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Musk Says Drivers May Become Obsolete, Announces Juice-Saving Upgrades
Lucas123 (935744) writes During a discussion at a Nvidia conference, Elon Musk predicted that in the future, consumers will not be allowed to drive cars because it will be considered too dangerous. [Note: compare Lyft CEO Logan Green's opposite view] 'You can't have a person driving a two-ton death machine,' he said. Others agree. Thilo Koslowski, a vice president at Gartner, said instead of laws dictating drivers must cede control to their car's computer, we may someday someday just pass signs requiring drivers to activate auto-drive functionality for certain particularly treacherous stretches of roadway. Kowlowski said fully autonomous vehicles won't be ubiquitous for another 10 to 15 years, but the government could spur that on by offering tax incentives as it does today with all-electric vehicles and hybrids. Related news: it may not be fully autonomous driving, but Tesla S drivers are promised an upgrade a few months from now that gives a taste, with the addition of automatic steering features. And though it's perhaps anti-climactic as a solution to "ending range anxiety," Musk also announced today that Teslas will get in the next two weeks a software upgrade that will greatly upgrade the cars' routing software, integrating "near-realtime" lists of available supercharger stations, and keeping drivers apprised of whether one is within range.
Is this something people actually want, empty marketing rhetoric, or a frightening imminent example of 'manufactured consent'?
I thought we'd have flying cars before we'd lose the chance to drive.
All kidding aside, 40 years from now we'll still be driving our own cars because programmers won't be able to help a car decide if it is allowed to avoid a collision that will kill a driver by swerving onto a sidewalk and killing two pedestrians.
_ _ _ Go for the eyes Boo! GO FOR THE EYES!
They should let owners lend their private chargers for a fee, handled by Tesla. Something like Uber but for charging your car.
If you want to accurately predict the future do as Jules Verne did and write as many of them as you can possibly think up. History indicates that you will be mostly wrong and a large number of predictions will increase the odds of getting something right.
we may someday just pass signs requiring drivers to activate auto-drive functionality for certain particularly treacherous stretches of roadway.
So on the sections of road I'm going to be most terrified to navigate I should secede control to the computer? In principal, this makes sense, but in reality this is a pee-your-pants moment that even adrenaline junkies will probably say no thanks to.
Within 3 hours drive of a charging station. Seriously, when is the last time you've driven more than 5 miles out of your way to get a fill up. And he wants to say wherever you are there is a charging station within 3 hours! Err...really now?
when you pry it from my cold, dead hands.
Which may very well occur when autonomous vehicles can't decide what they should do and come to a stop, causing others to plow into them.
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
i will drive it, thank you very much.
sigs are for losers (except to point out that sigs are for losers)
First they say that drivers are obsolete; next it'll be the passengers. Then, before you know it, there's a gathering of them in car-parks and garages around the country.....
wasn't elon just recently warning us against autonomous intelligence?
I'm thinking back in the days when I first got a car so I can go cruising and also for going on dates. With drivers obsolete how would it impact this kind of social behavior? Or young people don't do this kind of thing anymore? Just wondering.
mfwright@batnet.com
and what will happen to people automated out of a job?
Go back to school and rack up big loans just to be told you are to old for the job?
End having to use the jail / prison for there doctor for the stuff that er will not cover?
jalopnik article
'"It's much easier than people think" says Musk, outlining how most of the sensors and systems available right now can handle self-driving duties on the freeway, something Tesla showed off late last year with its AutoPilot features.'
As someone who has spent a career working on safety-critical real-time systems, I can assure you that it's not in any way "much easier than people think". Quite the opposite. Sure, driving a car down a well marked highway on a clear sunny day with little traffic and no system failures is easy. But if you obscure the lane markings in any of a number of ways, add inclement weather, throw out random obstacles, random system failures, etc. the problem gets monumentally harder. Throw in an urban environment with all sorts of other issues just keeps making it harder and harder. And solving all of those problems takes up well over 90% of the effort when designing an autonomous system. Hell, developing something that can recognize the problem in the first place is hard enough. Being able to differentiate between sensor failure and sensors indicating a failure is a non-trivial task. He's full of it if he thinks we're anywhere near having a self driving car that's ready for public consumption.
Sure, there are self driving cars out there on the road. But they have huge engineering and support teams using them as an evaluation platform. And it's good that we have made as much progress as we have. I look forward to seeing the work continue and advance the technology. But it's not an easy task. It's going to take probably decades before we're really ready for a fully autonomous self driving car that's ready for public consumption. We'll probably see some of the technologies work their way into cars between now and then. And that's a good thing too. But it's not going to happen overnight because it's much harder than people think.
