The world would be much better off if we converted our roads to a rail/streetcar system and drop the personal car concept entirely.
The hype around this is worse than VR.
edit: As a few people have mentioned, my suggestion that "trains are buses are much more efficient" is dubious. And I certainly don't mean to say they're better in all circumstances. It's more accurate to say that in certain scenarios, it still makes sense to use mass transit instead of self driving cars. Moving inside Manhattan, or commuting from a suburb to Manhattan, are examples where mass transit likely makes sense. With the obligatory disclaimer that I could be incorrect, this is simply my understanding.
Dubious claim that needs evidence. I think you're underestimating the potential throughput gains from autonomy. As just one example, speed limits can probably be greatly increased when you take the realities of human reaction times out of the equation.
How much energy does it take to move one train?
That's your answer.
When millions of Americans live in rural or suburban areas, what do you think is easier? Extending rail and bus routes to within walking distance of every house, or convincing everyone to move to a city? The answer is neither, and that's why cars exist.
Here's one that isn't a trick question: is it more efficient to build a rail line to my office and have a train run there or to have individual cars drive there? I don't know the answer for sure, but considering you may possibly need 15 trains filled mainly with people who don't work there converging on one location or 15 cars with one person each who does work there converging on one location, I'm almost willing to bet 15 electric cars would be more efficient than 15 trains.
There's a certain density requirement that mass transit needs that doesn't always exist. That's why we have cars.
Take that road in front of your office, and just put rails in it.
If your local government can pay for a road in front of your house, it can pay for a streetcar. This applies to dense areas as well as rural areas. Rail lines actually cost less to maintain than roads, and they cost YOU less because you don't have to buy and pay for a car.
And you don't have to fear dying in a crash every time you set foot inside a streetcar, like you do in a car.
It's surprisingly common when you leave the bigger cities. 90% of the country might live in cities, but the other 10% is spread out across the other 99% of the nation.
So if I don't fit into this world, how do I get around? Obviously we already ruled out self-driving cars, since they'll never work. So I assume I drive my own car? Since I'm already driving my own car, why can't I just drive it to the grocery store? Do I have to drive to the train station and get on a train to get groceries, or are there still parking lots for me? How far am I expected to walk from the train to the grocery store even though I have my own car and could drive right to their door? Or are we assuming self-driving cars work for me but don't work for anyone else? In elementary school I rode the bus for an hour and a half (not even exaggerating) to get from my house to school, am I making that same trip every day to get to and from work? Even though it's 20 minutes by car?
We're talking millions of people across the country here, not an inconsequential number. We're talking about thousands of small towns where trains will NEVER work. Are we just relegating them to second class citizens who have to ride their horses to town? Damn it's so easy for people in big cities to come up with these clever solutions, of course everyone can just take a train or a bus. Except millions of people can't.
But they're just minor outliers, right?
This is the cost of living in luxury with your own 19 acres.
And if you have your own farmland, you are richer than half the country.
So glad to know that food stamps, welfare, and homemade methamphetamines qualify someone for luxury living.
Jesus fucking Christ this thread is cancer.
Every single person in this thread lives in a big city and never stepped foot on land that didn't have a sidewalk next to the road. We're not talking "minor points" here, we're talking about 46 million Americans who don't have cable internet or cell phone reception, but somehow public transport will work there or we'll just force them to move.
I knew HN was a bubble but god damn, this is some next-level shit if you can just pretend 15% of the country doesn't exist.
Do you think Apple is going to create a car for the 15% of the rural people?
This is why your limited market is irrelevant and worth exactly 0.
It's your responsibility to catch up with the world, not the world's responsibility to cater to you.
Someone suggested abolishing public transport might not be the best idea, and you seem to have interpreted that (and all subsequent defences of it) to mean we have to abolish cars instead. No one's suggesting that, they're just saying that we should use more public transport where it makes sense.
The move to cities stats are also way overapplied. College educated young people are indeed moving to a few mostly urban dense cores like Brooklyn. More broadly there's somewhat of a shift from true rural to the suburbs but most of those people will still need cars.
My generation is moving into the cities where we can live without cars, no convincing needed.
> Here's one that isn't a trick question: is it more efficient to build a rail line to my office and have a train run there or to have individual cars drive there? I don't know the answer for sure, but considering you may possibly need 15 trains filled mainly with people who don't work there converging on one location or 15 cars with one person each who does work there converging on one location, I'm almost willing to bet 15 electric cars would be more efficient than 15 trains.
If your office is in the middle of nowhere, sure, but that's a "don't do that then" problem. If you turn over all the space that's currently spent on roads, road verges, and parking lots to more productive uses, you can cluster a bunch of places within easy walking distance of a train station - offices, restaurants, entertainment, and housing - and then people can live near where they work and enjoy.
Of course people who want to live in the middle of nowhere will probably always need something like cars, but they shouldn't be allowed to spoil it for the rest of us. Charge them a fair market price for the land they use for parking, and a road toll that covers the rent the road could earn if built on, rather than having everyone else subsidise those things.
If you think that's true for every Millennial across the country, you're crazy.
>that's a "don't do that then" problem.
Oh, okay. Just don't do that. Gotcha. Pretty simple. Just don't have a job, just don't go to work, I'm sure I can afford to move to Manhattan after I quit my factory job in Springfield IL because it was too far off the rail line.
>but they shouldn't be allowed to spoil it for the rest of us.
Holy shit. Just... holy shit.
Of course it's not everyone, but it's the overall trend.
> Just don't have a job, just don't go to work, I'm sure I can afford to move to Manhattan after I quit my factory job in Springfield IL because it was too far off the rail line.
