
No that's not how that works.
Toyota got into autonomous driving late. Then they hired Gil Pratt from MIT. Pratt used to run the MIT Leg Lab, which Raibert ran before Boston Dynamics, but Pratt didn't do much there. It's clear that autonomous driving can be made to work, because Google/Waymo is doing it. It's hard and expensive and it takes a lot of sensors. It also takes extensive testing. Waymo drives 25,000 autonomous miles a week. Volvo has l…
They've been selling partial-electric cars since at least 2014. The Prius Prime allows for electric-only driving up to about 30 miles per charge. That's enough for my commute. I got 3500 miles on my first tank of gas.