If Tesla were pursuing a project like this, they'd probably announce that they were expecting all their cars to ship with cold fusion reactors by 2020 — and then start hiring a team ;-)
They still have massive, on-going investments in anti-aging and self-driving vehicles. I don't know of any moonshots they've killed yet.
Project Ara?
Google fiber is mostly dead.
I'm envisioning the Mr. Fusion in Back To The Future as a Google product. Surely it would fail the second it left that narrow 5-10 year window of support. Error: 403, Forbidden; the user is not authorized for trans-time operation.
So, if Mr. Fusion was a Google product, as soon as McFly transported the DeLorean to the future (outside Google's window of support) and the onboard computer synced the time over-the-air and the Mr. Fusion updated its clock, McFly would be stuck in the future, though presumably in that time he should be able to find some competitor to Mr. Fusion which he could replace it with (with Doc's help; McFly never seemed to be very good with technical things).
However, it is an open question whether or not it will require additional / different sensors (like lidar).
You are driving your car and see that the pickup truck in front of you has an empty cardboard box in it (you can tell its empty by the way its floating around in bed of truck). Suddenly a gust of win picks up the box and it lands directly in front of your car. Its not very big, about 12 inches tall. Do you: (a) Slam on breaks? (b) Roll over it?
Now what will the "AI" in your car do?
Self-driving cars are not coming anytime soon. They are a whole slew of problems that you can intuit solutions to fairly easily, that are still beyond the ability of current tech.
Manned vehicles are not coming anytime soon. They are a whole slew of problems etc. -- you got my point.
I think focusing too much on pesky details is very much a fallacy in this case - you do not want an "AI" to react like a human in all situations, you only want it to drive in a way that is conservative enough not to endanger people too much. And we clearly aren't that far from this goal right now.
Humans who drive cautiously may go for a million miles without an accident. The best self-driving cars (i.e. Waymo) disengage on average every 11,000 miles.[1] It seems to me that a disengagement is equivalent to becoming unconscious without warning, and presumably we both agree that a given human does not have a heart attack while driving every year.
Humans, even with all the people who drive drunk, or texting, or falling asleep, average about 80 million miles between fatalities. Going 11,000 miles between events of total loss of control is nearly four orders of magnitude worse.
[1]https://www.forbes.com/sites/alanohnsman/2019/02/13/waymo-to...
However, I think this metric could be irrelevant in the case of a home/work commute. The 11,000 miles average appears to have been obtained basically by randomly driving Waymo cars on Californian roads. But a usual commute is much less than 11,000 miles, and if your self-driving can do it by itself once then probably it can do it twice. As the article puts it:
"The value of the data is limited, however, as the figures don’t factor in the complexity of environments in which vehicles are tested–dense urban settings, versus low-speed suburbs or less complex highway driving–nor do they show conditions including weather, light or speed."
Nevertheless, you seem to have missed my point : I was arguing that coming up with a specific use-case example that may (or may not, actually) go wrong is an argument that goes both ways.
If we pick a hypothetical where a human fails and an AI doesn't, does that mean self-driving cars are ready?
Do you think human drivers are faultless drivers?
Is their a fair cost-benefit analysis for not wasting enormous amounts of collective time driving? (Driving is a very unproductive activity).
Google could stumble into something very profitable.
But I have also seen google projects that did not look scientific sound to me. Measuring blood glucose with contact lenses? How? Lag time is around one hour for eye liquid. Your are dead and the sensor does not know it yet. Your need to be below 10 min lag time.
If experiments violate CURRENT laws of physics, the laws have to be revised. Guess how we came to our current atomic model from the plum pudding atom model?
a hypothesis is "a supposition or proposed explanation made on the basis of limited evidence as a starting point for further investigation."
it's arguable whether "is cold fusion possible?" is a valid hypothesis, because currently there is no accepted reason, evidence, observation, or starting point for that investigation. only the hope, the wish: "what if it was..."
"it's arguable whether "is cold fusion possible?" is a valid hypothesis, because currently there is no accepted reason,"
I am not a nuclear physicist, but my chemistry is good enough to know that it should not be possible.
But take into consideration that Fleischmann was a pretty good chemist. Possible he fucked up. Looking backwards likely. But discussion is possible only based on date. Not believes what should or should not be possible.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fleischmann%E2%80%93Pons_exper...
Why? What if you don't care about having your blood glucose data that quickly, and just want to see the overall trend, even if it is delayed an hour? This won't help people who really need to be able to see what their glucose level is right this second, but for others it's a lot more convenient than having to prick yourself every morning.
If you want to see "overall trend" and don't care about any "lag time", just measure in Urine.
But if you have money I can offer you a non-invasive glucose measurement start-up with peer reviewed publications.
Having to get urine samples regularly, or worse, blood samples, is a LOT more work on my part (not to mention painful for the blood samples), so it's not something I'm as likely to want to bother with.
How about people walking abound 24/7 with an anal plug?
A couple of them. In terms of economic success they only really need one every 10 years too succeed as every one of them might be worth tens to hundreds of billions.
It‘s also a great way to find out what ideas don‘t work without too much risk.
> [Bowie's character] uses the advanced technology of his home planet to patent many inventions on Earth, and acquires tremendous wealth as the head of a technology-based conglomerate, World Enterprises Corporation, aided by leading patent attorney Oliver Farnsworth. His wealth is needed to construct a space vehicle with the intention of shipping water back to his home planet.
No one ever thought cheap energy might be helpful before a few years ago? It's still not useful outside of cars?
The story line in question comes after one where someone has scavenged his tech from broken parts of Iron Man armor and used them in terrorist attacks, and at the same time as he's put together a purely "defensive" Iron Man suit for Pepper Potts called Rescue, and he decides to rebuild his company around civilian applications of the underlying tech,
Iron Man is actually quite interesting in that respect, as a lot of the story lines delve into him struggling with whether or not he should produce weapons to stop bad guys or come up with a design to find a counter to them before a bad guy comes up with the same design, vs. finding civilian applications without inadvertently handing bad guys new weapons. Some of those story lines make poor arguments, but at least the Iron Man story lines are trying unlike FF, I feel, where it's "let's whip up something new amazing before breakfast and then never do anything with it", while Tony Stark grapples with the issues of commercializing his inventions all the time, and often has to deal with fallout from it.