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NY Times Rides in Waymo Robotaxis in SF

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Re: NY Times Rides in Waymo Robotaxis in SF

#331

Post by bastawhiz »

paul7986 wrote: post #82
bastawhiz wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah it's a good thing that cities aren't filled with retail locations that sell liquids that, if ingested, turn humans into bad drivers that think they're great drivers. And it's a good thing that those hypothetical liquids don't form debilitating addictions that make the humans want them more.

hmmm your analogy doesn't totally fit and you might have drank too much of the AI tech bro kool aid ;-) These cars can be hacked as used as weapons ... for terrorist attacks. As well malfunction and lock you in driving into the bay or off a cliff or etc. Open to your rebuttal ;-)

Plenty of cars today are already drive by wire and connected. Cars have had computer controlled cruise for a decade or more. There's absolutely no reason to assume the security of the car's systems is impacted by its ability to drive itself.

Re: NY Times Rides in Waymo Robotaxis in SF

#332

Post by EGreg »

HDThoreaun wrote: post #322
EGreg wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Past results are not an indicator of future performance. There is no economic law that guarantees human labor will always be in demand. 70 years ago one man could sustain an entire household on one paycheck, his work was valued and the company man worked decades until he got a pension. Today, both sexes work long hours just to afford a tiny apartment, they have to switch jobs every couple years and even started doing…

> 70 years ago one man could sustain an entire household on one paycheck There are just as many "one salary sustains an entire household" jobs today as there ever were in the past. More in fact. The factory job that provides enough for the whole family was only ever a reality for a tiny, tiny portion of humanity. The vast majority of people, even the vast majority of americans did not have access to those jobs. Even…

Average family income in 1950 was $3,300, according to estimates issued today by Roy V. Peel, Director, Bureau of the Census, Department of Commerce.

The average income across all occupations in the USA today is $61,900. The average household incomes averaged to $87,864

According to recent data, the average price for a home in 1950 was just $12,000, while the average price for a home today is upwards of $540,000.

It turns out that a typical “household” back then had one breadwinner make the vast majority of the money. Today the households are often single-parent, or both parents working

So I don’t think that only a factory job could provide for a whole family back then. But my point is that whatever the corporation was (law firm, or whateve) they weren’t going to lay people off because the automation and AI wasn’t there. Now there increasingly is. The number of people who hold a job for 20-30 years at the same company is much smaller than back then.

I guess the main factor is the diminishing returns of a glut of products (crops in the farm example, or AI-generate content now) which devalues that specific industry’s products and makes everyone in a race to the bottom, so humans are priced out of a job. If you do this across enough industries (and many today are electronic or manufacturing) that means humans are no longer cost-effective to employ for any except a diminishing number of positions. What will we do with the growing unemployed class?

Re: NY Times Rides in Waymo Robotaxis in SF

#333

Post by [deleted] »

vorpalhex wrote: post #236
sofixa wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We can rethink our cities and move parking to the periphery Just moving parking to the periphery won't make American cities better or more walkable. > Eliminating the tedious and dangerous task of driving is an enormous benefit to humanity that will save 30,000+ lives a year in the US alone If you're assuming that self-driving cars will be perfect and segregated, conditions will always be perfect (e.g. no pedestria…

It also won't cure cancer or make me toast in the morning, but being able to move parking has big meaningful advantages that are likely to be leveraged! If you think you can convince the 3rd largest country by landmass in the world to just swap over to trains and buses - great. In the meantime, let's approach other solutions too. Self driving cars are here, are actively used in areas without trains, and seem like the…

[deleted]

Re: NY Times Rides in Waymo Robotaxis in SF

#334

Post by AtlasBarfed »

JKCalhoun wrote: post #194
Gravityloss wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My flying saucer was only going mach three. At this rate it was going to take hours to get to Singapore. What made it worse was the Starlink was janky and scrolling the influencer feed on my Oculus was only 120 FPS. Turned it off and started window whale spotting. Though they were so common now it got boring pretty fast too.

Found William Gibson.

Elevator tennis is really losing its shine, as is the soma. And the ladies aren't looking as pneumatic as they once did.

