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VW Raises the Bar for Self-Driving Vehicles
Old Man Kensey writes "According to the UK Daily Mail, VW has produced a prototype Golf (code-named "53 plus 1" in a reference to Herbie the Love Bug) that successfully steers and accelerates itself at speeds up to 150 MPH on tracks designed on the spot without pre-programming. It sounds almost too good to be true given some of the problems CMU's prototype has had over the years, but perhaps VW has learned from and extended CMU's research (and within-an-inch GPS positioning probably helps too)."
Can anybody explain to us when "within-an-inch" GPS technology became available, as well as how and possibly why?
A-Bomb
car: No GPS signal driver: OHHHH SHITTT car: Grab the wheel if you want to live!
Just a note to point out the Daily Mail is roughly half a step about the National Inquirer in terms of credability, so this one could be entirely fictional.
Wasn't it also CMU who also researched the rocker-bogie suspension? VW should put that on one of their cars. Then they'd finally have a real off-road vehicle. They wouldn't have to worry about navigating along the road. They could just drive over the cars in the way!
Come to think of it, I wonder why people don't use the rocker-bogie suspension, especially the military...
This is a good illustration of why research funded by a corperation is more likely to achieve results than that of academics. Academics are free to pursue whatever is most interesting as they work, and it is ok to get off on a tangent as long as some papers come out of it. However if you work for a company you need to get results, hence this car. Of course this model doesn't work quite as well for theoretical physics, but well enough for the computer science. I suspect we would have AI already if it could be turned directly into a product.
Philosophy.
Self-Driving Vehicle promptly hits the bar, gets thoroughly oiled and rolls off into the red light district looking for a "service".
"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
And that bug is probably fixed by now, but the problem is, how do we determine we worked out all the bugs? We can't even do that with Linux/Windows/Anything. The closest we come to that in the OS world is a microkernel with only a few thousands lines of code and controlled input.
But how do we ever determine a program that learns and is subject to varying, uncontrolled data inputs is bug free? You can't and I wouldn't want to see the first literal blue screen of death when it happens.
I don't want to sound like a luddite, but the article mentions that planes have been flying autopilot (did they forget to mention landing/taking off is still done by the pilot) since the 1970s. But I believe we'll have flying cars before self-driving* cars because the problem is several hundreds of a magnitude easier in empty 3D space where all you have to do is stay high enough off the ground and avoid collisions via radar/whatnot.
*The only way is I see anything coming close to a self-driving car is on highways where lanes get marked magnetically and driving problem gets reduce to the car having to stay X feet behind the car in front of it.
Duh, I meant to say I don't feel comfortable letting a car drive me. Yes, I'm up to late as it is.
So how long until the car drives you home if you've hit the bar too hard ?
No more soft drinks for the "designated driver".
I have just read about 53+1 the other day (can't rembember where, tough) 53+1 is specialized on slalom courses and can navigate them faster than a human driver. The car first runs the course very slowly scanning it, then it has to pause for half an hour when a special software optimizes steering, braking and acceleration points and afterwards it goes around the course faster than a real driver could. The system is NOT flexible, for example when a human suddenly is on the track on the fast lap it will blissfully ignore the humans existance and accelerate right through the human and create quite a mess. The usage seems to be exactly repeatable driving for car or tyre development. Froh
In Soviet Russia, the car drives you
It seems like the GPS cones positions are stored in some database, and then the Golf will drive itself by comparing its position with the positions of the cones. That's nice of course, but hardly a big breakthrough. Still far away from real-life driving, and little to do with CMU, where the driving is more or less real.
Rome taught me patience and assiduous application to detail. Virtues which temper the boldness of great, general views.
How does it find out the speed limit?
i guess they never found any of those drivers they wanted and had to create digital drivers?
Reminds me of many of my neighbors here in what was once called the "the meth triangle, methamphetamine manufacturing and trafficing capital of the world". You could always tell when the speed freaks were out of grass, they would be peeking out their windows and doors constantly.
