431–440 of 556 posts
I don't understand why there is so much focus on automobiles instead of just about everything else. In every other instance - airplanes, boats, long-haul trucking - the problem in significantly less complex to solve. The only tangible reason I see for such disproportionate focus is some sense of false futurism; aka, driver-less cars have become the 'flying cars' of our times.
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Cars are way more comfortable and more convenient than public transit. Working Parisians who take transit spend 113 minutes a day commuting: https://www.thelocal.fr/20160418/parisians-spend-23-days-a-y... DC, where most people drive, averages about 70 minutes. Commuters in Dallas, where everyone drives, spend just 54 minutes a day commuting: https://www.chron.com/news/houston-texas/houston/article/Hou...
Not sure why you quote average commute times of random cities and what that has to do with comfort of cars v. public transit. But personally, I prefer to take the subway and read and relax for half an hour before and after work, instead of having to drive in rush hour.
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Computers can "watch" every direction at once.
They'll also happily be fooled by adversarial patches (optical illusions) in ways that wouldn't fool humans. https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2019/4/8/18297410/ai-tesl...
If you want to murder people on the roadway, there are lots of ways to do this that are easier than fancy adversarial attacks (which only fool one sensor type, at best... and are then patched).
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I live in one of those european cities. We have at least six companies offering small electric scooters, even more for bicycles, pedelecs, larger electric scooter, cars, trucks everything. They litter the streets can be rented on a whim with your smartphone, totally hassle free. I used at least four different of these company in the last four days. BUT I still own a car, scooter and my own bicycles because it is supe…
>Also you always have to decide, do I want to/can I spend 50 Euros today just to go hiking? Or you know you could use your own car. Yes it also costs money but its way less and more spread out. That sounds like someone with very stupid money management. Unfortunately, this is probably the norm. You're surely spending many hundreds of dollars/Euros per month to own and operate a private vehicle: loan, fuel, insurance,…
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"Live in the city and want to go hiking 20 miles away?" Yes, you want to use a car in this case. But, in the life I imagine, I would rent a car. I dislike driving intensely, but I can see use-cases in which cars are necessary. However, Americans have been largely forced into car ownership, despite the expense and hassle of owning one. A reduction in car ownership coupled with more pedestrian-friendly community design…
> However, Americans have been largely forced into car ownership, despite the expense and hassle of owning one. Indeed, car ownership is a big part of most household budgets in the US. There's the initial cost (in the $25K to $35K range now), insurance, repairs & maintenance - cars are huge money sinks. So much capital tied up in cars. A few years back I estimated that there were 3000 cars in our tech company parking…
Why are you buying a new car? You can get a very decent car for $8K. And if you did buy a new one, you don't have repairs and maintenance expenses.
> The combination of public transit, on-demand self-driving cars, better city design, telecommuting could allow us to redirect that capital more productively.
Doubtful. Public transit usually takes 3 times as long, so you are wasting human time in exchange for capital (there's a reason people buy cars - it's not because they want to waste money). Self-driving cars will never happen, and city design can't help all that much.
From your list, only telecommuting can help, but only if you do it full time.
(Also your dollar estimate assumes all new cars, which is far from accurate.)
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It’s pretty clear that the author isn’t using the technical definition of big O but rather is using it in a descriptive way. It’s not ambiguous in any way so what’s the harm?
I would say no harm, but rather confusing to people that do not know big O, and useless to those who do.
If we expect driverless cars to be further delayed and we continue building our cities to encourage micromobility (bikes, electric scooters, segregated lanes, car free streets, etc.) then at which point does the value of the driverless car become moot because we no longer drive? Does this sound unlikely? Consider European cities like Copenhagen and Amsterdam which have encouraged cycling over the last two decades and…
> Also, why would I prefer a driverless taxi if an electric car with a human driver costs no more? I believe the number one cause of death for Americans under the age of 30 is traffic accidents.[0] It's around 40,000 deaths per year (in the US alone). Cars are getting safer, but humans aren't getting better drivers. Individuals humans will get better with experience, but experienced drivers cycle out and new drivers…
I'm not a machine learning expert, but I'm not convinced this assertion is well grounded. If you have two ML systems, I don't know of a simple, general, reliable way to transfer the "knowledge" stored in one to the other without disrupting the "knowledge" already within the other.
If you mean just copying the video feed, sure, but that's only one input variable. There's no guarantee of a linear relationship between hours of video feed and driving quality. Humans seem to hit an asymptotic lower bound in the collision probability even as they accumulate experience, and while that might not be true for self-driving cars, it isn't guaranteed a priori.
If we expect driverless cars to be further delayed and we continue building our cities to encourage micromobility (bikes, electric scooters, segregated lanes, car free streets, etc.) then at which point does the value of the driverless car become moot because we no longer drive? Does this sound unlikely? Consider European cities like Copenhagen and Amsterdam which have encouraged cycling over the last two decades and…
> Also, why would I prefer a driverless taxi if an electric car with a human driver costs no more? I believe the number one cause of death for Americans under the age of 30 is traffic accidents.[0] It's around 40,000 deaths per year (in the US alone). Cars are getting safer, but humans aren't getting better drivers. Individuals humans will get better with experience, but experienced drivers cycle out and new drivers…
Traffic accidents are not included in the "accidental death" category, and haven't been for as long as I've been looking. From page 2 of the full report[0]:
"For example, Malignant neoplasms of the trachea, bronchus and lung (lung cancer) and Motor vehicle accidents are not rankable causes of death (see “Procedures for ranking causes of death”), although they can be identified using the standard mortality tabulation lists. If these causes were included in the current rankings, lung cancer would be placed among the 10 leading causes of death with a rank of 6th, whereas Motor vehicle accidents would rank 13th."
It's not even close to being #1, for any age group. More people die from suicide every year than from car accidents. Please also keep in mind that 1 out of every 6 traffic fatalities in the United States was a pedestrian.
[0]: https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nvsr/nvsr68/nvsr68_06-508.pdf
If we expect driverless cars to be further delayed and we continue building our cities to encourage micromobility (bikes, electric scooters, segregated lanes, car free streets, etc.) then at which point does the value of the driverless car become moot because we no longer drive? Does this sound unlikely? Consider European cities like Copenhagen and Amsterdam which have encouraged cycling over the last two decades and…
If you don't need to drive why would you buy a driverless car? I don’t anticipate many people will ever buy a driverless car. The whole concept of buying a car is kind of ridiculous. You pay for it then you continue paying for registration, insurance, maintenance, park, etc all while it sits idle 90% of the time. Driverless cars allow you to be picked up at your front door and dropped off exactly at the spot wherever…
Thought experiment: Most of your clothes sit idle 90% of the time.
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Long-haul trucking would be a great use-case. Even if you need humans for local pilot guidance, you can queue them up to a "cell phone lot" and courier the last-mile drivers in between shifts of going back & forth. It would also mean drivers would be based more locally to points of loading, rather than having to be constantly on the road away from home.
Long-haul is more than just driving. Will smart trucks be able to put chains on and pull them off when necessary? Handle unloading of items of weighing process proves problematic? Call for pick up of items removed during weighing? Handle snow? Handle loss of sensors? Handle run away down hill on a steep incline. None of these are insurmountable, but all are well out of the current horizon. Heck, just refueling is har…