I am mostly concerned with the cost of them compared to traditional cars. It seems like one more way to stratify the rich and poor.
Not for long. Automotive innovations tend to trickle down pretty quickly as the economy of scale kicks in. The luxury feature of 2005 is the standard feature of today. Especially in a system like automated cars, where the more there are on the road the better they all perform.
True, but the poor aren't driving a 2005. They're driving the 80-90s car that is being held together on duct tape with a salvage title.
If it can't be bought for less than $5,000, it will definitely be a divide for at least a decade or two.
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JedocIn the scupperswith the staggers and jagsRegistered Userregular
I am mostly concerned with the cost of them compared to traditional cars. It seems like one more way to stratify the rich and poor.
Not for long. Automotive innovations tend to trickle down pretty quickly as the economy of scale kicks in. The luxury feature of 2005 is the standard feature of today. Especially in a system like automated cars, where the more there are on the road the better they all perform.
True, but the poor aren't driving a 2005. They're driving the 80-90s car that is being held together on duct tape with a salvage title.
If it can't be bought for less than $5,000, it will definitely be a divide for at least a decade or two.
Sure it will. But that's just about the best-case scenario for a new technology. The question is whether self-driving cars are more like helicopters, which remain rare and expensive for the better part of a century, or smart phones, which trickle down to lower-income users after a decade or two and then start providing tangible benefits to the lower class which weren't important to the original upper-class users who drove the innovation.
I've got a ton of patrons whose only internet access is through their phone, which was true for approximately zero percent of the early adopters of the iPhone. Likewise, while rich people want to own self-driving cars so they can read the Wall Street Journal during their commute, in ten years poor people will want to subscribe to an affordable car-sharing service so they can actually be employable. Having access to a working car is incredibly important for getting and keeping a job, and having cars that aren't sitting around in parking lots for 95% of their lives will drastically reduce the cost of the ride-for-hire economy.
I'm telling you guys: in a few years, we need to form Singularity Engine Industries, which will just be a huge pool of money that we use to buy a fleet of driverless cars and then we just rake in, then swim in all of the cash we make from selling rideshares. Singularity Engine Industries is even the perfect name for this futuristic, robot-driven business venture.
Edit: Oh man, I didn't even realize what a great pun that name is for a car company. This idea is my best idea ever.
godmode on
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webguy20I spend too much time on the InternetRegistered Userregular
I imagine it would give rise to fleets of driverless taxis instead, allowing for lower-cost transportation, which will be a bajillion dollar industry someday.
This right here. Especially in dense city centers
You'll call a car appropriate to your task (Small, medium, truck, van) using an app on your phone. It will let you know when it has arrived in the appropriate parking spot in front of your building. You'll go down, use the car for however long you need to, and when you're done it will go either to the next stop or back to some facility where it is cleaned/stored/charged until the next order comes through.
Hell for stuff like groceries and other pickups these fleets of cars could go to the store, get loaded by an employee and then show up at your building and drop it off. It value adds for the car fleet company, reduces costs for the big chains so they don't have to employee delivery fleets themselves, and lets mom and pop stores compete on a level field in the delivery business with the big companies.
This is what UBER wants to be when it is all said and done.
GrobianWhat's on sale?Pliers!Registered Userregular
The first part is available right now. We have at least 3 competing services offering that in my city. The only differences being I may have to walk 5 minutes to the next car instead of it coming to my house and I have to drive it myself.
That imo solves the main issue (car sharing) and the cars being automatic is just a nice to have.
The other thing holding driverless cars back will be integration of systems. Why would the Apple car exchange sensor data with the Google car? Are the automotive companies willing to use a system that's not in-house? (no control, someone else owns the data) They know what happened to newspapers etc.
the apple car will talk to the google car because neither company wants their car to get into crashes and thus make their product useless and unsellable
Until driverless technology is suitably advanced, of course they'll say you have to sober in your driverless car. In case you need to take over in an emergency
Until driverless technology is suitably advanced, of course they'll say you have to sober in your driverless car. In case you need to take over in an emergency
Problem with that is cab services are rendered nearly useless if you have to have a valid drivers license and be in a fit state to drive in order to use one.