For more information about the challenges in achieving a true driversless car check this Wikipedia Article
Stop worrying about the risks of nuclear power and start worrying about the risks of not using nuclear power.
One of the voodoo priests in Count Zero (http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/000648042X/202 -3748552-0791032?v=glance&n=266239) has a Mercedes limousine that drives itself.
Even if it works. Well, it reduces driver boredom and allows them to do something else. That's it. It might in the long distant future also reduce accident rates. However it doesn't solve any of the other problems associated with car usage; expense, pollution and congestion.
You're going to be spending just as much money on the vehicle, using just as much energy, producing just as much pollution and spending just as much time stuck in traffic.
While automated driving is cool and interesting, it's not revolutionary, it doesn't solve any of the big problems caused by car usage we have today. It's worth noting that it's not possible for any of the existing public transport technologies to solve the problems caused by car usage either.
http://www.vectusprt.com/
http://www.atsltd.co.uk/
http://www.skywebexpress.com/
http://www.mist-er.com/index-en.htm
Deleted
Travelling at 150mph on a circuit is easy. Well, relatively anyways.
Now if they managed to get this car travelling at 20mph down a city street during rush hour, we'd really have something useful on our hands.
Don't get me wrong, I'm impressed. But a self-driving car on an empty track is a million miles away from the everyday driving conditions we encounter.
Does this mean we won't be seeing the "Drivers wanted" slogan anymore?
This would imply to me that the position has been filled.
As a Passat Owner and Driver since 1999 and the wife has a Jetta from 1998, let me comment on the reliability and build quality of VW products.
They suck.
That said, these jokers can't even design an ABS controller that lasts 5 years. How the hell do they think that they're QUALIFIED to design a life critical componant like this?
Technology -- No Place For Wimps! Grateful Dead and Jerry Garcia Chatroom -- http://www.wemissjerry.org
I can claim to be a "rocket scientist", at least I have designed systems for satellite control and tracking, and I work for an aerospace company.
You cannot measure a position to within less than a centimeter using GPS. You can design a ranging system that gives you a measurement with enough numbers to represent that precision, but it doesn't mean that you can trust such numbers.
You cannot use GPS to give you better measurements than the accuracy of the GPS constellation orbit determination, and the satellites' positions vary more or less randomly due to residual atmosphere, solar wind, and solar radiation pressure. The end result is that GPS cannot give any reliable measurement to less than 10 cm, and one meter is closer to the best that one can accomplish in practical situations.
A more accurate system than GPS is LAGEOS, which has satellites that are much heavier and smaller than the GPS satellites. They are basically brass balls covered with mirrors. Because of that higher density, LAGEOS satellites suffer less perturbation from non-gravitational solar and atmospheric effects. However, the equipment for doing ranging with LAGEOS satellites is not portable, it's meant for geodesy studies, not navigation.
A good overview of different satellite ranging systems can be found in "Satellite Orbits", by O. Montenbruck and E. Gill, ISBN 3-540-67280-X, and here is a Wikipedia link for the most accurate satellite ranging systems.
Self-driving is nice, but how about the basics like:
Fixing glove box doors that break at the hinge constantly.
Making window regulator clamps out of metal instead of plastic so the window doesn't fall into the door.
Using MAF sensors that last longer than 30,000 miles.
Using O2 sensors that last longer than the previously mentioned MAF sensors.
Engineering sunvisors with built-in lights that stay working (wires too short so they break in the headliner).
Assembling 2.0L engines so they don't use 3 quarts of oil every 3,000 miles.
Re-engineering a 1.8t turbo overboost valve out of metal so it lasts as long as the turbo.
Re-engineering combi-valves so they also last as long as the turbo.
Making all oil pans out of steel so oil change technicians don't strip the pan threads after 10 oil changes.
Making interior rubber coated plastic parts that don't peel after 2 years.
Making brake light switches right on the first try - not the 4th or 5th revision.
Let's get the basics of autos right first before we make them drive themselves....
