91–100 of 204 posts
Holy shit. Forbes is an absolute cesspool of a website. There are about three paragraphs of text, and then I have to pony up another ad impression by clicking through to the next page in order to keep reading. All the while, two enormous fixed nav bars follow my every move at both the top and the bottom of the page. Meanwhile a veritable flotilla of fixed-position "social icons" on the left beg me to help Forbes adve…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Taxi driving, RIP.
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…
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Driverless cars would be a fantastic improvement to society, but I think you might be underestimating how much people will compensate. Traffic rises to fill roads, and only a small part of public transport budgets are for drivers (it looks like around 10% for LA)
> only a small part of public transport budgets are for drivers (it looks like around 10% for LA) Well, you also have to consider that bus systems are built around driver scarcity. What if buses were half as large, and run twice as often? They can't now, because that would double driver labor costs. If buses were the size of vans, capital costs might even decrease due to having access to van-market economies of scale…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
> Car companies will go broke when demand plummets. Just because it doesn't have a driver doesn't mean it doesn't need to be manufactured. Car companies will do fine. > Pizza delivery will not be an entrylevel job. Nope. But pizza making still will be. Sebastian, are you listening? > I think the net effect will be hugely positive You got that right. > but like all paradigm shifts this is going to cause immense social…
No they won't; every > 1 car family will have 1 car only after this, because, when at work, you just send your car back on it's own for the wife and kids. Big reduction. If your neighbor has different hours than you have, you can combine that by sending the car back when you arrived. I think it'll have a huge impact on car sales; we just don't need many anymore as, unlike now, they are not useless without a driver.
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Rio Tinto. Not for general public driving, of course, but for fleets of trucks and excavators that operate globally 24/7. At various sites they are already operating driverless equipment using tech developed in house. For what it's worth, oil & gas & mineral exploration work drove a large part of the civilian development of tools like Google Earth / Google Maps in the decades prior to the first public offerings by Go…
I still see it as orders of magnitudes off in complexity. You're talking about a system for autonomously controlling every motor vehicle in the U.S., or even the world -- that's effectively the end game. Google is among the handful of companies that has the computing infrastructure to have a "pulse" on the world at all times, and within those companies they are heads and shoulders above the rest in terms of being abl…
Not a (single) system, rather one such system per car - standard protocols for inter system comms are yet to arrive and each vehicle needs to react to local changes such as pedestrians w/out reference to an external global computing infrastructure.
It's not a big data, massively interconnected problem at all - the elegance comes from local smart behaviour - even for broader problems like optimal pooling.
Others can enter the driverless vehicle market and there are companies like Akamai Technologies that could provide any required interconnect. Google is a player, but by no means the only player.
For me, this would actually be a solid reason to move to the country they have it first. I find driving an absolute waste of time, but busses and metros and trains are just not a good substitute unless almost empty and comfortable (which most are not).
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
> Car companies will go broke when demand plummets. Just because it doesn't have a driver doesn't mean it doesn't need to be manufactured. Car companies will do fine. > Pizza delivery will not be an entrylevel job. Nope. But pizza making still will be. Sebastian, are you listening? > I think the net effect will be hugely positive You got that right. > but like all paradigm shifts this is going to cause immense social…
Not so fast. Check out this gourmet hamburger making robot: http://singularityhub.com/2013/01/22/robot-serves-up-340-ham...
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…
I think the implications are huge, but I question the 90% reduction in cars figure. While it's true that most people don't drive their car most of the time, when they do drive, most of them are driving within a relatively small time window. I could imagine a 25-50% reduction in the number of cars, but I just don't see 90% happening unless it's accompanied by a huge increase in people working from home or working non-…
In economics, the Jevons paradox [..] is the proposition that technological progress that increases the efficiency with which a resource is used tends to increase (rather than decrease) the rate of consumption of that resource.