He wrote about teens jumping in front of convoys of automated big rigs a long time ago, out of sheer boredom and an innate desire to cause chaos. Even in Methuselah's Children the long lived had methods of switching off auto drive to avoid being tracked everywhere at all times. It has been pointed out previously what about people on farms driving completely off the grid, not to mention the totally unresolved issue of whose at fault when my auto drive car is involved in an accident, or the choice HAS to be made between saving MY life, the driver or some stranger on the side of the road who wants to commit suicide by being run over...
errr....umm...*whooosh* *whoosh* Is this thing on ?
.
Show me a self-driving car that could navigate the snow-choked roads of Boston this winter.
Except sit at home with their tablet / laptop which is all that most people including most politicians do these days. We'll be living in a curated idiot-proof society soon, where the overlords decide what pre-packaged entertainment you're going to soak up today. All the old adventurous hobbies like driving sport cars and other vehicles, hunting and even things like doing certain DIY work on your own house are slowly being regulated out of existence to protect people from themselves.
The thing is, governments see us only as tools to keep the economy going, the economy and creating jobs are far more important than getting people to extract enjoyment out of their lives so it is in their interest to keep us as dependent on the economy as possible and since in the West we don't manufacture much anymore it also means coaxing people to use as many services as possible
and what will happen to people automated out of a job?
Go back to school and rack up big loans just to be told you are to old for the job?
End having to use the jail / prison for there doctor for the stuff that er will not cover?
Being automated out of a job is inevitable - it's been happening for decades. The REAL problem is twofile: (1) that we are no longer creating new, higher-paying jobs to replace those that were automated away, and (2) that the benefits of increased productivity per worker haven't been shared by the workers for 40 years.
Going back to school under those conditions is insane - why rack up debt to train for a job you'll never get?
Jail is an option some homeless people have been using for years - break a window, wait for the cops, sleep in a not-so-cold jail cell.
No, I don't have any real solutions :-( Sorry.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
That's dangerous talk from someone who has built his car business on a reputation for performance and quality... when cars drive themselves, they won't need to be fast, or good looking, because nobody will be looking. They could look like the Oscar Meyer Wiener Mobile and nobody would notice.
Oh well. Fun is always short lived.
Which has more power: the hammer, or the anvil?
... that work on the new holy grail, autonomous vehicles. Somehow, the level of confidence in this new technology seems to be inversely proportional to the distance to the nitty-gritty details of actually doing this. Can someone please tell me, exactly, how this is supposed to be done? Without using the phrase "how hard can it be".
Let's take the simplest of all the detection problems. How many lines of code does it take to reliably and safely detect the lane markings of a road? Nobody knows, because nobody has done it yet. Yes, there are prototypes that can handle some sub sets of all cases. The best I've seen handles 90% of the cases. That takes 1 MSLOC and still counting. How expensive will the last 10% be? How many hours of recorded video data does it take to verify the last 10%? The last 1%? The 90% takes a room full of TB harddisks and thousands of units parallel verification.
But yeah, how hard can it be to make a fully autonomous vehicle? I'll bet we'll have the fusion, flying car and AI analog: constantly 30 years in the future with winters interspearsed.
Funny, I was thinking just the opposite. Rural areas would be easier since there are few interactions with other cars. And they'd be able to react faster when a deer jumps in front of you. Of course, getting a heads up infrared would go a long way to avoiding deer at night. Unless it is planting or harvesting time, the odds of seeing and interacting with anything on gravel road here are practically nil. Maybe 1 vehicle for every 10 miles I drive. Computers should find that pretty easy. All you have to do is keep it between the fenceposts.
The REAL problem is twofile: (1) that we are no longer creating new, higher-paying jobs to replace those that were automated away, and (2) that the benefits of increased productivity per worker haven't been shared by the workers for 40 years.
The REAL problem is that you can't imagine what you could possibly ever do without a 'job'.
Is the wealthy "Libertarian" way of dictating social standards.
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
Like acess to freeway lanes, or much lower toll freeway lanes.
Like much cheaper insurance.
Universal Basic Income, funded by the recognisation that if the only things in the loop are energy and material resources that are rightfully property of everyone on planet earth, and robots manufacturered from said resources, then everyone should get a share.
By all means, have bonuses for those who like to innovate, but Luxury Automated Communism!
My 35 year old car just looked back at me and said, "Dude! What?"
Have gnu, will travel.
Ah, 'Universal Basic Income', the last gasp of socialism as it fades into irrelevance.