-ted
The forget that fact.. ok, want me to state an example? You're going to a party, you and your girlfriend (let's just imagine this can happen for a while) are driving there. Will there be an argument over who gets to sit in the passenger seat? ... no thanks :)
So... Could we actually replace the car with any of the existing public transport offerings? Is it physically possible for the existing public transport system to accomodate a 900% increase in usage? 500% increase? How about even a 100% increase? Nope. We're basically wasting our time and money attempting to get people on to the existing public transport systems. Never mind that they don't go where people want to go, when they want to go there.
Deleted
Ooh, ooh, anecdotal generalization. I can do that, too.
I drive a 1998 Golf TDI with 267000km on the clock. Number of problems: zero. The only thing the car ever needed, besides diesel of course, was spark plugs, filters, oils, fluids, brake pads, rotors, cam chain, washers, shocks & springs, and tyres. In other words, the normal items supposed to be replaced according to the shop manual.
My younger brother drives a 1996 Polo (petrol engine) with over 315000km on the clock now (he's the third owner). He's been driving it since January 2004. Number of problems: zero. Fill up the tank, change the oil regularly, and it goes without complaining.
My girlfriend drives a 2003 New Beetle. It is nearing 100000km now. Only problems so far was a punctured radiator (hardly VW's fault) and a loose electrical connection that made the dashes light flicker from time to time.
My friend's father drives a 2005 Phaeton V10 TDI. No problem whatsoever, so far. Unlike his previous 5-series BMW with its fucked up electronics that kept thinking there was someone on the passengers seat if you happend to put a coat or a briefcase there (and thus making the seat almost have a life of its own, trying endlessly to adjust to an imaginary passenger); or the E-class Mercedes he had that broke the turbo twice due to oil starvation, or the stupid electronic brakes that had all sorts of problems.
So, you see, anecdotal evidence means exactly squat. Over here where I live I see thousands of VW's every day, including loads of 30-year-old Golf mk I, 20-year-old Polos and Passats chugging along just fine.
Yes, you can. I just woke up, but I'll see if I can explain.
In the case of DGPS, the reference station uses its surveyed coordinate to difference the time encoded in the signals it is receiving against the time it would expect given an estimation of where the satellite is. So any error in the satellite's predicted position is lumped in with all the other naturally occuring forms of error.
In the case of RTK, or other forms of relative carrier phase positioning, the system attempts to determine and track the difference in the number of cycles of the carrier wave of the GPS signal between the base and the satellite and the rover and the satellite. This number multiplied by the length of the carrier wave, 19cm for L1 signals, gives you the length of one side of a triangle between the base station, the rover, and the point between the rover and satellite that is as far from the satellite as the base station is. So, the exact position of the satellite is not as important as the sight line vector the satellite forms against the base line between the base station and rover. And given the great distance of the satellite from the typical base station and rover, jitter in the satellite's position doesn't change that vector much.
In conclusion, given the advances in relative positioning, limiting factors on GPS positioning today are the accuracy of the survey points, the ability of the electronics to precisely measure the carrier phase/doppler of the GPS signal, the quality of the clock in the GPS unit and the speed/accuracy of the algorithms that determine the carrier cycle count difference.
As far as I know that requires a DPGS like system on the track with extra real time feedback to the car.
So they are cheating if you consider the real world.
I've been in a car that could drive its self on one very well surveyed road. If it got confused it would beep and assume the human was in control within a second. The internal guidance system alone cost over 1/3 of a million dollars and it used several different GPS systems to cross check the fiber gyro.
The only way cars are going to take over for driving the mini-van in place of the drive soccer mom is if there is a serious attempt to clean up the road markings. This means no more optional parking on the side as a road will either be a parking spot or a lane. Signs will need to be redone and cleaned up. The white lines must be far more precise than they are now and more places will need to deal with the yellow centerline (which has now been dropped in the EU even though its the cheapest road safety device ever)
Things have gone a long way. 2 decades ago I had a system that would indicate that a steering adjustment needed to be done. A decade ago there was Miata convertible that could maintain road position and deal with deer. This year we have a VW that can avoid traffic cones. Maybe in a decade we can see a car that can avoid the phone talking, breakfast eating SUV driver.
