> it is far more interesting than 90% of the stuff a lot of your FAANG companies are spending R&D dollars on
Yup. “The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads.”
Yup. “The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads.”
And it's not only to click ads, there is a whole lot of engineers (even more in poorer countries such as Brazil) who end up working in banks and finance, mostly to deal with complex spreadsheets.
It's a complete waste of educational investment.
There used to be a big incentive for the smart scientific and engineering minded types to go into academia, but now the majority go into either financial services or tech work because that is where the high salaries and actual problem solving are.
Though I don't know if it was an intentional reference or just a coincidence.
If you want to do fundamental research, the jobs are very scarce and, in many cases, not particularly good in terms of salary, stability, or location. A postdoc in the life sciences makes $50-65k/year, often either in a) a high cost-of-living area (Boston, SF) or b) a land-grant institution in the middle of nowhere, which is tough with a partner. These are usually short contracts too--mine is renewed annually. Faculty and Pharma jobs pay better, obviously, but are also pretty thin on the ground.
I like doing research that makes the world better, but doing so is an incredible luxury, even coming from a decently middle-class background. If my family were even slightly poorer, there's no way this would be possible and if one of them were to get sick or hurt, I can't imagine how I'd be able to stick it out.
It doesn't have to be this way, obviously. We could fund more stable positions--and I think it'd probably work out to more/better science per dollar spent. But right now...we definitely don't.
That's better than when the best minds are thinking about how to kill people.
Anyways, it is a good thing that even if the end goal is far from noble, most of the times, invest enough in R&D and positive things come out of it.
> numerous lives it would save
If you want to save lives, work on malnutrition, reducing coal energy, water access, basic vaccines, etc. You'll have a much greater impact.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_traffic-r...
Denmark (like most countries) are definitely better at not getting killed on the road, but closer to a factor of two by miles driven and four per capita.
They don’t matter per se. It is just a stat I had in my head that I could provide without googling anything to show how different both countries are. There are so many factors to consider with regards to driving infrastructure and habits, even density is not enough.
Waiting for L5, even if it actually is achieved in the current AI cycle, will introduce a whole new class of problems once self driving cars become a meaningful share of traffic, e.g. coordination/cooperation between cars and so on.
I'm always astonished at how those most skilled at software, turn around and explain how software is better than humans at task $x. Yet, I've never used a piece of software without bugs. I've never seen a piece of software, not real world capable, which even remotely close to dealing with things, as well as humans.
And the more complex the software, the more bugs. Bugs abound in complex software. Full self driving is as complex as the linux kernel, easily.
How many bugs are in the Linux kernel? Right now?
To even hope, even begin to hope that things will be mostly bug free, bug free beyond human "bugs" when driving, we'd:
- Need to 100% freeze the platform, so the car has zero changes. Ever. Like a Volvo, 10+, 20+ years with only fixes for flaws.
No change in drive train. No change in how the car handles, etc.
- A 100% feature freeze fix for years and years, only bug fixes, no feature add.
It's just not happening overnight. And when it does, cars are going to require an addition of massive sensors, it's not going to be camera or radar, it's going to be camera, radar, lidar, motion, wind, and 50 other environmental sensors.
It's going to be mainine computing power in triplicate. Connectivity and sensors in triplicate. 100%, no way is the AI CPU even slightly network connected. No over-the-air updates.
Bugs cannot happen. Bugs kill. Bad hardware kills.
I do get that having a car self drive, in the desert, in constantly warm temp is an easy thing. Try it at -40C, in a snow storm, with a snow filled road, in the country with no ditches, no lines to see (due to snow), in the dark, when windy, periodic white-outs, and more.
Heck, I'll say there's a chance when AI can drive on a frozen lake. And yes, humans do and can.
So far, all AI driving is monoculture.
Not to mention, how about a 20 year old car? Or even 10? "Buy new?" Now you hate the environment! And 20 year old cars are driven daily by humans, no they aren't the primary cause of accidents, because, when driving you notice issues in the feel of how the car drives.
Can AI "feel" that? Sure! But that means loads and loads of sensors! And cost! ANd repair bills!
To be honest, my 2050 thing is likely mostly due to this. Cost.
Speaking of Sweden's road safety rate...
On the other hand, nobody has any idea how to get Americans to change their minds on guns, cars, or red meat, and there is no foreseeable course of action that would work. That's not to say it's impossible, but I don't see how to get from here to there. This isn't a case of people just not knowing that if they drove more carefully they'd be at less risk of dying. Public education is not even remotely sufficient to the task of accomplishing the behavior changes we're talking about. Hell, I bet you could spend a hundred billion dollars and not even get to the point of a solid majority agreeing there's a problem to be solved, much less make any progress on solving it.
Interesting that your list doesn't include alcohol.
It isn't difficult or expensive in its own terms. You don't do it with "public education", you do by consistently dramatising the results you want in popular media, and demonising the results you don't.
Give it ten years of consistent messaging from multiple seemingly independent sources and it's done. Give it twenty five and it's so done the alternatives are no longer thinkable.
The difficult and expensive part comes from the enclosed nature of political power in the US, which has a choke point on the kinds of messages that are allowed to appear in popular media.
The common point that you won't see huge structural improvements until human driven cars are gone is true and it's going to be a WHILE.
Even if you had perfect self driving technology the cultural and political capital you'd have to expend to get rid of recreational cars is just astronomical. At that point you may as well ban all of the fucking things, the electric ones aren't better they just shovel the suffering around a bit.
The externalities of driving are huge (both positive and negative) but the negative externality of driving accidents is nearly a trillion dollars per year in the US.
This eliminates the most deadly accidents (head on collisions) and makes overtaking completely stress free.
It's a simple intervention that you can do almost anywhere, and it saves lives immediately. You only need to invest a bit in concrete barriers and paint.
I wonder why almost no other country does that.
Edit: You think our covid restrictions was successful?
They're talking about road layouts.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/525530/sweden-death-rate...
Indeed, a worthwhile intervention. But when do you think Tesla will be auto-updating the FSD rickshaws in Liberia?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_traffic-r...
Traffic backups and delays aren't just created from people crashing, it's because when you take a a dozen tiny humans and you put each of them in mostly > 15foot long cars, you now have 12 people managing to take up over 180 feet of space.
Speeding up emergency services is a solved problem. You take a lane that is filled with single-occupant vehicles, and you dedicate that to efficient forms of transit, whether it be a high-speed bus lane or a bike lane. Emergency services will not only opt to use that the majority of the time, they will also be less likely to crash with another vehicle due to not needing to weave lane to lane.
Hope this helps.
I understand that HackerNews is tech centered, but some times when I read "the best minds of my generation are doing X" I wonder if the commenter can see the flashes of brilliance shining beyond their field or what they know as "tech."
Or else it exists in some intersection of corporate benevolence and the work not actively harming the ad company. Which is just not an arrangement I trust sorry.
Plus I mean that's two people. How many people work at google and fb and how many who do get to decide they're going to do something more important than ads?
We are talking about "best minds of our generation". That means dozens.
But even a regular good engineer/researcher can probably find a place where they can work on something they're interested in. I did.