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Obama Proposes $4 Billion Investment In Self-Driving Cars (transportation.gov)
An anonymous reader writes: The Obama Administration has unveiled a proposal for a 10-year, $4 billion investment in the adoption of autonomous car technology. The money would fund pilot projects to, among other things, "test connected vehicle systems in designated corridors throughout the country, and work with industry leaders to ensure a common multistate framework for connected and autonomous vehicles." The administration says it has an interest in cutting the death toll — over 30,000 people each year in the U.S. — associated with traffic accidents. The proposal also calls for the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration to work with industry to resolve regulatory issues before they inhibit development of self-driving cars. "This is the right way to drive innovation," said Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx.
Why is he getting involved in this at all? We already have several companies working toward this goal. The only answer that makes sense is that he wants to fund those companies closest to him or his party.
That's worth 8 Solyndras
Take money from the people at gun point to give to corporations. As usual, Obama stands for welfare. Corporate welfare.
"...you can keep it." Oh boy, here we go. Obama wants to junk more cars again. Cars have represented freedom in the United States for nearly a century.
It's the ultimate government wet dream of control and power. If you control all means of transportation (if normal cars get outlawed at some point) you control EVERYTHING.
Wherever humans thrive, innovate, or succeed in any way, shape or form, there are cars too. If you take that away you are on your way to becoming a nation of slaves.
Like it or not, government giveaways of your tax dollars will likely christen even the projects you support.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
"Have you not considered how much easier it is to control a walking population?"
Gas or electric, cars consume a tremendous amount of energy shuttling one person from place to place compared to mass transit. How about encouraging denser housing, so people don't have to commute so far to work. Or support that whole "walkable community" thing that so many people want to live in.
http://github.com/gbook/nidb
Clearly the most pressing issue the U.S. has at this point are those damn human controlled cars! I'm sure there's no better use for $4 billion than this. Nope, none at all...
What we're seeing here folks is an outgoing president going into full "my legacy" mode. This frequently looks similar to "full retard" but the prez gets a pass...
when obama put 500 million into a solar company and then it went bankrupt
I think people should be mandated by the govt to live in dense megacities and be required to present proof of reason why they need to travel between mega cities...
WAIT - I think I've seen this movie before!
What will an unmanned Mercedes do to prevent being stripped at a stop light on the wrong side of town? Like in the South Side of Chicago?
Go ahead and take your personal $4 Billion and invest it in driverless cars. As for me, I will go ahead and invest MY money in companies that I choose.
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
It's always easy to make yourself look good when you get to spend other people's money to do it.
Last I checked, we had this little problem of a "national debt" and weren't exactly making ANY progress on paying it down. Yet Obama thinks he can just snap his fingers and pull another $4 billion out of the air, because he'd like to see driverless cars get some help from Federal government? (And let's face it.... whenever Federal government decides they can't bear to stay "hands off" of something any more, it means they want to micro-manage it and control it. That's the only kind of "help" they know how to dole out.)
Last I checked, they already handed companies like Tesla Motors some pretty big subsidies to promote what they're working on. How about govt. just steps back and lets private industry continue working on that?
What About Liability Self-Driving Cars?
That is what the gov needs to work on before you have some who it setting in the hospital with bills racking up as the courts are fighting over who will pay the bill.
Or some one is doing hard time as them being the owner / renter of the car is found guilty of Vehicular homicide, accomplice (just by renting out the car you own and the rent / call a auto car app pulls a uber) / license auto suspension from (photo tickets that get lost in the owner / renter / user mix) / dui from just being in a auto car / auto driving into a airport or other restricted zone (there was a apple maps flaw that results in drivers crossing airport runway).
So the administration is spending somewhat less than half a billion a year to test the road-worthiness of such autonomous vehicles and then ensure that the different models can operate with each other. It's not about crony capitalism but ensuring that the autonomous vehicle market doesn't degenerate into a Wild West of clashing, or worse crashing, standards. Of course, the ideal would for a world body to set the standards for autonomous vehicles, but waiting for that could mean some other country could get a head start in developing the technologies that would later be incorporated in those standards.