The answer for those is "public tranport system". And you don't have to drive either!
Go ahead, mod me troll...
So say we all
I have a 1970 VW Bug, and it has 370K miles on the body running gear and transmission. The engine has about 120K on it, some parts reused from the original, such as the carburator and manifold. Builder got a big laugh when he put the motor together, used the big barrels and pistons, engine puts out more power than stock, they didn't tell me. Car pulls away from stoplight with suprising vigor, much to the suprise of those behind that were plotting their sweeping pass only to be denied.
It does need a clutch, this one has about 180K on it, and is coming apart.
Shifting takes a lot of practice/patience. Did put a new shift coupling back there, that helps a lot.
There are no solid-state parts in the car, the turn signal relay has been replaced with a can-type, cheap and reliable. The radio is not OEM, does have transistors, but is probably worth all of 25 cents if the buyer is really needing a cheap radio. The turn signal lever wore out, too expensive to replace, so put a paddle switch on the dash for the turn signal setup.
Gas guage quit, not the one in the tank, the one in the speedometer. Having fixed that, just keep a log of when tank is filled, and every 100 miles, refill. Seats are wore out, windshield wipers also.
Ignition switch replaced with a custom setup, hidden "on" switch, and a starter button on the dash. Horn uses a relay, so it always works.
Has a new spare tire, change a flat in 10 minutes.
Drivers door sags, hold it up to close smoothly.
No car payments for past 30 years. Can get 49.5 MPG at 55 MPH.
Cops won't stop you, too embarrassed to be seen giving a ticket to something like that. Will pick off tailgaters from behind, and write them tickets.
Front windshield gasket leaks top center, carry a bucket during monsoons.
Car was painted with a brush several years ago, looks horrible.
Tires wear evenly all around, can get 8 years between tire changes, they dry-rot first before tread is gone.
The battery is a left over truck battery, holder modified to accept. Buy a new one for the truck, put the old one in the Bug. Keep a spare battery around, and carry jumper cables. Seems everyone else needs jumping off, not this one.
Has a home-built "lights on reminder", not solid state, secret design, I'm not telling. The device is 25 years old, and shows no sign of failing.
Most wiring has been changed and updated, everything has it's own circuit and fuse, OEM was crap.
Lots of people want to buy the car, I say "you cannot afford it". They just imagine it will solve all their problems.
Rapidweather's Linux Screenshots.
This is surely the perfect car. I can just imagine the scene:
Car pulled over by the highway patrol for doing 150 in a 65 zone.
Officer is puzzled by the fact that the only person in the car is asleep, in the back seat.
"Did you know what speed you were doing, sir?"
"Huh, um, wha? Oh - the car was driving, Officer".
Car has to appear in court next Wednesday.
And in homage to the founder:
Hail Hitler
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
Just one question - you know an awful lot about specific VW problems. Do you keep buying new VW's so you can find out more? Is there some other, darker problem you'd like to discuss?
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
I have to state you can either have a completely automated system, or a completely human driven system, the two will not mix. And even then, this technology is too expensive to implement.
I don't understand why car companies are wasting time and money in developing self driven cars. While there might be useful purposes for the technology, such as "off-world" exploration, or for use in the military, there will never come a time when we turn over control of our cars to a computer and sit back and enjoy the ride.
There are too many variables involved in a self-driven cars, things that a computer cannot take into consideration, such as the often random and stupid nature of how people drive. In a mixed environment, where human and computer driven cars are allowed, it will be a huge disaster waiting to happen. The first time some idiot swerves across 4 lanes of busy traffic because they don't want to miss their exit (because they were not paying attention in the first place) and causes a massive car pileup because all the computer driven cars could not react fast enough to the sudden chaotic input will essentially pull the plug on the whole idea. Companies like VW and Honda working on automated cars will be named in a massive class action lawsuit that will effectively bankrupt these companies (good riddance, both companies are overly hyped about anyways).
