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Driverless Buses Ruled Out For London, For Now
An anonymous reader writes The office of the Mayor of London went into a bit of a panic this week after their own paper suggested that driverless buses could appear on the streets of the UK's capital at some point in the next four decades. The Mayor's office went so far as to suggest that they were really talking about driverless underground trains. Even more bizarre was the reaction of the city's taxi drivers' association — whose spokesperson claimed that the failure to deliver 'simple' software tasks such as speech recognition meant there was no chance of driverless buses appearing on London's streets.
When I was younger, I worked on speech recogntion problems - well, expert systems and neural networks in general. It was the toughest nut our team had ever been tasked to crack, and we didn't crack it.
When the man on the street perceives speech recognition to be simple - and coming from a taxi driver, that's more than a little ironic, considering they're essentially human Traveler Salesman Problem solvers - you know technology has overtaken you beyond hope.
Me, I can't stop being complete blown away by what can be achieved today. Driverless cars are almost a reality everybody can buy, yet I still vividly remember MIT experimental self-driving trucks trying to hold a straight line on a closed circuit at 1 mph!
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
There have been a number of drivers' strikes that I'm sure make them unpopular. No doubt management would leap at the chance to be rid of them. The hard part will be keeping the union from finding out too soon and taking preemptive protest action against redundencies.
Well done to timothy for replacing blog link with actual news article link in summary.
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Tried googling, couldn't find anything much other than job adverts.
How many professional drivers are there in the UK or US? Including bus, taxi, cab, private mini bus, postal, delivery and haulage? My guess would be 500,000 to a 1,000,000 in the UK alone.
That's a lot of jobs that could be lost to autonomous driving.
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Perhaps the problem of speech recognition is that we try to teach computers our language. We could also make a spoken system where the language and pronounciation is drafted for the task.
The second unnecessary difficulty of speech recognition is to convert sounds (triphones) into letters.
NB: The message above might reflect my opinion right now, but not necessarily tomorrow or next year.
Unattended train operation is a reality -- see here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
I wasn't aware of that. See also here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
NB: The message above might reflect my opinion right now, but not necessarily tomorrow or next year.
The loss happened at the heigth of industrial revolution where there was a lot of other job openning, compeltely new job market for uneducated and untrained people.
Nowadays the job market for untrained and potentially uneducated job is *shrinking*. This is not the same as back when horse cariage were gone and automobile came in.
There is a high chance that untrained and uneducated job lost today, are definitively lost thru job market shrinkage. Think about that. Think about what that means for the economy as a whole when 100.000 jobs are lost. Nothing good for the economy or for the social stability.
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Yes, and the buggy-whip makers won't be pleased, either.
That argument does not pass the "So what?" test, and never has. Technology advances, and society changes; it's why we're not still all running around dressed in skins, hunting down our food with rocks. When it does, some types of job inevitably become less-sought, or even redundant. If that job's what you do, or me, that's just tough; the world doesn't owe anyone a living. If your job goes away, you go look for another. Yes, there's a social argument for cushioning the transition, if things are moving so fast that lots of people are going to find themselves out of work in the same place at the same time - but that's rarely what actually happens.
Robotic automobiles are just one small example of what will happen quite rapidly now. Governments do not confront the problem and almost no group at all gives voice to the problem. We are going to eliminate almost 100% of human employment. And that is a good thing as long as our financial structure is built around the change. A few sociologists have made statements about how this rather drastic change will come upon us. Basic concepts that we are familiar with will vanish. Capitalism will be a quaint, old, failed idea. And all nations will shake under this transition. Yesterday we had concerns that American business and American labor might not be able to compete with the cheap, labor pool in China. All of a sudden that issue is self extinguishing. Instead of our factory competing with their factory now we have the question " can my robot work cheaper and better than your robot?".
Kudo's for ruling out a service that doesn't exist yet. Thats getting ahead of the game. Think of all the things that one day might exist that we could go ahead and regulate right now! Here's one that should be banned:
touchscreen underwear.
Any other recommendations?
The London bus system is great. In my experience the busses are safely and courteously driven, frequent and on time. If I have one criticism it would be that it is often almost impossible to talk to the driver.