We're looking at a future where you can build anything you want in your parents' basement so long as you have the raw materials to do so. Why would I want the Glorious People's Central Income Committee deciding what I should and shouldn't have?
I'm going to extract a shitton of enjoyment out of going to sleep in my pod in Denver and waking up at the beach in San Diego!
The REAL problem is twofile: (1) that we are no longer creating new, higher-paying jobs to replace those that were automated away, and (2) that the benefits of increased productivity per worker haven't been shared by the workers for 40 years.
The REAL problem is that you can't imagine what you could possibly ever do without a 'job'.
That's a secondary problem. Most people worry about how they would *survive* without the paycheck that comes from having a job.
That's not how universal basic income works. Everyone gets enough for cost of living (food, shelter, utilities). If you want more than that, it's up to you.
At least in the US, we'll see rioting and the very imminent threat of mass scale starvation before anything like UBI comes into play. I think Luddite-style robot smashing and a descent from an automated technological society will happen before our 'betters' part with a shiny penny of their hoard. (In typical idiot revolution fashion, the robots that could provide for us all will be targeted before the robot's masters who are keeping the productivity to themselves.)
If you want a vision of the future, imagine a youtube comments section scrolling - forever.
The idea that everyone needs to be working 40 hours a week in our modern, increasingly automated world is absurd. Productivity has done nothing but go up for forty years. Remember the dream of a world where people could pursue hobbies and have more leisure time, away from work, because we designed machines to do the hard work for us? It's basically here, but we're all operating under this crazy mentality that we should be working eight hours a day, five days a week, if not more. And you know what more free time means? More time for people to innovate and invent. There are tons of brilliant people out there with a great idea for a new product or new business, but they don't have the time to pursue it.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Cost the cost in half and I'd ditch my car in a heartbeat.
and what will happen to people automated out of a job?
They will be paid to throw rocks at windows in order to generate jobs for glaziers.
Or they can spend their time studying economic fallacies.
I mean I could see an arrangement like they have for nursing where you agree to x years of service in return for having your tuition paid, but paying for job training myself?
That used to be called an indentured servant, and it wasn’t a very good thing if you ended up stuck with an unscrupulous boss.
You started talking about efficiency. There are exist much simpler solutions: 1) Take a bus. (one driver drive several passengers)
Clearly time is not a factor in your efficiency calculation
And where do you get the raw materials and energy? Trade some of your blood plasma for a couple of pounds of resin? A kidney for a year's worth of food? You can't print bacon and eggs and toast and orange juice for breakfast.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
The problem is that unless it's mandated by the government, instead of being voluntary, compliance won't happen because too many people, given a choice of doing extra hours or being out of a job, will do the extra hours.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
The REAL problem is that you can't imagine what you could possibly ever do without a 'job'.
You mean things like starving, freezing and being dirty?
I can think of plenty of things to occupy my time besides work, but I still need an income.
And where exactly do you think those raw materials are going to come from if you don't have any money to pay for them?
The answer to that is easy. A Basic Income policy. A standard amount paid to every one. Enough to cover the essentials. Then work is something you do to pay for the extras, not to survive.
You're probably either obviously kidding or running a little experiment here with your commentary - to see how many people "disagree" with you. I don't know.
But in case you are not, here are some of Elon's latest tweets:
https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/577946471804235776
@elonmusk Mar 17
To be clear, Tesla is strongly in favor of people being allowed to drive their cars and always will be. Hopefully, that is obvious.
https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/577946893646364673
@elonmusk Mar 17
However, when self-driving cars become safer than human-driven cars, the public may outlaw the latter. Hopefully not.
Why try to build a machine to mimic human intelligence. There are 7 billion people on earth. Already remote control tech is allowing soldiers to maintain a 9 to 5 job fighting wars from their Florida bases. So let us equip the cars with real time feedback remove control and outsource driving to drivers sitting in Bangalore, Bangkok, Dacca, Manila... It will be fun to watch traffic.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
You may not hav noticed, but Laissez Faire Capitalism is a busted flush. It may have been fashionable, coming out of the 1980s, but since 2008, ever fear people are buying into it. If it was actually the one true way, the right wouldn't need a fake news channel to lie to them 24 hours a day.
Like most engineering problems, once a solution exists in prototype form, it looks like a solved problem to the marketer. In reality, there is a big distance between something that sort of works in ideal conditions and something that is really reliable under most conditions. Driving safely and efficiently is a difficult problem, at present requires expensive sensors and a lot of computing. It will get cheaper and easier and more reliable and will probably be useful. However I think we will still have a full set of manual controls in cars for decades to come.