Even in an environment of purely computer driven vehicles, where you have a safe enough (and powerful enough) computers controlling all the cars, robust and secure wireless networks, along with radar and all the sensors needed so that every car knows about the existence of every other car on the road in a 10 km radius, there is still a level of uncertainty and chaos that computers will not be able to handle. A sudden rainstorm or white out, while may not affect the navigation of the vehicle, may cause the computer to react poorly in a sudden stop situation when it hasn't gauged the slipperiness of the road. Driving down a dark highway at night, human eyes may pick up the deer standing still on the side of the road, and slow down accordingly assuming the deer might dart across the road suddenly, but a computer will not register the fact that there is wildlife near the road, and will not react quick enough when the deer darts pass, regardless of how good the avoidance detection and mechanics are. There is no computerized counterpart for human intuition and experience.
In the end, you will have to build a roadway underground, where you can almost guarantee no inadvertent input of chaos into the computer controlled environment. If you take weather and wildlife out of the equation, and can guarantee a pretty much predictable environment, then I would agree that computer driven cars makes sense. But it would cost trillions of dollars to upgrade the highway and transit systems to implement this kind of system for computerized car control, and I would move that it would be criminal to allow a human driver in this environment, enough for jail time and a life long suspension of your license. Movies like iRobot where Will Smith takes manual command of his car while driving down an automated tunnel is pure fiction, and it will remain that way.
In the end, this is a pipe dream and I am afraid that every dollar wasted on this technology could be put into making cars more fuel efficient, ecologically friendly, or research in alternate fuels or power technologies. They can also be made safer, or at least, implement computer assistance that could effectively prevent the car from spinning out of control if the human driver isn't skilled enough to handle the situation.
I don't think I am alone in assuming that this technology will never see the light of day in a real world application. The real world is too unpredictable and chaotic to turn over to a computer to drive around in. If they invent anti-grav engines and force fields, then maybe I would turn over my vehicle to a computer, but they don't even let the computer drive a spaceship 40
I haven't thought of anything clever to put here, but then again most of you haven't either.
"How the hell do they think that they're QUALIFIED to design a life critical componant like this?"
How is calculating the fastest route round a cone layed out track "life critical"?
The revolution will not be televised... but it will have a page on Wikipedia
The holy grail is cars that talk to each other to get around more efficiently yet. If the traffic up ahead narrows from four lanes to two because of construction, and car computers can talk to each other and say "Hey, you're two miles back but get ready for this", then orderly traffic flow can be maintained as the cars merge into the remaining lanes and decelerate. This in turn saves gas, etc.
Hell, think how much money you'd save if you car just automatically avoided potholes if it could. Tires, struts, shocks, suspension, all those would last much longer. Look at the figures on how much money it costs drivers annually in a city like Baltimore that's infested with chuckholed roads.
-- Old Man Kensey
...yeah, because AI programmers are really gonna quit their jobs and carreers to fix car window mechanisms.
The revolution will not be televised... but it will have a page on Wikipedia
"My girlfriend drives a 2003 New Beetle. It is nearing 100000km now. Only problems so far was a punctured radiator (hardly VW's fault) and a loose electrical connection that made the dashes light flicker from time to time."
We had an intermittent FAILURE to start which ulitimately ( $500 labor, $10 wire ) was traced to a corroded wire/poor ground.
Watch that flickering dash light problem. It'll likely get worse.
Technology -- No Place For Wimps! Grateful Dead and Jerry Garcia Chatroom -- http://www.wemissjerry.org
Have the people at VW not seen the movie at all? Herbie accelerated at the wrong times, didn't steer properly, would do all sorts of things that should have gotten his human passengers killed. Not my ideal driving machine. Pontiac is the one who needs to be developing self driving automobiles. A car like KITT is way better than Herbie. Too bad David Hasselhoff is busy almost killing himself shaving (or that good?).