Yes, let's enforce high population density communities. While we're at it, fashion consumes a tremendous amount of energy and time. It also promotes the culture of privileged. Let's have everyone wear state issued uniforms and do away with the individual expression through fashion. Orange jumpsuits should work fine or black and white striped uniforms if that makes things easier on the eyes.
What about Basic income for the people who will lose there job from the this? and the then the GOP takes away there medicaid?
Ugh... The whole drive to self driving cars is more about putting the millions of taxi/truck/trash drivers OUT of work.. Using their own tax money to fund it is kinda underhanded.
This administration is just flat out sick. I don't even know what to say anymore. I didn't think it was possible to sink lower than W, I cannot wait until his term is up.
If they want to cut the death toll, the answer is obvious: spend the money on public transportation. I prefer PRT (e.g. Skytran), because it offers all of the common practical advantages of automobiles yet also uses the best and most highly-developed technology for automated vehicle guidance: rail. As long as we continue to use vulcanized pneumatic tires for the bulk of our transport needs, we are failing.
If the Obama administration is planning a handout for self-driving cars, it's because they are planning another Solyndra. Some of the money will actually be spent on the stated goal (perhaps even the majority of it) and a large portion will be deliberately handed to someone who has no actual plans to return anything, and who will pocket it.
Ya,except trains suck. Trains are terribly expensive, especially here in the US. Trains don't go anywhere people need to actually go, so you either need to walk or drive the rest of the way. They can't go uphill.... seriously they don't have the traction unless you build one especially for climbing hills, which makes them both expensive and incompatible with either other tracks or other trains. Trains are mass transit, so will always take longer than personal transit unless you are a couple stops away because of all the transfer and waiting times.
The only places you get bang for your buck with mass transit are in dense urban cores where there are too many people and buildings for cars and enough people to fill them up all the time.
Higher speed rail in the Northeast Corridor from Boston to DC or maybe California between San Francisco and LA make sense where air travel is saturated, just like it does in Europe and Japan, otherwise air travel is better. Trains for long haul freight make sense for getting things from the middle of the US to the coasts. But otherwise we are talking about incremental expansion of Urban areas with a few miles of new transit here and there. Of course that $5 billion would be barely enough for a couple of rail projects with a few miles of service... going back to the whole too expensive thing.
It seems like most people want to live in one of two conditions, either clustered up with other people jammed into a box, or spread out with some space but still with some community around which they can be clustered. Why shouldn't these models be promoted? People should be able to live where they work, simply because that's a model that actually works well for everyone. When that's not the case, a lot of inefficiency arises, and we all suffer for it.
Has anyone written a user script to automatically re-submit after a delay? So damned annoying
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I'm for investment in mass transit, although I'd be really ecstatic if my community would at least invest in sidewalks and pedestrian crossings.
The problem that I see with denser housing in the USA is it would face huge social hurdles. There is a whole movement of people wanting to live in tiny houses. But the catch is that they don't want that tiny house stacked on top of another and surrounded on every side by similar units. They are going with a tiny living space so that they have more of their outside space usable. Most Americans still dream of owning a single family home with separate bedrooms for each child and plenty of living space to sprawl. Changing that mindset is certainly possible, but it'd require concerted effort shaping peoples hopes and dreams on a massive scale
Say that's nice freedom of movement you have there, it be a shame if something happened to it.
Take the damn four billion and invest it in the homeless (veterans especially).
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
1. I drive 40 minutes to work every morning and up to an hour and a half driving home in the evening. I would love to hand this boring and wasteful task to my car. I could certainly do something much better with the time.
2. This technology will certainly become commonplace (look at aerospace, for example). It is going to take research to figure out how best to do this. It is going to require adjustments to how transportation is regulated. It may require changes to our infrastructure. You certainly don't to put these vehicles on the road without some thought to the implications of doing so. This costs money. What is the alternative?