DISCLAIMER: I don't give a flying fuck if you agree with me or not, I don't give a flying fuck about your insults, and you're not changing my mind, EVER, either, so just don't bother commenting on the above at all, deal with it.
Your post sounds so much better when read in an Abe Simpson voice.
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
When every American housewife understands that the Blue Eagle on everything that she permits into her home is a symbol of its restoration to security, may God have mercy on the man or group of men who attempt to trifle with this bird.
That fallacy is based on what is rapidly becoming it's own fallacy - that human labor is required.
Robots are rapidly reaching a human level of dexterity, and amortized cost is rapidly falling below human wages. What kind of job is a man without intellectual talent to do when robots can do every menial task for a fraction of what it costs him to survive? And for that matter we're beginning to automate an increasing amount of intellectual labor as well - by the end of this century it's the vast majority of people will be unlikely to be able to out-perform a robot that costs a fraction of their living expenses in any economically meaningful way. The service and entertainment industries may still prefer "the human touch", but there will be a steady flow of wealth from the service sector to the fully-automated manufacturing and agricultural industries, and the farm/factory owners just aren't going to buy enough services to balance the wealth flow and keep the current economic system viable. Not unless that ownership is spread across a large fraction of the population rather than being almost entirely concentrated in less than 1%.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
How are you planning on acquiring those raw materials when they're all owned by a select few who have absolutely no incentive to share them? If they've already got all the money they could ever want, why would they bother selling it to you? In their ideal world you die, and they buy whatever pittance you own for pennies on the dollar.
Do you think THIS society will go along with that rather than pay less elsewhere?
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
Who's going to be left to pay your basic income?
and it actually has a tremendous amount of historical evidence to back it up.
So do you only drive model T's? Modern cars already do a lot of the "control" of low level components based on your "inputs". Raising our level of control abstraction to a simple joystick for direction, or just a voice command of "go there" is just a matter of degree.
... when self-driving cars become safer than human-driven cars, the public may outlaw the latter...
This may happen incrementally...
Imagine that left 'carpool' lane of the freeway turned into a 'auto-drive' only lane. 180 speed limit. Auto-drive cars merging effortlessly into and out of the lane. People sleeping, texting, eating, watching movies as they zip by.
After a few years, only the right lane is open for 'human driven' cars. They will be stuck behind whoever the slowest driver in their lane is. Their insurance rates will be crazy high.
You won't even need to outlaw human drivers, any more than you need to outlaw people taking a horse and buggy to commute to work these days.
"ending range anxiety,"
The comma should go *outside* the right quotation mark, not inside it.
Why OpalCalc is the best Windows calc
Maybe if you couple it with celebrity endorsement. Funnel a few million to the Kardashian clan and I bet you could make some headway.
I periodically link Marshall Brain's "Manna" into these discussions ; his novel basically describes what you just said, only the rich guys "won" by ushering all the "useless poor" into government subsistence camps policed by robots.
His proposed robo-utopia is probably going to rub most libertarians up the wrong way, seeing as it includes panopticon surveillance and implants that can deprive you of your liberty (in exchange for a life of self-determinism and luxury that would otherwise give most of them a wet dream...).
.. .and incidentally, many of his predictions are already true - Amazon and other players already have warehouses where the humans are mere robot arms serving a computer. The only thing really lacking for his Manna 2.0 version is the federated web API for employment contracts, which can't be far off.
If you hate spammy advertising so much, why do you force it on us here? Surely you realise your name is universally reviled on Slashdot for this incessant nonsense you spew forth, and your childish attacks on people who point it out to you.
You can still take it to the track, instead of risking the lives of others for your own amusement. Was that so difficult?
"Manifestation of personal freedom"! If that's what it means to you, your ideas of freedom and your own self image are damaged beyond repair. If you're admitting you'll never change your mind, you are not being rational, by the very definition of the word. If you're not being rational, why should anyone assume you were rational when you concocted your strange opinion? You essentially just farted on Slashdot, and it made you feel good. Nice. Thanks for that.
He just doesn't want anyone pointing out that driving a car on public roads for pleasure is endangering others for their own amusement. If he can twist this into some stance in defense of Freedom, then it makes him feel less of an asshat for trying to demand no-one impinge on his right to endanger others, when that's all he really cares about in the first place.
Agreed. If you guys don't manage to destroy your empire before then, that will surely do it.
the benefits of increased productivity per worker haven't been shared by the workers for 40 years.
