61–70 of 204 posts
I think the idea is extremely shortsighted. It's a technological feat but not a creative one. It just produces more cars, more fuel-burning and more roads. It's more cars and that will produce more pollution.
Ultimately, it solves nothing. You want to stop deadly car crashes? Help save wildlife from excessive roads and urban sprawl? Stop driving. Live and work locally. But that would take real change.
I've been saying this to anyone who will listen for years. I really believe this technology will touch everything . Real estate markets will shift dramatically as the average commute time halves or quarters. Transport costs will plummet, making every single physical object cheaper. Public transit will be dirt cheap, always punctual, and take you absolutely anywhere. Tens of thousands of people each year will escape d…
90 percent of those in the transportation sector will lose their jobs. Car companies will go broke when demand plummets. Pizza delivery will not be an entrylevel job. I think the net effect will be hugely positive, but like all paradigm shifts this is going to cause immense social upheaval and initially look like it only makes things worse.
The big effects will be on other aspects. No more drunk driving. Fractional ownership of cars.
We'll all be dead from toxic smog before Google's driverless cars get anywhere. I think the idea is extremely shortsighted. It's a technological feat but not a creative one. It just produces more cars, more fuel-burning and more roads. It's more cars and that will produce more pollution. Ultimately, it solves nothing. You want to stop deadly car crashes? Help save wildlife from excessive roads and urban sprawl? Stop…
Nope. Less. Cars-per-person will nosedive from almost 1:1 in the US right now to maybe 1:5 - that means the embodied energy wasted on cars will go down. Per-mile energy costs will go down too, if cars are driven efficiently.
It also enables the large-scale conversion of the US car fleet to electric propulsion. Cars can recharge themselves and aren't range limited because you can swap cars rather than waiting.
It's huge. It's as big as the invention of the car was. All the human hours wasted on moving things from A to B will gradually go away.
I've been saying this to anyone who will listen for years. I really believe this technology will touch everything . Real estate markets will shift dramatically as the average commute time halves or quarters. Transport costs will plummet, making every single physical object cheaper. Public transit will be dirt cheap, always punctual, and take you absolutely anywhere. Tens of thousands of people each year will escape d…
I've been saying this to anyone who will listen for years. I really believe this technology will touch everything . Real estate markets will shift dramatically as the average commute time halves or quarters. Transport costs will plummet, making every single physical object cheaper. Public transit will be dirt cheap, always punctual, and take you absolutely anywhere. Tens of thousands of people each year will escape d…
90 percent of those in the transportation sector will lose their jobs. Car companies will go broke when demand plummets. Pizza delivery will not be an entrylevel job. I think the net effect will be hugely positive, but like all paradigm shifts this is going to cause immense social upheaval and initially look like it only makes things worse.
This assumes Google will have the market to itself. Cars aren't like search. It's not a winner-takes-all market.
Google's not selling cars. It's selling automotive technology that will soon become standard in cars.
This still means that they aren't going to be making the "triiiillions of dollars!"
[Dr Evil pinkie finger here]
I mean sure, they can make a lot of money further down the value chain. But so do Motorola whenever someone installs a few dozen PowerPC chips into a new BMW.
It's just lazy link-baiting conflation of the Biggest Number Available with what might actually happen, and that annoyed me.
I'm going to disagree with other posters that Google is not going to own this market. It's hard to think of another company that is even close to being able to execute on this. It's the ultimate big data problem. The in-house experience of Google at running computing infrastructure is a must-have for this type of system to work.
$15T GDP, ten percent of which is transportation. I think that a truly self-driving car and truck could eat 20% of that, easily. So $300b a year...
We'll all be dead from toxic smog before Google's driverless cars get anywhere. I think the idea is extremely shortsighted. It's a technological feat but not a creative one. It just produces more cars, more fuel-burning and more roads. It's more cars and that will produce more pollution. Ultimately, it solves nothing. You want to stop deadly car crashes? Help save wildlife from excessive roads and urban sprawl? Stop…
Somehow, I feel there is still no alterative to real world communication. Until that is fixed, this is still amazing.
Self driving cars will have a metro train like experience with very good reach thanks to the existing infrastructure (roads).
We'll all be dead from toxic smog before Google's driverless cars get anywhere. I think the idea is extremely shortsighted. It's a technological feat but not a creative one. It just produces more cars, more fuel-burning and more roads. It's more cars and that will produce more pollution. Ultimately, it solves nothing. You want to stop deadly car crashes? Help save wildlife from excessive roads and urban sprawl? Stop…
> We will need more roads, more cars and that will produce more pollution. Nope. Less. Cars-per-person will nosedive from almost 1:1 in the US right now to maybe 1:5 - that means the embodied energy wasted on cars will go down. Per-mile energy costs will go down too, if cars are driven efficiently. It also enables the large-scale conversion of the US car fleet to electric propulsion. Cars can recharge themselves and…
Fresh food every day delivered from the farm? Not a problem any more.
Also, regarding pollution - traveling salesman algorithm optimizations would reduce the distance travelled and CO2 emitted for the same outcome.
I've been saying this to anyone who will listen for years. I really believe this technology will touch everything . Real estate markets will shift dramatically as the average commute time halves or quarters. Transport costs will plummet, making every single physical object cheaper. Public transit will be dirt cheap, always punctual, and take you absolutely anywhere. Tens of thousands of people each year will escape d…