291–300 of 443 posts
You can only release it when you reach 100%, and if that last fraction takes the next 50 years then we really are not even close.
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Folks are glossing over this quote too easily: > “Historically human beings have shown zero tolerance for injury or death caused by flaws in a machine,” It doesn't matter if it's objectively safer; people have no issue doing dangerous things so long as they can maintain the illusion of control.
I don' think that's true in terms of transportation systems. In terms of cars: Streets where built for people or animals walking on them and cars quickly started killing large numbers of people. The response was not to make cars safer by say physically limiting them to 10 MPH, but to remove people from streets. A fairly high fraction of early aviators where killed, that did little to slow adoption of aircraft. Astron…
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Even better than speech recognition, handwriting recognition. Hello, Apple Newton, may you rest in peace. I'm not convinced we'll have handwriting recognition within my lifetime, and if we do I imagine that shortly after I'll go looking for Sarah Connor :)
Automated reading of checks and of envelopes is working very well. Automated envelope reading is now so good that the USPS only has one center in the US where humans look at images of envelopes. They just look at the hard cases, and if they show up there, they're really hard.
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A little more context on the speech recognition part: I remember going to a trade show (many years ago) where a representative from one of the major speech recognition companies was showing off the technology. He wasn't just dictating text, but was also using the software to control the computer. I was floored by it. I was 100% convinced we had arrived at that dream of intelligent voice-computer interaction. I've fel…
> Sure, your sensors and cameras might be able to read signage correctly in 99% of conditions, but when there's graffiti on the sign at night during heavy rain, all bets are off. In the vast majority of the cases, that sign will have been seen by another autonomous car on a sunny day before it had graffiti, and stored in the map database. You should be comparing a whole fleet of autonomous vehicles learning from each…
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The economics couldn't be more different. Driver salary is 26% of the cost of trucking. Driver salary is 52% of the cost of a taxi. Those numbers are in the single digits for aircraft and trains. We could replace pilots and train operators, technologically speaking. But the incentives are not (yet) large enough to overcome the regulatory and cultural barriers. We'd rather have that extra order of magnitude of safety,…
>Driver salary is 52% of the cost of a taxi. If you drop the utilization, the cost of the driver as a percentage probably goes up a bit. But here's the thing about those numbers. Yes, driver salary is a big chunk of taxi cost but flip things around. It's only about half the cost. In other words, there's this widespread assumption that autonomy totally changes the nature of automobiles and automobile ownership even th…
2) Especially since amortization cost is also reduced, you might as well electrify the vehicle (this requires some sort of robot arm for fast charging, but I suppose you could pay someone like $0.50 per cycle to plug and unplug a bunch of vehicles in the interim). That reduces fuel costs by a factor of 2 and maintenance costs even more.
3) No driver means room for more people or ability to shrink the car, reducing all the above costs.
So you've now reduced all the other costs by a factor of 2. That means your overall costs are now reduced by 75% or more. Yeah, that's starting to look pretty attractive.
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Curious, isn't it? Humans rely on auditory information to enhance situational awareness so you'd think that would factor into the design of a machine that needs as much situational awareness as possible. For example, emergency response vehicles announce their arrival and direction often long before any visual contact is made. How will deaf autonomous cars recognize incoming emergency responders if the view is obstruc…
Are deaf people allowed to drive? How do you think they handle these situations?
[0] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/superpowers-for-t...
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Im skeptical you can do real autonomous driving without context. In DC, we have roads that flow one direction part of the day and another direction the other part. We've got roads that will be shut down unpredictably when there is a diplomatic event. We've got constant construction, where a two lane road might be reduced to one lane with a human holding a sign or using hand signals to usher cars through on their turn…
It would not be too costly to augment roads with electronic signalling devices which give information to the software in cars. This information can do what signboards or traffic signals do for humans. The difficult part - when there is an error in these signals, or things shut down, autonomous cars will suffer much bigger problems than human driven cars. Its these edge cases that are the problem. We already rely on s…
Sounds costly to me. There are a lot more roads than airport runways. And then the big question is: Who is going to pay for it?
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Folks are glossing over this quote too easily: > “Historically human beings have shown zero tolerance for injury or death caused by flaws in a machine,” It doesn't matter if it's objectively safer; people have no issue doing dangerous things so long as they can maintain the illusion of control.
I don' think that's true in terms of transportation systems. In terms of cars: Streets where built for people or animals walking on them and cars quickly started killing large numbers of people. The response was not to make cars safer by say physically limiting them to 10 MPH, but to remove people from streets. A fairly high fraction of early aviators where killed, that did little to slow adoption of aircraft. Astron…
Umm, reasonably sure that implementing a legal speed limit was an initial response, in the UK at least. It took a number of years (and likely a lot of propaganda, though I haven't looked that closely into it and history is, of course, written by the victors) to allow motorcars to use roads at anything close to a reasonable speed.
Check wikipedia out: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speed_limit#History
> unveiled a new concept car, the Concept-i Man sure would be cool if any concept car ever presented were actually released. They do look fancy and futuristic.
> Man sure would be cool if any concept car ever presented were actually released. Not many are, but some are occasionally. I personally own one of the few existing Isuzu VehiCROSS vehicles. It started out as a concept car in the 1990s, then went into production virtually unchanged (only a tad under 6000 were ever made).
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Folks are glossing over this quote too easily: > “Historically human beings have shown zero tolerance for injury or death caused by flaws in a machine,” It doesn't matter if it's objectively safer; people have no issue doing dangerous things so long as they can maintain the illusion of control.
>the illusion of control. No, it's literal control. They'd rather operate a vehicle in a way that's statistically less effective (where effective is defined by a collection of algorithms, we all know how perfect algorithmic generated routes are) than lose that control for a small benefit. Control itself is worth something to people.