3. The part that does concern me is what will happen when autonomous commercial vehicles become common. Talk about a job killer. How many hours each year do long haul trucks sit idle because the driver is required by law to stop to rest? That issue would completely disappear (along with a whole lot of decent jobs). Of course, this also could eliminate those accidents caused by drivers falling asleep.
As in almost all change, there are good points and bad points. There is also cost.
Who would care if the US spent 4 billion dollars on research, regulatory updates and infrastructure updates if the benefits far outweigh the cost? Unfortunately, sometimes you have to spend money just to find out if spending more is warranted. Consider the trillions we've spent recently that had almost no prospect of providing any benefit to the average American citizen. I'd much rather see spending on something like this.
We always figured robots would change our society.
When I was young, people thought computers would "do their homework".
Now, the AI that is gonna change the world is just as simple as autonomous vehicles.
No more truck drivers, no more taxi drivers, no more bus drivers.
Cutting the lowest job for immigrants and the uneducated.
Cutting costs for delivering goods drastically, this will be as big as the manufacturing revolution.
. . . . outside urban cores, and close-in suburbs. It only is an economic choice in high population density areas. Everywhere else, costs per passenger-mile (or passenger-kilometer, if you use rational standards ;) ) are high multiples of private transit, and have far lower utilization. . .
That's ok, because the vast majority of people live in those urban cores and the suburbs, beyond that, the vast majority of travel is between or to those urban cores, which means...
Well, it turns out, it'd be the reduction of a lot of transportation problems.
There is a whole movement of people wanting to live in tiny houses
Based on this week's Powerball, I rather think people want HUGE houses. . . .
Looking at your post, perhaps some of the money would be better spent on basic education...
Commercial interests seem to be handing the development of autonomous car travel just fine. Rather than having Washington jump into its own program of vehicle development, better to facilitate the development of the numerous industry standards, many of which will involve state and federal infrastructure, that we are going to need to make autonomous vehicles pervasive.
I'm thinking of cars that receive data from highways for local conditions, from NOAA for weather, and from each other to manage city traffic with least congestion.
When people "lose jobs", they usually get new ones. Well, except under Obama, whose stimulus programs, crony capitalism, ACA, and other policies have led to a significant shrinking of the labor participation rate.
Actually, it's mostly Democrats that are "taking away their Medicaid", by bankrupting the country.
Self-driving cars are part of the SJW agenda to take away our manhood. Alphas don't want a layer of electronics and artificial intelligence between us and the metal.
Fuck Obama.
You are welcome on my lawn.
jammed in with a horde of unwashed masses, unable to stop when and where I want.
So you never fly eh?
But I digress.
I still think there is an opening for rail here.
First, avoid the insanity that are airports.
Second, it's safer as one device can't destroy an entire train full of people.
Third, you could load your car on the train and then use it at your destination.
Key is to not force the service to stop at every podunk town between destinations. Just stick with Major Cities.
I'd much rather drive my car into the train and then spend two days traveling cross country in a nice comfy observation car, then drive off at my destination, even if I had to end up driving several hours more to reach the ultimate destination.
I suspect the economics would work. Just need someone/some company to champion it and over come the inertia of he current rail industry.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
It's always easy to make yourself look good when you get to spend other people's money to do it.
It's also easy to make yourself look good when all you have to do is make complaints about somebody else and not even back it up.
Last I checked, we had this little problem of a "national debt" and weren't exactly making ANY progress on paying it down.
Actually, depending on your definition of progress, the deficit is going down from what it was projected to be, so you must not have checked recently.
Of course, you really ought to examine the question of payment of a national debt versus the income of a country. It's a very complicated analysis, but from many viewpoints, debt is not a bad thing in and of itself, so it's the actual structure and nature of the debt that matters.
Yet Obama thinks he can just snap his fingers and pull another $4 billion out of the air, because he'd like to see driverless cars get some help from Federal government?
See here? This is showing your actual lack of understanding. They can, indeed make 4 billion dollars appear, by issuing yet another bond, at low interest rates, and it'll be taken and accepted by everybody.