Also to standardize terms, it helps to talk about the SAE automation levels:
Level 0: Automated system has no vehicle control, but may issue warnings.
Level 1: Driver must be ready to take control at any time. Automated system may include features such as Adaptive Cruise Control (ACC), Parking Assistance with automated steering, and Lane Keeping Assistance (LKA) Type II in any combination.
Level 2: The driver is obliged to detect objects and events and respond if the automated system fails to respond properly. The automated system executes accelerating, braking, and steering. The automated system can deactivate immediately upon takeover by the driver.
Level 3: Within known, limited environments (such as freeways), the driver can safely turn their attention away from driving tasks, but must still be prepared to take control when needed.
Level 4: The automated system can control the vehicle in all but a few environments such as severe weather. The driver must enable the automated system only when it is safe to do so. When enabled, driver attention is not required.
Level 5: Other than setting the destination and starting the system, no human intervention is required. The automatic system can drive to any location where it is legal to drive and make its own decisions.
Tesla's Autopilot is currently somewhere between levels 2 and 3, with an aim of getting to Level 4 by the end of the decade.
I've read that Ford and GM are trying to go straight from level 1/2 to level 5 due to liability concerns, but that means it will take longer.
the self driving cars we're likely to get out hands on anytime soon have nothing to do with these tech demo cars or gps-driven google cars at all
step 1 is wired interstates, where US megahighways essentially become gridded monorail systems that take over as soon as you get on the on-ramp and hand it back on the exit
its a simple enough technology that it could be retrofitted onto most existing vehicles
and thats still many years away. but that's got the most economic force behind it, because it leads to automated logistics fleets, and fewer accidents on high speed roads leads to lighter cars leads to lower fuel consumption
webguy20I spend too much time on the InternetRegistered Userregular
I could see trains making a comeback with the last mile problem solved by autonomous taxis. Not needing someone to pick you up or drop you off would be a huge deal, especially in more rural areas where there aren't taxis and other services.
I could see trains making a comeback with the last mile problem solved by autonomous taxis. Not needing someone to pick you up or drop you off would be a huge deal, especially in more rural areas where there aren't taxis and other services.
I think the ideal, and it's something the PRC is experimenting with, is high-speed rail to go the great lengths between major cities and then ride-hailing taxi services to do this last mile. China already has huge amounts of high speed rail that makes travelling literally 1000s of miles capable of being done in a matter of hours, and ride-hailing apps have been huge over there for years.
I could see trains making a comeback with the last mile problem solved by autonomous taxis. Not needing someone to pick you up or drop you off would be a huge deal, especially in more rural areas where there aren't taxis and other services.
I think the ideal, and it's something the PRC is experimenting with, is high-speed rail to go the great lengths between major cities and then ride-hailing taxi services to do this last mile. China already has huge amounts of high speed rail that makes travelling literally 1000s of miles capable of being done in a matter of hours, and ride-hailing apps have been huge over there for years.
Well China has certain, uh, advantages when it comes to building a HSR infrastructure that a lot of Western nations don't.
But something like that would be the ideal long-term model, probably, assuming automated cars lead to the projected road usage efficiency gains.
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JedocIn the scupperswith the staggers and jagsRegistered Userregular
edited March 2017
Same. Starting from Oklahoma City, I could get to LA, Chicago, or New York for slightly cheaper than an airplane. Of course, it would take two days instead of four hours, but whatever.
Getting to someplace like Seattle, on the other hand, would take three and a half days and would cost about twice as much as a four-hour flight.
Absent some trillion-dollar moonshot for passenger rail, trains aren't going to be anything like a solution for at least the next couple of generations of Americans. The infrastructure just isn't there.
my phone has been slowly dying for months now. The sound buttons don't work, the power button works only intermittently, the battery will jump from 25% to dead in about two minutes, ... etc
Last night it wouldn't charge at all, and faced with the prospect of no phone, I made the 3am decision to buy a refurbished one off ebay, to tide me over until I decide to spend the cash on a Pixel.