You must be This__Tall to Golf -- Volkswagen's newest verb, replacing Farfegnugen.
every time i see anything autonomous ground vehicle related, everyone goes off about how fantastic carnegie mellon university is while completely ignoring the fact that sebastian thrun's team at *STANFORD* won GC2. yes, i realize that thrun was red's student for a long time, but when you compare the radically different approaches it's pretty clear that it's thrun's vision, leadership, and team which earned the win. since vw was part of thrun's team, the odds are overwhelmingly in favor that any autonomous control of the 53+1 was largely a product of their collaboration with *STANFORD* and has pretty much bugger all to do with CMU.
The black trans-ams will also come with crime sensors.
You could claim to be Methuselah as well. Not claiming it doesn't change the fact that you are an aerospace engineer and not a "rocket scientist." What rockets have you worked on? a satellite isn't a rocket is it? Are you a satellite scientist or a rocket scientist?
Mike
(not a rocket scientist, but very few people are)
You know, self-drive in England means "rented" to you and me. What, you don't watch The_Prisoner on sci-fi? His first day there, in the shop, looking for a map.
According to the US Coast Guard NAVCEN site DGPS has:
"availability of 99.7% per month"
Now, assuming my math doesn't suck, that means that for 129 minutes a month it won't work... Those could be a very exciting few minutes!
However, we have all the technology to enable such a vehicle, especially if we limit it to highway travel (where conditions tend to be less variable than surface streets). One such improvement for guidance would be a combination of active and passive "dots" lining the lanes. The passive ones could be simple rare-earth magnets. The active ones would take a bit more work, but I can easily envision a small solar panel with an integrated RF/IR transponder - perhaps it could even communicate with other dots wirelessly to forward information toward on-coming traffic about road conditions and such. I am also thinking of a system like an ant-trail, where the communication could be forwarded by "hitchhiking" packets of information onto the car as it travels, and then it could deposit the info in a later dot (not sure if or how this would be useful, but it sounds like it could be in some manner).
Couple this with signage broadcasting data, cars with navigational aids (GPS and radar, mainly), standard vehicle-to-vehicle communication protocols (so cars could talk to each other to let each know intent and yielding) - I would be willing to bet that all of this is easily available, without needing special DGPS systems installed. Even without special "active dots", most of the system would be easy and cheap to develop.
The expensive and hard to develop part isn't the hardware - it's the software. This includes not just the software for the system and the cars, but the "software" (ie, business processes) needed for insurance and liability concerns for all parties involved.
Reason is the Path to God - Anon
They're generally seen as very reliable cars. Not Toyota or Honda quality, but very good nevertheless. I own an Audi A3 (basically a rebranded Golf with better interiors), reaching now 200 000km and running real fine with no events besides normal maintenance except for a clutch spring failure at 85 000km.
If at first you don't succeed, skydiving is not for you
- Commute time door-to-door using automobile: 15min
- Daily commute: 30km
- Auto gas consumption: 8l/100km
- Monthly gas consumption in commute: 30km*20days*.08=48l/month
- Gas cost: 1.32/l
- Monthly costs telecommuting by car: 63
- Commute time door-to-door using subway: 45min
- Monthly subway pass price: 27
My solution? Car pooling. When a two person pool is head-to-head costwise and beats transport times 300%, public transportation must be called overpriced. And if we pooled three people, we'd make a profit.If at first you don't succeed, skydiving is not for you
Price and costs are in euros. /. ate the symbol.
If at first you don't succeed, skydiving is not for you
I'm not a REAL public transport advocate, I just like it because here in Barcelona it works much better than in other cities I've lived and I don't have a car. Until about a year ago I lived in a 500 thousand people city in southern Brazil, where public transportation sucked and I had a car.
Every case is a case. Right now for me, public transportation is wonderful because:
1) I don't have a car, so I don't have a choice (he he...)
2) I live in a neighborhood where I can go almost everywhere by foot
3) When I need to use the public tranportation it is fast, reliable and available where I need/want to go
4) After years driving, I kind of got tired of it
Besides, here in Barcelona the gas is about 1.25 Euro a liter (it's 6 dollars a gallon) and a parking space cost around 2.50 Euro (3.20 dollars) an hour.