(And let's face it.... whenever Federal government decides they can't bear to stay "hands off" of something any more, it means they want to micro-manage it and control it. That's the only kind of "help" they know how to dole out.)
Interesting premise, but exactly what do you expect when it comes to autonomous cars? A hands-off approach to regulation?
Last I checked, they already handed companies like Tesla Motors some pretty big subsidies to promote what they're working on. How about govt. just steps back and lets private industry continue working on that?
I'm sure Tesla Motors has gotten some subsidies, but they aren't blank checks, and I can't find any specifically geared towards autonomous car research, so any benefits will be secondary.
It may be considered by the Federal Government that a more direct approach is desirable.
A 4 billion dollar gift to a major campaign contributor. And so on it goes.
The House Republicans have responded with legislation (the Keep God-Fearing Pedestrians Safe From Godless Autonomous Terrorists Act) that requires every vehicle to be driven by a licensed Christian. Every vehicle must also have a plastic Jesus statue on the dashboard.
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
Could it be because of this ? Video of Obama 'Beast' Cadillac limo stuck on ramp in Ireland
Reading your post, it's clear that your in favor of such investment because you personally benefit.
I wonder if you're open minded enough to knowledge that you'd be more opposed to it if you did not personally benefit. For instance, if you were a expected to be displaced truck driver, would you still feel that it was good due to the "benefit of the greater good"?
Regardless, I'm strongly opposed to this expenditure. There is already plenty of investment and research happening around this technology and there is no sign of that diminishing any time soon. Put simply, federal money is not a requirement for the current advancement of the technology and it is not at all certain that federal funding will in anyway accelerate what is already a very rapidly developing technology.
There is however a MASSIVE federal deficit that needs to be addressed and avoiding the expenditure of ANOTHER $4Billion would be a prudent step. There are also more needy programs, both existing and yet to be implemented, that would be FAR better spends for the greater good than this.
Put simply, there's no legitimate excuse for this expenditure, but since you'll benefit, you're on-board?
They say they are concerned about the number of annual road deaths. Aren't most caused by people who can't afford autonomous cars (teens, seniors, white trash drunks, etc.)? (And no, an autonomous car with a steering wheel can never be cheaper than the cheapest non-autonomous car.)
Isn't obvious that this technology will only work in areas with great climes and clear roads (a fraction of the country)?
Isn't this another one of those situations where we ALL pay (suffer) for something that only a fraction of the people will have/use?
Shouldn't we permanently fix the hacking problem (my old microwave oven is un-hackable) before putting millions of people's lives/time at stake?
Solyndra 2.0, I suppose... Yes, autonomous vehicles have their place perhaps, but that place is not on everyone's dime.
I post this for future generations to read, not some of my loony, hype-swallowing contemporaries who can't see beyond the end of their cell phones.
Really ? Please show how public transportation is viable in most of the BosWash corridor.
Take Washington, DC, as an example. The "suburbs" currently extend up to 90 miles west of DC (i.e. the I-81 corridor), blend seamlessly into the Baltimore suburbs to the north, and are rapidly blending seamlessly to the Richmond area to the south. To the east, it's solid burbs all the way to the Chesapeake. Philly blends into Baltimore in a similar fashion, and into NYC via New Jersey. . .
Are you seriously claiming that public transit is the best way of traveling from, say Bowie, MD (Joint Base Andrews area) to Reston/Herndon VA ? Outside of a few chosen corridors, you're talking orders of magnitude more time and cost, even assuming you could get from one designated point to another one. . .
To keep autonomous vehicles off the road.
Truck drivers. There sure are a lot of them in the US.
Just how many will there be when you can slap a sensors and servos package on an existing vehicle and have it drive without pause, without pay, consuming 25% less fuel and requiring less maintenance and tyre changes? How many fewer truck stops, diners, mechanics, etc?