This morning I tried to charge it again, for kicks, and ... it went from 3% to 16% barely before the charger hit the socket, the power button actually works (?), and a lot of the other ongoing problems seem to be mitigated. (sound buttons still aren't working, mind you).
I think spiteful technology is an under-researched field.
my phone has been slowly dying for months now. The sound buttons don't work, the power button works only intermittently, the battery will jump from 25% to dead in about two minutes, ... etc
Last night it wouldn't charge at all, and faced with the prospect of no phone, I made the 3am decision to buy a refurbished one off ebay, to tide me over until I decide to spend the cash on a Pixel.
This morning I tried to charge it again, for kicks, and ... it went from 3% to 16% barely before the charger hit the socket, the power button actually works (?), and a lot of the other ongoing problems seem to be mitigated. (sound buttons still aren't working, mind you).
I think spiteful technology is an under-researched field.
so you're saying they didn't playtest the phone either
PLUS the USB ports on all my power strips started to fail this week too.
I'm 80% sure it's a busted capacitor but looks like there's seven potential culprits on the circuit, no visual indication, and all of them are registering slightly odd resistances, so tracking that down is gonna be fun. Maybe I'll get stuck in on the weekend.
my phone has been slowly dying for months now. The sound buttons don't work, the power button works only intermittently, the battery will jump from 25% to dead in about two minutes, ... etc
Last night it wouldn't charge at all, and faced with the prospect of no phone, I made the 3am decision to buy a refurbished one off ebay, to tide me over until I decide to spend the cash on a Pixel.
This morning I tried to charge it again, for kicks, and ... it went from 3% to 16% barely before the charger hit the socket, the power button actually works (?), and a lot of the other ongoing problems seem to be mitigated. (sound buttons still aren't working, mind you).
I think spiteful technology is an under-researched field.
What kind of phone? If it's an iPhone and your serial matches their recall range, you can get a free battery replacement!
I think spiteful technology is an under-researched field.
My theory is that it's like when kids are shits to the teacher, but absolute angels when mom & dad are around. Technology will act up until you involve tech support, then it will fall in line to stay out of trouble.
Your phone is only acting right because it realized you were serious about replacing it. Don't mention the Pixel too loudly or it'll straight up die.
my phone has been slowly dying for months now. The sound buttons don't work, the power button works only intermittently, the battery will jump from 25% to dead in about two minutes, ... etc
Last night it wouldn't charge at all, and faced with the prospect of no phone, I made the 3am decision to buy a refurbished one off ebay, to tide me over until I decide to spend the cash on a Pixel.
This morning I tried to charge it again, for kicks, and ... it went from 3% to 16% barely before the charger hit the socket, the power button actually works (?), and a lot of the other ongoing problems seem to be mitigated. (sound buttons still aren't working, mind you).
I think spiteful technology is an under-researched field.
What kind of phone? If it's an iPhone and your serial matches their recall range, you can get a free battery replacement!
it is an iphone, so I'll look into it! Though I think the battery is only one of its many, many problems.
So Recode obtained a report that circulated within Uber's self-driving division showing that on average, a human had to intervene every 0.8 miles.
That, uh, that does not seem very good.
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JedocIn the scupperswith the staggers and jagsRegistered Userregular
edited March 2017
Well, it shows that a driver intervened every 0.8 miles. Whether or not they had to or just didn't trust the car is a completely different figure.
I know when we got a self-steering rig for our tractor fifteen years ago, I spent the first couple of months fighting with the damn thing because it was performing precision maneuvers that looked wrong to my eyes, since I would put a much greater margin of error on a turn at the expense of a straight furrow. After I started trusting it, my interventions dropped by a couple of orders of magnitude.
Granted, the mistakes the tractor was making had basically zero consequence, so I'd want a human driver to be much more leery of a self-driving car's decisions, but that report in no way suggests that the drivers were actually in danger every 0.8 miles.
