71–76 of 76 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Same reason you don't directly control the elevator going up and down.
The possibility space of elevator motion seems somewhat more constrained than that of an automobile...
L5 is impossible by this definition: >“operating the vehicle on-road anywhere that a typically skilled human driver can reasonably operate a conventional vehicle.” People who think otherwise must have spent their entire lives in metro areas with little to no weather. Moderate amounts of snow will certainly make L5 driving impossible until we have AI where reasonable people start thinking about giving civil rights to.
The list of problems for which that sort of claim has been made but which have since been solved without anything resembling AGI is long enough that I'd tend to doubt new ones.
1. Cars that are good enough to drive themselves most of the time.
2. Remote driving centers, run by the car manufacturers, that will have a human take over as soon as the car hits a spot it is unsure of. To the passenger, this is invisible and is considered self driving. (As long as the self-driving is good enough, one operator can handle a lot of cars. If there is an open standard, one remotely-led car can lead [or at least prompt] all the cars in back of it.)
3. Areas, such as urban centers, that only allow self driving vehicles and have no parking (as the vehicles can leave after drop off).
4. Improvements to self-driving in those areas, as they are geofenced, don't have human drivers, and have lots of cars hitting any given snag - all of which make debugging easier.
5. As problems are solved, and the pressure to move to self-driving goes up (due to said areas) the self driving part will handle more, and remote-control less, in ever widening circles.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
OK, you build trains from Sidney, Montana, to Lewistown. I'm not interested in self-driving cars, but thinking trains solve all problems is a very narrow, urban view.
I don't think trains have to just be an urban thing. Maybe you wont get a train stop in McDermitt, NV or Loa, UT or Mackay, ID but there are plenty of places with higher density than that. It took me a long time to realize the history of the various interurban trails I've seen. This tweet I saw recently has some interesting maps of the networks of people focused rail to even small towns near Boston. https://twitter.c…
Post-WW2, building suburbs without any sort of public transit was an additional way to discriminate against "the poors" as virtually all of those suburbs had race & religion restriction covenants in the property deeds.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
so, trams?
I think they're describing something more like a PRT system: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_rapid_transit
Obviously that gets a bit pie in the sky so maybe facing a reality of something simpler and more traditional public transit like is ok, but one can dream