We're not all going to the same place, so mass transit becomes incredibly inefficient. People like to think only of fuel and operating cost, but not of time and the aggregate cost across population. Imagine if all commutes were 90 minutes longer each way.
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He's tossing out silly but warm fuzzy proposals that will be shot down by Congress so Democrats can point fingers.
It's $4 billion over TEN YEARS. That's half a drop in the bucket.
The issue isn't the money. $5 Billion is a pittance in Federal terms. The issue is the meddling. The potential for excessive mandates. Autonomous cars should be on the roads as soon as they can demonstrate they have an equivalent or better ability to drive than human drivers on existing roads.
It is that simple. And that is the type of simple uniform state and federal laws that we should be working towards. A car company should be able to certify that their autonomous system is safe and effective on existing roads and then that vehicle should be able to drive.
No additional infrastructure. That infrastructure approach has failed again and again since the 1950s. What we need is just roads and cars. Sure better roads would be great and benefit everyone and make it easier for autonomous cars to drive safely. Autonomous cars can't be relying on guide wires or smart signs or whatever. That is an old approach that just doesn't work because it puts an elaborate and expensive infrastructure before the utility. That infrastructure first approach is a recipe for having a couple roads where you can have autonomous cars and then decades of wasted time shaking rich people down to fund more infrastructure while the rest of us keep getting killed.
Having a dumb road system and vehicles that become smarter as technology improves is precisely the way we need to move forward to get this technology adopted as fast as possible and save lives.
Doesn't all mass transit have massive amount of government subsidies now? How is that working out?
I see a vibrant private sector effort along these lines already. Government can do the most by eliminating unnecessary regulatory barriers (or in rare instances putting up a few for safety, perhaps), but otherwise should stay out of the way. Government programs have a way of becoming jobs programs and therefore hard to shut down. The example of the Pentagon not wanting a new weapons system but Congress mandating it anyway comes to mind. Let the private sector risk its money and direct its deployment toward the most promising uses.
Does this mean we can start talking about effective gun control now?
It occurs to me that self-driving cars are rolling camera platforms, and I can foresee a future in which recordings and the coordinates of where they were made are kept and are mandated to be accessible by the police or government (or even more likely, Google/Tesla/GM/etc). The world of tomorrow will likely be one of unrelenting, unavoidable surveillance, infinitely more than it is today, bad as that already is.
Oh, $4 Billion out of $3.999 Trillion??? Oh, .001% of the budget? ARRRRGGGGHHHHH! What a waste of money?!
MOAR "Defense" spending instead! 'MURICA!!! Only $615 Billion for the military?!
Yeah, um, please... Spend the $4 Billion on planning so we don't have to spend $20 Billion reacting.
Not sure what you're getting at. Can't truck drivers be re-educated to serve society in another manner? Or are they only stupid enough to drive trucks?
Dump the $4G into public transit, starting in the Washington, DC metro area, where the Metro, decades newer than Philly, NYC, and Chicago's subway/el systems, is so vastly worse than any of them. Cheap crap, and bad management, too.
mark
The national debt is not an accident. It is intentional spending of people's savings. Because politicians who raise taxes don't get re-elected.
You're a slave to your car. To the payments, the maintenance, the smog and the wars fought to keep gas cheap.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
Maybe you should investigate moving to a country without a government, might suit you better. Or, if that seems to scary, enroll in a community college economics course, you might learn a thing or two.
In the future, there will be machines to do everything for us.
And human beings won't know how to do a goddamned thing for themselves anymore, and eventually, they won't even know how to repair the machines that they now depend on for their survival.
R.I.P., human race. Maybe the next dominant species to acquire sentience won't fuck everything up so much for themselves.
Drive your own cars, damnit!
A tipsy person could just tell their car to take them home.
It would also help with parking. I could go to a meeting, restaurant, club, etc, get out in front of the place, and tell my car to go find a place to park. When I was ready to leave, I could call it on my cell phone, and tell it to come get me.
Remember the car Sandra Bullock drives in Demolition Man? Gets in, drives out of the city, engages auto-pilot on the freeway. Then when she gets near her destination re-takes the wheel for the drive through the city.