The next stage of programming might be to make self-driving cars maneuver in ways that feel better to human passengers, rather than going for maximum precision and efficiency.
Jedoc on
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MrMonroepassed outon the floor nowRegistered Userregular
So anyone else on Firefox seeing this fun new behavior from Facebook where the "audio is playing from this tab" icon pops up on the Facebook tab every few seconds?
It makes it look like maybe someone sent me a message but in reality there's zero sound coming from the tab.
Is this glitched out on my system or have they implemented almost the most annoying imaginable method of trying to get me to click back into Facebook while I'm browsing other sites?
So anyone else on Firefox seeing this fun new behavior from Facebook where the "audio is playing from this tab" icon pops up on the Facebook tab every few seconds?
It makes it look like maybe someone sent me a message but in reality there's zero sound coming from the tab.
Is this glitched out on my system or have they implemented almost the most annoying imaginable method of trying to get me to click back into Facebook while I'm browsing other sites?
I bought a new phone, a Moto G4 Play (the 2gb ram/16gb storage version) and a 128gb micro sd card. Last smartphone I had was an Xperia Tipo (and then a feature phone, Nokia 208). It should arrive tomorrow and I'm looking forward to checking it out.
Yeah, they hired him (Jeff Jones) like 6 months ago to try and improve their public image, as he had previously worked on rebranding Target.
He cited "incompatible leadership styles" or something like that as his reason for leaving. I'm guessing that he and the CEO were butting heads all the time.
Posts
True, but the poor aren't driving a 2005. They're driving the 80-90s car that is being held together on duct tape with a salvage title.
If it can't be bought for less than $5,000, it will definitely be a divide for at least a decade or two.
Sure it will. But that's just about the best-case scenario for a new technology. The question is whether self-driving cars are more like helicopters, which remain rare and expensive for the better part of a century, or smart phones, which trickle down to lower-income users after a decade or two and then start providing tangible benefits to the lower class which weren't important to the original upper-class users who drove the innovation.
I've got a ton of patrons whose only internet access is through their phone, which was true for approximately zero percent of the early adopters of the iPhone. Likewise, while rich people want to own self-driving cars so they can read the Wall Street Journal during their commute, in ten years poor people will want to subscribe to an affordable car-sharing service so they can actually be employable. Having access to a working car is incredibly important for getting and keeping a job, and having cars that aren't sitting around in parking lots for 95% of their lives will drastically reduce the cost of the ride-for-hire economy.
Edit: Oh man, I didn't even realize what a great pun that name is for a car company. This idea is my best idea ever.
This right here. Especially in dense city centers
You'll call a car appropriate to your task (Small, medium, truck, van) using an app on your phone. It will let you know when it has arrived in the appropriate parking spot in front of your building. You'll go down, use the car for however long you need to, and when you're done it will go either to the next stop or back to some facility where it is cleaned/stored/charged until the next order comes through.
Hell for stuff like groceries and other pickups these fleets of cars could go to the store, get loaded by an employee and then show up at your building and drop it off. It value adds for the car fleet company, reduces costs for the big chains so they don't have to employee delivery fleets themselves, and lets mom and pop stores compete on a level field in the delivery business with the big companies.
This is what UBER wants to be when it is all said and done.
Origin ID: Discgolfer27
Untappd ID: Discgolfer1981
That imo solves the main issue (car sharing) and the cars being automatic is just a nice to have.
The other thing holding driverless cars back will be integration of systems. Why would the Apple car exchange sensor data with the Google car? Are the automotive companies willing to use a system that's not in-house? (no control, someone else owns the data) They know what happened to newspapers etc.
You think they're let you drink etc even if you're not actually driving? Probably report you directly to a new shiny database!
Problem with that is cab services are rendered nearly useless if you have to have a valid drivers license and be in a fit state to drive in order to use one.
Breathalyzer-based immobilizers already exist and are not mandated for general use. I don't see any reason why this situation would be different.
Tesla's Autopilot is currently somewhere between levels 2 and 3, with an aim of getting to Level 4 by the end of the decade.