Anyway, as I said, every case is a case. Because it seldom rains here, the gas costs a lot motorcycles can park on the sidewalks, lots of people here have small motorcycles and scooters. They are as numerous as cars. As you can see, one uses the options that suits him/her better.
So say we all
Doesn't go where I want to go, and even if it did, I couldn't leave my crap in it all night or bring home a load of pine nuggets.
If you must moderate, please moderate as irrelevent, not something bad, because I'm sure someone will find this interest
You mean glow plugs? I don't think a Golf TDI is gonna need spark plugs. :)
Actually, we had that in 1997. See Demo 97, where all that was implemented in a live freeway lane in San Diego. Then funding was cut.
is setting a lap time benchmark for track motor racing sports such as F1... lets see how good schumi, alonso et al. really are...
On another note, if these scientists think they're so smart... let's see them do it with a motorbike =)
Over 1 million people are killed in automobile accidents each year globally, 43,000 in the USA. Far more are injured or maimed.
Estimates for the costs of crashes range from 10 to 30 cents/mile, factoring in everything -- health, repairs, suffering -- which is more than the cost of gasoline or depreciation.
It's now down to an engineering problem to build self-driving, crash-avoiding cars. It's the largest preventable cause of suffering and death we have.
Has it been over a year since you last donated to the Electronic Frontier Foundation
Since they already were working with Stanford, why would CMU matter?
/I suspect we would have AI already if it could be turned directly into a product./
How do you figure?
Even ignoring the the potential for a singularity, the income possibilities for a decent AI are huge:
Cheap but pleasing and polite telephone customer service.
Video monitoring and loss prevention.
'Search'
Medical diagnosis
Any company that develops a generic intelligence will very quickly become the largest company in the world. (assuming no one else does rolls their own very very quickly) There is almost no product or service that can'tbe improved or replaced by AI.
And that's not even counting:
Robotics (household, manufacturing, military, DRIVING)
Entertainment (everything done now, plus good game AI opponents and sex bots)
Programming (including new AI's)
Automated invention and design. (Hey look Dave, I just found a cure for cancer!)
How's that for turning directly into a product?
AI has gotten relatively low commercial funding because it is high risk, and people have gotten burned on it. Now that academic research has brought us seemingly much closer, more and more investors will place their bets.
whoa...
I don't know about you, but I'd consider the ABS controller a more life critical component than automatic cone navigating!
If the ABS controller fails in a way that leave you unable to brake? That's potentially very deadly.
My wife and I both bought VWs at the same time. She bought a 2000 Jetta GLS 2.0L and I bought a 2000 Golf 1.8T. We loved the fact that we could get great fit and finish in cars that cost less than $21,000.00.
Both cars had very similar problems. The problems that were not similar were related to different engines.
A friend of mine also owns a 2002 Jetta 1.8T.
All of us have had similar problems. These are not one-off, outlying statistic, type stuff. These are repeated, widespread, design failures. So much so, that most of the issues were acknowledged and paid for by VW post warranty. That's a good move by VW, but I expect the design work and testing to be done on their nickel....not mine.
No one paid me for the time and effort to deal with these problems (monthly trips to the dealer, time without a car or rental fees...etc).
I still drive the Golf, and to VWs credit, the 6 year old car runs well and still feels "tight". That said, I won't buy another VW.
I don't expect cars to be perfect, but our 2004 Jeep Grand Cherokee has 60,000 miles and it has been in the shop only twice for unscheduled maintenance. The Jeep is not as fun to drive, but it has given us a lot less grief than the VWs.
-ted
Volkswagens suck. They try to ride on the coat-tails of being "German-engineered", yet fail miserably. I'd rather someone hold a gun to my head and make me buy a Ford.
Contrary to their advertising campaign, there is only one stereotype that Volkswagen owners must suffer: They're chick-mobiles.
"Michael, why won't you answer me?"
-KITT
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
Thanks for the link, though...
Reason is the Path to God - Anon