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Nevada passes law authorizing driverless cars

blogs.forbes.com

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Re: Nevada passes law authorizing driverless cars

#161

Post by ebaysucks »

alanh wrote: post #81

We expect people to be frightened of robotic cars for the same reason they are scared of dying in a plane crash: Some deep-seated fear of dying in a manner that isn’t our own fault. Thoughts: 1) Marketing/PR for autonomous vehicles needs to really drive home their safety, so when you hear “robot car,” you think “… saves lives.” 2) Is it hard to imagine the opposite fear in children born 10 years from now? Having seen…

Volvo's City Safety is marketed in the same way you describe: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O5MR2S2K5iM&feature=relmf...

Re: Nevada passes law authorizing driverless cars

#162

Post by william42 »

nhaehnle wrote: post #146
ChuckMcM wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've argued that the Lump of Labor fallacy fails because it considers workers to be more fungible than they are. It is possible to create jobs for which no one in the existing unemployement pool is qualified to fill. That is a structural unemployment of 0%. When that happens competition for the qualified labor goes up, and salaries rise in response. While the structurally unemployed[1] remain so and remain poor. This…

Curiously enough, though, all of Europe and the US has seen more or less the same kind of development of this kind in recent history. Yet the disparity between rich and poor differs widely between those countries, and it has also gone up and down quite strongly over time. This is very strong evidence that the kind of disparities you mentioned are not truly structural. The "structural argument" is just a decoy used to…

Sweden actually has higher unemployment than the US, but less wealth disparity, because they have a better social support net for the unemployed.

Re: Nevada passes law authorizing driverless cars

#163

Post by sbierwagen »

nooneelse wrote: post #152
bh42222 wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know why you're being down-voted, it's a valid question. Computers have eliminated a lot of jobs over the last 30 to 40 years. For example VisiCalc, did a lot of what many tax accountants charged for. It used to be that humans, mostly women, switched (or routed if you will) phone calls. Automation certainly does eliminate many jobs. But interestingly it also seems to make previously impossible things possible…

Personally, I look forward to self-driving sleeper cars and a new type of motel that is little more than a secure parking lot plus some nice bathrooms. What is the feeling of "where you live" if you switch cities each time you sleep? Also, in your hypothetical, if we are all routing calls as our day job, doesn't that mean that at any one time, 1/3 of humans are asleep, 1/3 routing calls, 1/3 possibly on calls. With a…

  With at least two people per call. How can that not be workable?
He was partially referring to the internet. What would the web look like if two servers that wanted to move data between each other, (say, in a stock exchange) had to use circuit-switched telephony?

Re: Nevada passes law authorizing driverless cars

#164

Post by sbierwagen »

skybrian wrote: post #159
msluyter wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Marshall Brain wrote the very interesting (IMHO) "Robotic Nation" in the exploration of your question: http://www.marshallbrain.com/robotic-nation.htm And, to save time, here are the standard HN responses: 1. Marshall Brain commits the Lump of Labor Fallacy ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lump_of_labour_fallacy ): The lump of labor fallacy holds that the total amount of work is fixed. This is considered fallacious bec…

You're picking some bad examples for future growth. Instead, look at the problems people really want to solve. I'd pick health care as something that's just going to keep growing. As long as people have health problems, there will be a market for attempts at solutions. As the rest of life becomes more affordable, more money can be spent on this.

Advancing technology might eliminate some diseases, and make treating others trivially easy.

Note that nobody dies of smallpox anymore. That disease no longer exists in the population, it has been eliminated. IBM Watson will (eventually, kinda does now) automate diagnosis. Respirocytes[1] would eliminate decompression sickness, and make it pretty hard to bleed to death, with a medic handy. A Vasculoid[2] would eliminate bleeding entirely, as well as blocking all blood-borne diseases, by the simple expedient of replacing blood with something else.

