181–190 of 501 posts
Huge waste of money that could have been poured into public transport to actually solve our problems and improve our lives. What a tragedy.
Having been the victim of public transport for the first 30 years of my life: nope. You just can’t polish a turd. (Maybe other countries can but here in Germany it’s a lost cause and you can’t make individual mobility expensive enough for me to ever take public transport again).
Huge waste of money that could have been poured into public transport to actually solve our problems and improve our lives. What a tragedy.
Having been the victim of public transport for the first 30 years of my life: nope. You just can’t polish a turd. (Maybe other countries can but here in Germany it’s a lost cause and you can’t make individual mobility expensive enough for me to ever take public transport again).
I only ever take a car for trips outside the city.
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Not to mention that the upside of self-driving cars is capped at the cost of an uber driver, and even in a world with ubiquitous fully autonomous cars you still want public transportation. Driver assistance on highways is probably the right 80/20 solution, at least for the foreseeable future.
> Not to mention that the upside of self-driving cars is capped at the cost of an uber driver An uber driver that can drive 24/7. Also there are a lot of cars that sit in parking lots 95% of the day that can be used.
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What does self-driving have to do with any of the other things though? Whether there's a human behind the wheel of an EV or an algorithm doesn't make any difference for climate change. If anything, the money wasted on self-driving could have gone into more pragmatic goals.
Fewer people owning cars and instead hailing from a shared pool of autonomous EVs as needed sounds like a solid improvement over the current situation.
My favorite example is that in 1987, the scientific consensus was that it would take "at least 100 years" and likely much longer to sequence the entire human gnome.[a] But the vast majority of it was sequenced by 2000, only 13 years later. Moreover, just two decades later, anyone could get their genome checked for known markers for pocket change by companies like 23andMe, founded in 2006.
Having some expertise and interest in AI, I regularly watch presentations by all companies working on self-driving and also look at the videos posted by beta testers online. While it's fun to watch the failures, I'm more interested in judging whether the technology is continuing to improve.
My perceptions contradict this article: (1) The technology is progressing faster than is generally recognized, with vehicles getting progressively better at dealing with edge cases and handling failures gracefully. (2) Judging by the videos I've watched online, Tesla is significantly ahead of everyone else.
Prediction: Before the end of the decade, this article will seem... short-sighted.
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[a] https://www.nature.com/scitable/topicpage/sequencing-human-g...
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EDIT: I edited my statement about 23andMe based on sausagefeet's comment below.
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This isn't going to work for the most obvious case: rush hour. Which is the case that is the root cause of most issues. If you're still stuck with peak road usage nearly equivalent to that today, your goal isn't to solve prominent issues today.
If you have a networked grid of cars you can run them much closer together and increase road capacity. (Even with failures, likely less dangerous than leaving critical decisions to individual human drivers.) You can also automate away the poor behaviours that contribute to delays. This would require collaborative networked/distributed self-driving, which is not the same as the let's-use-this-as-an-excuse-for-AI-resea…
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This isn't going to work for the most obvious case: rush hour. Which is the case that is the root cause of most issues. If you're still stuck with peak road usage nearly equivalent to that today, your goal isn't to solve prominent issues today.
If you have a networked grid of cars you can run them much closer together and increase road capacity. (Even with failures, likely less dangerous than leaving critical decisions to individual human drivers.) You can also automate away the poor behaviours that contribute to delays. This would require collaborative networked/distributed self-driving, which is not the same as the let's-use-this-as-an-excuse-for-AI-resea…
Meanwhile, we have solutions which work today, several of which can be done today. WFH, incentivizing working outside peak hours, building more densely and closer to cities, investing in public transport, and more. We just don't want to do it.
We see this in The Netherlands. Public transport has gotten noticeably worse, car usage is going up as a result, and roads are expanding to compensate. In a country where housing is a massive problem, which means people will move to less desirable places (read: places further away from work hubs). Now we have a chicken-and-egg problem with regards to public transport, and increased car usage is pressuring space which could be used to create more homes and remove cars from the peak.
We simply don't need to wait another 10-15 years for self-driving to finally be a thing. What needs to be done, is accepting that things will suck for a bit to then get better eventually. Continuing on the same path with self-driving cars will only stall the problem instead of solve it, anyway.
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I too rather like rainbows, unicorns, chocolate waterfalls and free happiness growing on trees as a solution to all problems.
I feel that this one is a rather realistic solution. It uses existing technology (cars), existing infrastructure (streets) and existing data infrastructure (cloud providers) to solve a massive problem. The "only" thing that's missing is the self driving part (the only being in very large quotes of course). This means its much less of a stretch to get this scenario working than proposals like Hyperloop, Flying Taxis o…
Source: https://youtu.be/DkGMY63FF3Q
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If you're relying only on cameras, then yes, that's an issue. Level 4 vehicles can locate themselves without the need for lines on the road. Everything has been carefully mapped out ahead of time.
>Everything has been carefully mapped out ahead of time. That sounds sustainable and scalable to earth-size, for sure.
Huge waste of money that could have been poured into public transport to actually solve our problems and improve our lives. What a tragedy.
A fleet of self driving cars are realistically the only scalable public transportation because the costs increase with the number of people not the area to be served. Do people just forget how unbelievably spread out everything but the densest cities are? 24/7 bus service to within 0.5 miles of every house in my city is already impossible even if you allowed them to be on the every 4 hour. To replace cars people would realistically need them on the hour and want on the 20 minutes. Bet you my shirt at that point it would just be cheaper for the city to just run a free taxi service.