61–70 of 168 posts
I keep telling everyone that I don't need to learn to drive - we'll have automatic cars in 10 years or so thanks to Google.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
What is a Christmas tree machine?
They're going by the name "3-D printer" right now, but the overall idea is a home fabrication machine capable of producing complex 3-D goods (including moving parts, electronics, etc) on demand. Current 3-D printing is an extremely crude version of the eventual device. So if you wanted a new microwave, go online and download the design. Then go to the Christmas Tree machine and have it print one up for you. Just like…
The Make magazine follows CTM/3DP stuff pretty closely: http://blog.makezine.com/
This is a great article. Every now and then Matt can really knock one out of the park. Of all the tech that we talk about on here, there are only a few items that really catch my attention. Christmas tree machines are one of them. Auto-drive cars is the other. These two inventions, when complete, will massively change things. Good luck guessing when they'll be complete, though. Could be a decade. Could be a couple of…
The time-frame for auto driving cars is actually more difficult to predict than that for general adaptive robotics because of the regulatory and social issues involved. I'm sure it will be decades not centuries though. My prediction is that robotic servants will be common place in homes by the 2020's and that almost all manual occupations will be replaced with automation during that decade. I have no idea how society…
Automation has slowly been creeping into cars over the last decade or so. Lights and wipers turn on and off automatically, cars brake and belts tighten when danger is detected, systems help you keep the lane and cars can park all by themselves (brake and gas are controlled by the driver, the car steers).
All of this is a far cry from a truly self-driving car but all of this has been implemented without much fuss. All the imaginable horror scenarios did not scare citizens or politicians. I think that’s good sign and I also think that many debates about potential social problems of the introductions of self-driving cars are driven by overly negative stereotypes of political systems.
I also think that it doesn’t really matter all that much if the US doesn’t want to do it. There are more than enough other rich nations out there.
I keep telling everyone that I don't need to learn to drive - we'll have automatic cars in 10 years or so thanks to Google.
Google's CEO doesn't think pilotless planes are possible by 2030: http://www.longbets.org/4 . Part of his reasoning: the FAA changes so slowly that if this were even all possible, the adoption and certification would all take at least 50 years. I don't see why the same wouldn't be true (perhaps on a smaller scale) for the auto industry.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The time-frame for auto driving cars is actually more difficult to predict than that for general adaptive robotics because of the regulatory and social issues involved. I'm sure it will be decades not centuries though. My prediction is that robotic servants will be common place in homes by the 2020's and that almost all manual occupations will be replaced with automation during that decade. I have no idea how society…
Decades I can accept, centuries seem a bit too pessimistic. If we really need centuries I would expect technical and not social issues to be the holdup. Automation has slowly been creeping into cars over the last decade or so. Lights and wipers turn on and off automatically, cars brake and belts tighten when danger is detected, systems help you keep the lane and cars can park all by themselves (brake and gas are cont…
It's also true that we already depend on many life-critical software systems, in aviation and medical devices notably. In a rational world all that one would need to show is that statistically a self-driving car is safer than a human driver. That bar is probably not that hard to achieve. I'm just not sure how to predict how the general public will react to automated systems that can and will kill people in rare circumstances and whose correctness can at best only be defined in probabilistic terms.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sadly now that it has served its purpose, it has been shut down. Granted I hardly ever need it now that I have a smartphone but it was very useful when I didn't!
1-800-BING-411 is still operational. http://www.discoverbing.com/mobile/411/
I was very impressed when I found out Google was running a free 411 phone information service just so that they could gather a ton of data to train new voice-recognition algorithms. That's real long-term thinking, and definitely makes them an AI company in my book.
Sadly now that it has served its purpose, it has been shut down. Granted I hardly ever need it now that I have a smartphone but it was very useful when I didn't!
They're Ad-funded, so they should in theory be independent of a larger company's whim to shut down sluggish divisions.
I keep telling everyone that I don't need to learn to drive - we'll have automatic cars in 10 years or so thanks to Google.
If you don't want to drive, move to NYC. A significant fraction of the population there never gets a driver's license because they see no real need to.