1: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Respirocyte

2: http://jetpress.org/volume11/vasculoid.html

Re: Nevada passes law authorizing driverless cars

#165

Post by sbierwagen »

cachemoney wrote: post #106
alanh wrote: post #81

We expect people to be frightened of robotic cars for the same reason they are scared of dying in a plane crash: Some deep-seated fear of dying in a manner that isn’t our own fault. Thoughts: 1) Marketing/PR for autonomous vehicles needs to really drive home their safety, so when you hear “robot car,” you think “… saves lives.” 2) Is it hard to imagine the opposite fear in children born 10 years from now? Having seen…

People are afraid of planes because if the power goes out, you die. On the ground, if the power goes out on your driverless car, you cruise to a stop.

And if you cruise to a stop in the middle of a train crossing?

Or if the steering shuts down while on a long curve next to a cliff?

Re: Nevada passes law authorizing driverless cars

#166

Post by cal5k »

pavel_lishin wrote: post #21
chc wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be honest, at least half of those sound like perfectly reasonable ideas. Aside from machine guns, I'm not sure there's a strong logical argument to outlaw any of them.

Presumably, the machine guns are only rentable at the range - what's the logical argument against that?

Because they are fun.

No, really. What better way to pretend you're a gangster or action hero for the day?

Re: Nevada passes law authorizing driverless cars

#167

Post by skybrian »

sbierwagen wrote: post #164
skybrian wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're picking some bad examples for future growth. Instead, look at the problems people really want to solve. I'd pick health care as something that's just going to keep growing. As long as people have health problems, there will be a market for attempts at solutions. As the rest of life becomes more affordable, more money can be spent on this.

Advancing technology might eliminate some diseases, and make treating others trivially easy. Note that nobody dies of smallpox anymore. That disease no longer exists in the population, it has been eliminated. IBM Watson will (eventually, kinda does now) automate diagnosis. Respirocytes[1] would eliminate decompression sickness, and make it pretty hard to bleed to death, with a medic handy. A Vasculoid[2] would elimin…

Well okay, in the really long run, perhaps health care will someday be a solved problem. But that's not going to happen without lots of market growth and investment in the meantime.

Re: Nevada passes law authorizing driverless cars

#168

Post by paganel »

nerfhammer wrote: post #27
truebosko wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Big trains and buses still move a lot more people than one small car. If everyone hopped into their driverless car, we'd be back to where we are now -- gridlock :)

In theory driverless cars could end up having algorithmic optimizations and use networked information such as to use overall road capacity much more efficiently. Then hackers can take control and direct all traffic to participating gambling establishments.

> In theory driverless cars could end up having algorithmic optimizations and use networked information such as to use overall road capacity much more efficiently.

A company like Google isn't smart enough to drive off about.com from the front page of almost all of their SERPS, and do you actually expect them to come up with an "algorithmic optimization" for driverless-cars in cities like Cairo or Istanbul?

Re: Nevada passes law authorizing driverless cars

#169

Post by nitrogen »

rmason wrote: post #128

My state of Michigan is known as the birthplace of the automobile. We had the first stretch of paved road in the world as well as the first stoplight. But we've abdicated our leadership in the automotive industry by turning our back on this development. Michigan rightly should have been the first state to legalize this technology. It seems as if the auto technology breakthroughs are coming from Silicon Valley. Bob Lu…

We had the first stretch of paved road in the world

What qualifications are you adding that exclude stone-paved streets in ancient South America, Europe, and the Middle East?

Re: Nevada passes law authorizing driverless cars

#170

Post by mortenjorck »

joelthelion wrote: post #137
arkitaip wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately Google is incredibly bad at sales and marketing so don't expect them to understand that their main challenge will be the public perception of driverless cars.

Yeah, that's why no one uses their products.

Google is good at entering a market just as it's catching on with a meaningfully-differentiated product, and the product markets itself. See Search, Gmail, and Maps.

When Google doesn't do this, they have to rely on marketing. See Wave or Buzz.

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