Google wants driverless cars, but do we?
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
Idiotic things like this in the article miss the point:
> And yet this trend has never been voted on or discussed seriously by our politicians
We already voted with our dollars and will continue to do so (and our politicians suck).
The article also has stupid shit like:
> The truth is, no one knows for sure how many lives could be saved by driverless cars, because data on the role of human error in crashes is incomplete and misleading
Human error is the cause for all accidents, barring freak accidents like sinkholes and tornadoes (both hitting my state recently :( ). This one is so simple to reason about. Think about the cause of any accident, even the ones where clearly some technology failed. Even a rear-end caused by brake failure is the fault of the driver for ignoring his dashboard and not fixing the car often enough.
A self-driving car can and will refuse to drive if the brakes go back (provided all the sensors don't go bad at the same time too). A self driving will have unlimited patience for slowness. A self driving car will never be drunk or drive tired.
> We already voted with our dollars and will continue to do so (and our politicians suck).
No doubt. Why in the heck would I need a politicians to vote and discuss such a thing? We decide and they get their butts in gear getting the regulations to work or we vote them out of office. They are supposed to represent the will of the people, not be our parents.
Once computer programs are driving cars, this will change.
> Yes, jobs will be created by these new cars, but many will be lost.
Every time a company, economy, nation or empire doesn't follow the route that saves more human effort they are outcompeted (or conquered) by those who do.
This is as much an argument against self driving cars as much as it is an argument against automation in principle. We need to figure how to handle 40% unemployment when all those truckers lose their jobs. Either Basic income, subsidized jobs, or some kind of discussion to figure out what happens next. Because self driving cars will be part of it unless there is an apocalypse.
Holy crap! I a cannot finish this unresearched technophic clickbait piece of drivel. It is making me dumber as I read it.
The economics of slavery seem to be an effective rebuttal to your point, unless slaves are put in the role of automaton (and not human).
Also you miss out on a large portion of the person's output if they are slave. There are very few slave inventors.
I'd say the only reason they were "missed out" is because of the politics of slavery.
The entire basis that efficiency of human effort is competitively dominant relies on a definition of human as only the "humans benefiting from automation" leaving out those who don't benefit out of the equation.
Compared to the non-slave inventors the list of slave inventors is disproportionately tiny. A few anecdotal people don't hold muster to waves of people innovating. I can point to single companies with hundreds of inventors.
In the long run automation benefits everyone, even the people who temporarily lose their jobs. Those people are encouraged to get back into the work force and to do the best they can even they have less work to do because of some new tool. Slaves were sometimes killed for not working hard enough. If slaves invented a labor saving device they got non of the benefit and instead any value increase was entirely given to the slave's owner. Employees can choose who to work for and choose their conditions, slaves cannot. Employees can try see their obsolescence coming and go to school, shift careers or fight it, slaves can only do as they are told.
There's absolutely no evidence to support this, is there? How would self-driving cars result in larger and more grisly accidents?
Of course, when something goes wrong with that, yes, the accident would be more severe, because the velocity is higher and the likelihood of multi-car collision would also go up.
Of course, the effect may be akin to an airplane crash: When one crashes, the survival chances are lower, and more people are killed, than say, in a car crash. However, the frequency of the incident is drastically less, and hence airplanes are generally understood to be safer, statistically.
If we expect to get to that level, then the crash investigators better be closer to airplane crash level care then our current level of investigation.
How many pedestrians are killed by jumping between two train wagons?
> How many pedestrians are killed by jumping between two train wagons?
How many tires blow out per year, or cars get slippery?
Taking small steps is fine, but the smallness should be in the location, not the density. Just a small neighborhood with only self driving cars, instead of a large neighborhood with a small proportion of self driving cars.
And of course, a deer-free neighborhood will be best to start with.
From the article: "One of the claims made for autonomous cars is that they can be lighter, shedding heavy metal crash cells and expensive safety gear, like airbags, saving fuel."
We would also need to get most of the humans off the road. No amount of self-driving AI can dodge a human with intent (or stupidity), a similar performing vehicle and a headstart.
Algorithmic error - algorithm responds poorly to rare environmental condition (naturally or artificially generated).
Emergent behavior error - algorithm for individual vehicle safety causes unsafe conditions for groups of vehicles in certain circumstances.
Security vulnerability - mass hacking of vehicle systems by malicious actors.
Bureaucratic vulnerability - politician or bureaucrat demands mass remote disabling of vehicles or other mass action that plays well in a television soundbite, but for which the system was not designed and can not carry out safely.
There are some big challenges for automated driving. The backlashes against the inevitable disasters could define the industry. No one is going to pay for more than token research into these areas, and regulation is always at least 20 years behind. It's up to the engineers on the ground to build in mitigation mechanisms.