This. In the 60s and 70s there was this shared vision of what creative and scientific progress mankind could make when freed from most of the boring busywork that many jobs are.
Then a non-conspiracy(*) decided "what if we just pocket all that profit instead and instead of being just very rich become super-filthy mega rich?"
(*) most cases where people see conspiracies actually are not, they are just cases where the interests of people or groups of people align so nicely that they don't even need to make a conspiracy to act as if they had.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
Probably because, unless something changes drastically, most people can't imagine how they will eat without a job!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
I drive a small pickup with a 5-speed stick, and I know for a fact that the only control that doesn't have a direct mechanical linkage is the throttle, and I can live with that. I know I can always bring the vehicle to a complete stop whenever and wherever I choose and no automated system can override me, everything still functions even if the engine quit running.
Are YOU using the TOOL, or is the TOOL using YOU? Think about it!
"Manifestation of personal freedom"! If that's what it means to you, your ideas of freedom and your own self image are damaged beyond repair. If you're admitting you'll never change your mind, you are not being rational, by the very definition of the word. If you're not being rational, why should anyone assume you were rational when you concocted your strange opinion? You essentially just farted on Slashdot, and it made you feel good. Nice. Thanks for that.
Where do you live so I can beat your fucking face in for saying that to me, you little bitch? Fuck off and die, slag. People like you don't DESERVE to be in control of ANYTHING, especially not when, where, and how you get around, you should be on a LEASH and TOLD what to do, you're obviously not responsible enough to be allowed to run around loose.
Are YOU using the TOOL, or is the TOOL using YOU? Think about it!
You should see what people say about you. Here's an entire thread, 23 pages long, of people laughing at your pathetic attempts to threaten someone.
Just for future reference - I take insults from muppets as a sign I'm doing something right. Each post from you makes me happy, so please continue.
Hahaha! So tough! Oooh scary! You gonna run me over in your awesomemobile? If you get this upset with a slashdot post, imagine what you'd do in a case of road rage. You didn't really do yourself any favors by flying off the handle. You're just proving my point with every angry word you vomit forth. Keep up the good work, Internet Tough Guy!
Vint Cerf, when he gave a presentation where I work, mentioned that the latest version of Google's self-driving car didn't even have a steering wheel.
Allow me to present my two arguments that they're complete idiots:
1) It's now a few years from now, and half the self-driving cars on the road are 5-10 years old. Many, if not most, were purchased used.
How do you feel knowing that many of those cars' owners have never seen a safety recall, much less had one done?
2) Pull 11705 Dewey Rd, Wheaton-Glenmont, MD up in google maps, go to street view, and rotate to the left, to look at the road. One two
parking lane, directions, no lane markings, and, oh, yes, the bus uses this road, and if I drive to work, I usually drive on this
road. Tell me a self driving car's going to handle it...
Oh, and argument 3: I can go most places without driving. I use this thing called "public transit". If I really, really need to get somewhere faster, there are these things called "taxis". Consider how much a self-driving car costs, and how long you'll own it, and how much maintenance will cost, and then how much you'd spend on public transit, with or without taxis, and tell me which is a *hell* of a lot more money.
mark
Again each time I read an article on Slashdot about autonomous vehicles, I'm amazed at how the same bunch of geeks who would murder someone just so they can retain complete control of their gadgets, computers, websites and houses, can at the same time be happy to let a computer take control of their cars?
I don't understand?
Try it! Library of Babel
Well, by then you won't have a basement for your kids to work in: you'll be lucky to have a tent.
Or enough energy to keep warm, let alone run your 3D printer.
I know it must happen to you at least a few times every week, but: The next time someone beats you to a pulp in real life, you piece of shit? You'll have to wonder if it's me.
Sleep well, asshole -- if you can. Guys like you? Your days are numbered, both on the Internet, and in real life. Enjoy living in fear.
Are YOU using the TOOL, or is the TOOL using YOU? Think about it!
The REAL problem is twofile: (1) that we are no longer creating new, higher-paying jobs to replace those that were automated away, and (2) that the benefits of increased productivity per worker haven't been shared by the workers for 40 years.
The REAL problem is that you can't imagine what you could possibly ever do without a 'job'.
"no longer creating new, higher-paying jobs to replace those that were automated away" Well we aren't replacing high paying manufacturing jobs with high paying manufacturing jobs, but we sure are creating new high paying 'knowledge worker' type jobs all the time. However, I have no idea if the rate of knowledge worker job creation is keeping pace with the decline in manufacturing jobs. I wish it were easier for the layperson to search for things of that nature without having to wade through dozens of biased/politically motivated 'articles'.