I've read that Ford and GM are trying to go straight from level 1/2 to level 5 due to liability concerns, but that means it will take longer.
step 1 is wired interstates, where US megahighways essentially become gridded monorail systems that take over as soon as you get on the on-ramp and hand it back on the exit
its a simple enough technology that it could be retrofitted onto most existing vehicles
and thats still many years away. but that's got the most economic force behind it, because it leads to automated logistics fleets, and fewer accidents on high speed roads leads to lighter cars leads to lower fuel consumption
Origin ID: Discgolfer27
Untappd ID: Discgolfer1981
I think the ideal, and it's something the PRC is experimenting with, is high-speed rail to go the great lengths between major cities and then ride-hailing taxi services to do this last mile. China already has huge amounts of high speed rail that makes travelling literally 1000s of miles capable of being done in a matter of hours, and ride-hailing apps have been huge over there for years.
I think it might be cheaper for me to fly to some places in the UK than get a train
Well China has certain, uh, advantages when it comes to building a HSR infrastructure that a lot of Western nations don't.
But something like that would be the ideal long-term model, probably, assuming automated cars lead to the projected road usage efficiency gains.
Getting to someplace like Seattle, on the other hand, would take three and a half days and would cost about twice as much as a four-hour flight.
Absent some trillion-dollar moonshot for passenger rail, trains aren't going to be anything like a solution for at least the next couple of generations of Americans. The infrastructure just isn't there.
Oh, it was very deliberate. There was an inter and post war effort to eliminate rail transport from the car manufacturers.
L.A. would have had a subway system to rival New York's if they hadn't been scuppered.
heat rises; so the best airflow for cooling is where the cool air enters from the bottom front, and leaves out of the top and rear
Last night it wouldn't charge at all, and faced with the prospect of no phone, I made the 3am decision to buy a refurbished one off ebay, to tide me over until I decide to spend the cash on a Pixel.
This morning I tried to charge it again, for kicks, and ... it went from 3% to 16% barely before the charger hit the socket, the power button actually works (?), and a lot of the other ongoing problems seem to be mitigated. (sound buttons still aren't working, mind you).
I think spiteful technology is an under-researched field.
so you're saying they didn't playtest the phone either
I'm 80% sure it's a busted capacitor but looks like there's seven potential culprits on the circuit, no visual indication, and all of them are registering slightly odd resistances, so tracking that down is gonna be fun. Maybe I'll get stuck in on the weekend.
What kind of phone? If it's an iPhone and your serial matches their recall range, you can get a free battery replacement!
My theory is that it's like when kids are shits to the teacher, but absolute angels when mom & dad are around. Technology will act up until you involve tech support, then it will fall in line to stay out of trouble.
Your phone is only acting right because it realized you were serious about replacing it. Don't mention the Pixel too loudly or it'll straight up die.
it is an iphone, so I'll look into it! Though I think the battery is only one of its many, many problems.
That, uh, that does not seem very good.
I know when we got a self-steering rig for our tractor fifteen years ago, I spent the first couple of months fighting with the damn thing because it was performing precision maneuvers that looked wrong to my eyes, since I would put a much greater margin of error on a turn at the expense of a straight furrow. After I started trusting it, my interventions dropped by a couple of orders of magnitude.
Granted, the mistakes the tractor was making had basically zero consequence, so I'd want a human driver to be much more leery of a self-driving car's decisions, but that report in no way suggests that the drivers were actually in danger every 0.8 miles.
The next stage of programming might be to make self-driving cars maneuver in ways that feel better to human passengers, rather than going for maximum precision and efficiency.
It makes it look like maybe someone sent me a message but in reality there's zero sound coming from the tab.
Is this glitched out on my system or have they implemented almost the most annoying imaginable method of trying to get me to click back into Facebook while I'm browsing other sites?
Yep happening to me too.
Uber's president left today?
He cited "incompatible leadership styles" or something like that as his reason for leaving. I'm guessing that he and the CEO were butting heads all the time.