> Jamie Lincoln Kitman, a lawyer, is the New York bureau chief for Automobile Magazine.
So, no surprises here.
Yes, the change is technological, but the biggest impact is cultural. You assume that everyone is going to love self driving cars, but has anyone studied people to see if they are accepting? Many people just want to jump in their cars and go.. they haven't figured out the destination yet. Or maybe they are just scared - they have been driving for a long time and don't want to give it up.
When I drive 10 hours to visit my parents, I don't like it. But do I mind driving to the train station every day? I get to feel the road under the wheels, drive a little bit fast in corners, etc. Do I put my car in sport mode so its fun? hell yeah. Maybe if you truly have no affinity for car culture all these things are irrelevant.
My commute is 29 miles, with all except 3 miles being on the highway. The off-highway miles, you bet I'll be in manual mode and gunning the shit out of it. But once I hit the highway, I'll hit the auto-pilot and relax. Being a driving enthusiast while wanting to have autopilot are not mutually exclusive.
I wonder how easily you can drift a Tesla...
Some of the points made by the article:
-We don't know exactly how many people will be saved each year!
-We might make fewer cars!
-Our politicians haven't decided whether or not we want them!
-We can just disable phones in moving cars so people don't drive distracted!
Jamie Lincoln Kitman, you make me angry.
[Edit: formatting]
"A member of the Society of Automotive Historians, Jamie Lincoln Kitman drives a 1966 Lancia Fulvia and a 1969 Ford Lotus-Cortina, both of which run fine on unleaded."
He just wants to drive his crappy, unsafe, polluting cars around forever and make us do the same.
The #1 danger to classic cars is collisions with distracted drivers of newer, less cool cars. A friend of mine lost a late 1960s Honda CVCC (precursor to Civic) in a front-end collision after putting a lot of work swapping over a bunch of period-correct NOS modifications from another late 1960s Honda CVCC that he obtained as a wreck from another collector who wanted to sell it as a parts car to a fellow enthusiast after it had been involved in a similar front-end collision. Two classic cars lost to distracted drivers of modern shitboxes who were too busy texting to realize that they should not have been making a left-hand turn.
Even California exempts pre-1975 cars from smog testing (and soon to be pre-1980s cars). Classic cars will have no trouble being grandfathered in. I have seen people drive Model Ts around on the streets.
> Jamie Lincoln Kitman, a lawyer, is the New York bureau chief for Automobile Magazine.
Even openpilot gives a big Blob of binary that I should trust.
It's my goddamn life. I'm not going to let a company whose #1 goal is to make me click as many ads as they can run my car.
for sure you're against it
when driverless car is out and everyone is adopt to it, the whole automobile industry together with oil & gas will be disrupted
but your company shouldn't be affected as you can review on all the driverless car :) :)
"Countries with an abundance of natural resources, specifically non-renewable resources like minerals and fuels, tend to have less economic growth, less democracy, and worse development outcomes than countries with fewer natural resources."
Scholars debate the causes of the resource curse, but one popular theory has to do with the way autocrats fund themselves relative to democracies.
Autocrats, it turns out, need a lot of wealth to pay their cronies. No dictator rules alone; they need someone to run the military, someone to collect the taxes, and someone to enforce the laws. Those people have to be paid, and handsomely, or they'll overthrow the dictator (or just allow the dictator to be overthrown). This is called "selectorate theory" and this video is a great introduction. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rStL7niR7gs
Oil wealth, specifically, undermines democracy because when autocrats have access to oil wealth, they don't need to depend on their citizens very much. (Indeed, many autocratic countries rich with oil wealth just allow other countries to come in and drill it, keeping local labor entirely out of the loop.)
Resource-cursed autocracies tend to democratize when the oil wealth runs out and they need to rely on the people's productivity to deliver wealth to cronies. When autocrats are forced to allow people to educate themselves and communicate with one another, democracy ensues.
It can work the other way, too. In every democracy, there's a group of folks asking themselves a question: is now the time to try a coup, to replace democracy with an autocracy? As the value of capital increases and the value of human labor decreases, the advantages of staging a coup becomes more and more enticing.
For years we've thought of human labor as the "ultimate resource." But it turns out that human labor isn't the ultimate resource. Robot labor that's just as good if not better than human labor is a resource beyond any we've ever seen.
But that means that we're discovering/inventing the ultimate resource curse.
We might use automation to fund universal basic income, or a class of elites could use it to undermine "unnecessary" citizens (the "unnecessariat"), establishing a corporate fascism.
When we depend on human productivity for our tax base, we need to keep us all well educated and healthy. But soon, we won't depend on human labor.
"Is now the time?" they're asking. And, increasingly, the answer is "yes."