691–700 of 923 posts
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No we don't. We live on a planet around a midlife star. The amount of resources available to us over the next 10,000 years is staggering.
Humans haven't proven the ability to live sustainably on one planet. Sustainably utilizing resources beyond the planet is far from certain.
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The impetus will be wartime, just as the impetus for the interstate highway system and most of the railway system was wartime. In peacetime, self-driving cars are a nice-to-have that can save many billions of driver hours and a few traffic fatalities. In wartime, they're literally a matter of life or death. The side that can handle all of their logistics without exposing their precious humans to enemy fire has a huge…
Dropping bombs on smart highways seems much easier than hitting a moving vehicle.
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If you destroy a yield sign, maybe it will eventually cause some problems, or maybe not. We could imagine a world in which destroying smart infrastructure could pretty instantaneously and reliably cause massive traffic jams, which seems like it would appeal more to certain trolls and perhaps protestors. We could also imagine a world in which more subtle attacks could reliably and fairly quickly cause injury/fatality…
If you destroy a yield sign, the system will immediately know because all the cars previously recorded it.
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The impetus will be wartime, just as the impetus for the interstate highway system and most of the railway system was wartime. In peacetime, self-driving cars are a nice-to-have that can save many billions of driver hours and a few traffic fatalities. In wartime, they're literally a matter of life or death. The side that can handle all of their logistics without exposing their precious humans to enemy fire has a huge…
This argument is tough to swallow. The real push to build interstate highways was in early 1950s and began in earnest in 1956. National defense was only one piece of the justification for the project.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Aid_Highway_Act_of_195...
There were of course other civilian concerns as well, but Eisenhower's arguments at the time of the plan primarily cited the importance of Germany's autobahn system during WW2 as a justification.
I think he is the one and only sane C-level person in the industry, after hearing this. People claiming most of AI hype barely know what the "AI" people mention is. And people who go as far as drawing rosy pictures of human like general AI being your personal chauffeur are past ridiculous. The entire idea of human-like general AI for practical applications is like trying to make people using horses for transport in 2…
He talks about difference between level 4 and level 5 (4 - attainable, 5 - may never happen). This is a strange proposition in my book: level 4 is already good enough to bring a lot of value (taxis in a big city are level 4 afaiu), level 5 - ideal but who cares?
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To put this in perspective, imagine this hypothetical conversation happening a century ago: "I have this new auto-mobile concept which doesn't require a horse and which can go fast; I envision up to fifty miles per hour. It will require a smooth, hardened road surface, but that will be achievable someday." "Forget about it. We already have millions of miles of roads, which are bumpy, made of dirt, and hard to build a…
What are the incentives, though? There’s not actually that much money to be made here, despite dreams of self driving taxis (something that could never be possible). Maybe in the trucking industry, but the tech doesn’t exist and is nowhere close to being reliable enough consistently enough.
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There is no evidence that automated driving systems are any safer than human drivers, or that they ever will be.
Autopilot is evidence that automated systems are already better than humans today. The edge cases scare people but on aggregate the stats show is superior to people. This sort of tech is only going to keep getting better.
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Yes. Can you estimate how much these companies have received funding compared to self-driving tech companies/projects? My wild guess (based only on the general visibility) is that it amounts pretty much to a rounding error.
sure, but I think the truck convoy companies are run a little bit more like regular companies than startups? they have a reasonable near-term goal and sales pipeline. Like, I think if you have a couple modern trucks you can go have peloton install their system and you can use it right now.
[1] I assume also some regulatory developments for this are missing in addition to platform and universal tech kit for private cars. In case such platform already exists and all regulatory hurdles have been tackled, then I miss only widespread adoption and marketing...
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What about dirt forest service roads? What about the dirt parking lot at that wedding you just went to? How will it find a parking spot? How will it get into a ferry where people direct you to the correct spot? How will it deal with an accident up ahead where some drunk bystander is trying to direct traffic? How will it know to ignore the drunk guy? What if it isn’t a drunk guy but a sober person directing traffic? D…
The "edge case" I worry about is driving on ice or snow. Driving safely on frozen surfaces is not a solved problem for human drivers, but most of us insist it is a perfectly reasonable thing to do. If the vehicle drives as slowly as it should in those conditions, it would probably frustrate a lot of people who really depend on their false sense of invincibility.
What does that mean? That it actually is solved by humans? Or that it's not, and we just take the increased risk? If the former, then we can automated it. If the latter, then the self driving cars can also drive at increased risk, opt-in of course.
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Dropping bombs on smart highways seems much easier than hitting a moving vehicle.
Relatively futile, though, when a self-driving cement mixer comes along, patches the crater, and restores any guidechips needed for other vehicles to navigate.