Re: NY Times Rides in Waymo Robotaxis in SF

#335

Post by prepend »

kn0where wrote: post #323
prepend wrote: post #307

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also we live longer so it’s more likely to detect and die from cancer. Even over 100 years ago is true incidence of cancer higher? Not to mention why we would think we have more cancer now than 1000 years ago. Or perhaps we have more cancer but that’s because people aren’t dying of other things first, so it doesn’t matter we have more cancer. This is the kind of counterproductive examples I find people arguing about.…

Cars have absolutely gotten more dangerous as they’ve increased in size — for anyone outside of one.

Yet vehicle mortality rate has decreased [0] and pedestrian mortality rate is a bit trickier as over the past 40 years it dropped and then climbed back to where it was in absolute numbers [1]. So it’s definitely less dangerous based on the rate of drivers, passengers and pedestrians who die each year.

Please share any better metrics you like for showing increase in danger.

[0] https://www.iihs.org/topics/fatality-statistics/detail/yearl...

[1] https://www.axios.com/2023/06/23/pedestrian-deaths-cars-suvs...

Re: NY Times Rides in Waymo Robotaxis in SF

#336

Post by mannykannot »

3cats-in-a-coat wrote: post #321
tchaffee wrote: post #316

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I haven't seen any evidence in any of your comments. You try to persuade (which is not evidence), but I haven't been persuaded.

At least it's clear what I'm trying to persuade you about. As for evidence, frankly like this other guy says "it's all around us" but you need to translate what happens to systems (species, civilizations, ecosystems, nations, companies, industries) in smaller scale, and translate it to a globalized economy. Indeed, by the time we have evidence that our entire species is potentially screwed... we'll no longer have use…

It is not entirely clear to me exactly what you are trying to persuade us about, though it is quite possible that we share a number of concerns. I am not, however, going to be persuaded of that on the basis of a socioeconomic theory that ignores, and attempts to contradict, the complexity of recent history.

Re: NY Times Rides in Waymo Robotaxis in SF

#337

Post by keenmaster »

refurb wrote: post #126
keenmaster wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If a couple drives 10,000 miles each for 50 years, that’s 1 million miles. In a neighborhood with 75 houses, each inhabited by such a couple, 1 person will die from driving in those 50 years. And when they die, they usually had many more years to live otherwise. That’s to say nothing of injuries.

This isn’t accurate because the deaths include pedestrians (which could be someone outside of your neighborhood of 75)

Sure but the spirit of my comment stands and it’s a small adjustment to the math. Needless to say pedestrian safety is paramount.

Re: NY Times Rides in Waymo Robotaxis in SF

#339

Post by stu2b50 »

1024core wrote: post #338
stu2b50 wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Muni is actually fairly clean and safe, it just goes nowhere.

Many in SF would disagree.

Idk, BART generally is considered to be dangerous and/or dirty but I don’t think the muni rails are considered as such when I lived there. They were generally pretty clean and not particularly janky.

Re: NY Times Rides in Waymo Robotaxis in SF

#340

Post by EGreg »

tchaffee wrote: post #313
EGreg wrote: post #303

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No massive unemployment? The Great Depression lasted quite a while! And we only got out of it by after a decade of building up the next job sector of things for people to work in (see three sector model in economics) Compare pictures of farms before and after automation and count the number of farmhands. Before automation, 20% of American jobs were farm-related! Read Grapes of Wrath and other books by John Steinbeck……

> The Great Depression lasted quite a while! It wasn't caused by a big advance in technology. [1] "There is no consensus among economists and historians regarding the exact causes of the Great Depression. However, many scholars agree that at least the following four factors played a role." 1. The stock market crash of 1929. 2. Banking panics and monetary contraction. 3. The gold standard. 4. Decreased international l…

It may be heterodox (like Einstein’s theory of relativity vs the luminiferous aether theories) but I think the facts are there. I follow more the thinking of Joe Stiglitz and the Three Sector Model of economics to arrive at that conclusion:

https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2012/01/stiglitz-depression-...

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