Unlike everywhere else I've been, the busses have this perspex shield completely isolating the driver, with just a few holes drilled in. Due to London's diversity a lot of drivers also have accents that may be difficult to understand in less than ideal conditions. This means that when its noisy (and London is a noisy place), you may be trying to communicate with someone who you may not understand very easily (and who may not understand you very easily) through a few tiny holes which the driver is a few feet from.
I was dragged off a London bus, interrogated for half an hour and fined (I appealed successfully). The reason this happened was that I tried to ask the driver if my card had been read successfully and he waved me on. Clearly I see now that he hadn't been able to hear a word I said over the noise, and hadn't bothered to actually try to speak because I wouldn't have heard him either.
Really not a lot would change if you couldn't talk to the driver at all. Its not like you can actually buy a ticket on the bus or anything.
...are already quite common. That's nothing new. Fully automated subway trains have been deployed all over the world. I recently rode one in Barcelona (the new L9/L10) and it was quite nice. That should be (relatively) uncontroversial. Busses navigate extremely complex environments. Subway trains navigate remarkably simple, controlled environments.
Why would you need speech recognition on a London bus? You never talk to the driver. You get on, touch your Oyster card to the reader, and get off when you get to your stop. That's it. It's a flat rate fare. You can't even use cash on them anymore - you have to use an Oyster card.
Yeah, I had a sig once; I got bored of it.
Let's face it, driverless buses don't really exist. But so long as we don't regress back into the awful world of proprietary or non-standard extensions, why should buses need drivers outside of those shipped with the kernel?
Methinks the mayor of London has a soft spot for microchannel!
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Various non-technical people make predictions about the limitations of technology 40 years in the future. Politician makes guarantee of policies that will be followed long after he and most of the people that voted for him are retired or dead.
Discuss.
that customers could interact with to chose their destination. It could plot the route and everything!
*sigh* There is no chance that Google or Apple would come out with such a complicated piece of software.
Trains are actually the easiest vehicle to automate, because they run on fixed tracks. The automation system need only worry about merge points, plus what is ahead and what is behind the train. Buses are easier to automate than cars because they run on fixed routes at relatively slow speeds, but the liability exposure of a busload of people in an accident is much greater.
Once driverless car technology has sufficiently matured, there will be no need for buses, underground trains, or any other current public transport system. City authorities should be planning for driverless cars (including driverless "taxis" for those who do not own a car) instead of continuing to think about and invest in soon-to-be-obsolete modes of transportation.
In addition to the regularly mentioned benefits of driverless cars, such as reduction in road deaths, and freeing commuters to use travel time more productively, another very important advantage is significantly improved efficiency. Eventually cars will communicate their destination to a central computer, which will coordinate the journey with all other cars. The route and speed will then be determined so that cars traveling in different direction will cross junctions at different times, avoiding the necessity of stop lights and thereby allowing cars to travel at almost constant speed to their destination. Not only is this more time efficient, but avoiding the regular large expenditure of energy on accelerating from a stop will also make cars more energy efficient. Furthermore, the reduction in the need for acceleration means that cars will not require such large engines, and the almost elimination of car crashes means that weight can be greatly reduced by stripping safety features and heavy metal bodies, further improving efficiency. Taking more direct routes to destinations, rather than the circuitous routes often required when using public transportation, also improves efficiency. I am surprised that environmental campaigners are not all urging the rapid implementation of this technology. More efficient road use will also mean that existing road infrastructure can be used more efficiently, which may reduce the need for road expansion projects. City authorities should therefore not only avoid throwing more money into public transport methods whose days are numbered, but they should also be reconsidering road expansion investments. The money should instead be directed to driverless car research, and planning for this coming revolution.
I've seen bus drivers take a corner without considering the other lane, and wipe out a driver and passenger in a truck, waiting in the turn lane. I've seen a bus driver carelessly activate the bus-stairs-convert-to-wheel-chair-lift before it was safe, completely knocking over an elderly wheel-chair bound person onto the concrete, head first . . . and then just sit there, not doing anything, requiring myself and another passenger to jump off and assist the person.
I don't see how automation can do much worse.