Manhattan is expensive because there's only one of it. If the jobs build around the rail lines, you can save a load of money by not needing a car, and split the difference with your employer. And sure, not every job will be able to do this - factories need space. But that's a small portion of our economy at this point, and getting smaller all the time.
To a significant extent the issues with mass transit can be remedied by breaking the global graph up into connected subgraphs, and each subgraph can be similarly subdivided, recursively down to the point where the form factors and utilization rates cause the economics to break down. The edges between those subgraphs is mass transit.
Autonomous technologies make both point to point and mass transit transportation much cheaper. But labor (market or not) comprises a much more of car transportation costs than mass transit costs. Eliminating that cost inherently drives a shift from mass transit to car transit. Combine that with an efficient coordination algorithm to increase car utilization rates, and it gets a significant upper hand.
Each approach will still have its place, of course.
> breaking the global graph up into connected subgraphs
I feel like it's too conservative -- and takes "the transportation graph" as too fixed an entity. Consider how much the shape of the U.S. changed between 1917 and 2017 -- suburbs, the Interstate Highways, malls, fast food, huge parking lots, and on and on. The car literally gave us new ways of living with each other, for better and for worse.
So I think we should expect changes at least that radical in the next hundred years -- which suggests that we'll not just divide some abstract, eternal graph differently, but really truly reshape it.
I can't wait for super-fast trains + self-driving cars, AND I can't wait to see what kind of world they create.
From software perspective, there isn't much difference between form of vehicles.
For that reason, I'm more excited about self driving cars than about public transit.
I've said this on here before, but I'll say it again: efficiency is not everything.
Individual houses (or even apartments) are less efficient than having everybody living in barracks, hot-bunking the beds in three shifts, and eating some sort of nutrient-balanced kibble in cafeterias.
Human beings have goals other than efficiency. One ignores this fact at one's own peril.
Efficient at what? The comment you replied to explicitly talked about what's "efficient at moving people".
Of course some people like cars for reasons other than how good they are at getting from A to B, but is that a matter of fundamental human needs, or something more like fashion? Certainly people who commute by car don't seem to actually enjoy doing it.
Efficient in terms of resource usage, which is exactly how the comment I replied to was using it.
"but is that a matter of fundamental human needs, or something more like fashion?"
I'm pretty sure that being able to go where you want, any time you want, in a conveyance that doesn't smell like urine, isn't just a "fashion".
And self-driving taxis mean you can use them for those journeys, and rely on more efficient public transport for everything else.
> in a conveyance that doesn't smell like urine
This is not an inherent issue with public transport. I take the bus to work every day and it's never smelled of urine.
No.
You will have to call the taxi and wait for it to arrive, and (inevitably) you're going to have to wait a lot longer at peak times.
That is not the same as going any time you want.
But I think most people would much rather wait a few minutes on those occasions and save their money.
(And FWIW, I think it could be fairly quick, since you don't have to pay a self-driving car to sit around in a small town in case someone needs it.)
And I don't see those changes happening without an infrastructure overhaul, at which point you might as well create a streetcar infrastructure.
Famous last words?
It's already happened.
That said, I do think we'll get there eventually, as I think we'll get to AGI (or even ASI) eventually. But I can't prove that either. And I can understand a certain measure of skepticism about the whole thing.
I'm not trying to say self driving cars are as easy as building a modern OS, however difficult that may be. I'm trying to say, in the area of how advanced computers can become in a very short period of time, humans have historically been incredibly, actually laughable inaccurate.
Anyone who says "computers will never X" deserves to be shunned into nonexistence. Literally all of the proof is on the other side of their argument. Historically, computers have always been able to do exactly what humans have claimed they could not do. It's only a matter of time.
Driving on open roads with other humans is going to require elements of real intelligence that are qualitatively different than your OS example where they just did more programming, better, faster.
It's apples and dump trucks. What if computers are just the wrong approach for this problem?
Computers are always improving. Granted. Doesn't mean it's going to be in a direction that's useful for general AI and driving full-autonomous.
On the flip side of constant improvement is are the claims that we'd have full autonomous cars "real soon now" for each of the last 20 years.
In 2017, we're still far enough away no one will give a product availability date. This again points to a qualitatively different challenge than what came before, and the need to develop several new layers of tech (not just integrate what's there) to get the job done
Take a modern computer and show it to a programmer from 1970 and try to convince him that computers are still remarkably dumb. I doubt he'd agree. AI always falls into this trap. Once it's been done, it's not AI. It's just an algorithm. AI is something else. And when we do something that only humans could do just a few years ago, suddenly it's not AI anymore either. It's just an algorithm. AI is something else. And when we do that, now it's just an algorithm too. AI is something else.
I have a robot vacuuming my floors right now. I just typed "vacuuming" wrong and my computer corrected me without asking, it just did it. A minute ago I asked my phone, using my voice, to turn off my bedroom lights and it did. Seems pretty mundane, I know. So too will self-driving cars in time.
No doubt he'd be impressed at the progress, but failing the test is failing the test.
There is a difference between behaviors which seem intelligent (your roomba) and actual intelligence. Seemingly intelligent behavior (like Eliza) only works when your counterparty isn't too probing or discriminating. It's like a Potemkin village of intelligence; looks great, as long as you don't look too closely.
Replacing half of all driving is still a world changing benefit to society.
The self driving technology that already exists could change the world with regards to the trucking industry alone, as trucking hours are mostly done in "easy" conditions on the highway.
Trillions of dollars will be saved even if self driving trucks only ever work in sunny weather on the highway.
For examples: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/aug/18/self-driv...
But they have also been used in DC, Vegas, Perth, the Netherlands and other places.
It might not be a total replacement for cars but they are self-driving vehicles that are moving passengers now.
Sure, they only work on the highway, but that is still a large amount of driving time.
Replacing 50% of driving hours is still a world changing revolutionary benefit.