Is there anyone who thinks we couldn't have this in production next year if we wanted to?
Nope, no sig
"Self-driving cars get press? I want in on the action!" That's all this is about.
If all they were interested in was reducing highway carnage, 90% could be eliminated with 3 steps:
1. Breathalyzer interlock on every car.
2. Cell phone disabler while car is moving.
3. 8 hours per day maximum driving time per truck driver.
I would never ever trust a car to drive for me, and will never use a "Dumb" car.
Great, now the Republicans will develop an irrational hatred of self-driving cars and repeatedly try to repeal the laws allowing them to be tested. "Obama's coming for your steering wheels!"
Last I checked, we had this little problem of a "national debt" and weren't exactly making ANY progress on paying it down. Yet Obama thinks he can just snap his fingers and pull another $4 billion out of the air, because he'd like to see driverless cars get some help from Federal government?
The national debt is not a problem, it's a solution. If you could borrow $18.2T at ~1.2% APR, you'd be a fool not to.
Furthermore, while $4B may sound like a lot of money, it's roughly 0.02% of the national debt. This isn't exactly going to make or break our federal budget.
Posting anon because I'm lazy and don't feel like starting a whole debate.
Elon Musk was displeased with California's recently released rules which he thought were too restrictive. This appears to be an attempt to establish a Federal Standard before California's rules can achieve 'Grandfather' status like what happened with emissions.
Like emissions, the Federal standards will be weaker than California's. Whether you like that depends on how much you appreciate clean air or safe roads. I think I'll side with Gerry Brown on this one. Again. (He was Governor when we implemented emissions controls in the 70's too, which were decried as too hard to meet. Thankfully, he was right and he won. Cars are clean, high performing and high mileage. Our air is vastly better than in the 70's or 80's, with many more cars on the road.)
Exactly right.
Any sane transport policy will likely be a mix of public, semi public autonomous vehicles and privately owned autonomous vehicles. If you live in the boonies you might own your own car. In the suburbs, maybe not.
"In America, first you get the sugar, then you get the power, then you get the women..." -H. Simpson
Ok, the reason of 'the government has an interest in cutting the death toll' may not be 'bogus' per say (assuming we believe this is a function of government) but that doesn't mean this is $4B well spent...perhaps spending it on developing an accurate, easy, extremely reliable & fast alcohol detection system connected to ignition systems would be better (http://www.reuters.com/article/us-public-health-drunk-driving-idUSKBN0MF2J920150319)...there are no 'protected reasons' that such a system can't be required to be implemented(*) in all new cars (no different than any other safety device) and as such the only argument against these devices being required are about 'inconvenience'...that's not insignificant if they aren't easily used & near 100% reliable but intuitively I find it far easier to believe we can develop such a device with sufficient money & research ($4B seems like a good start) LONG before we have autonomous vehicles roaming the streets!
Ultimately all I'm saying is that if the only reason for this $4B investment by the government is 'reduce the death toll from accidents' that there are better ways to spend that money. As such I find the argument for spending this money is bogus.
(*) HOW it is implemented or 'violations' enforced or 'tampering' enforced etc. & used could be argued to imply some 'privacy concerns' & I will not 'poo-poo' those concerns, they would have to be addressed but these concerns do not on their face invalidate the premise of the technology presuming it otherwise can meet the basic requirement stated of 'accurate, easy, reliable & fast' (e.g. not so much inconvenience that simply driving to the store & back seems like a chore & would potentially lead to a 'revolt' even by otherwise reasonable people! :-))...
The below is from me originally from 2001: http://www.pdfernhout.net/on-f...
Although see also this idea from a couple of weeks ago: http://www.pdfernhout.net/pled...
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Consider again the self-driving cars mentioned earlier which now cruise some streets in small numbers. The software "intelligence" doing the driving was primarily developed by public money given to universities, which generally own the copyrights and patents as the contractors. Obviously there are related scientific publications, but in practice these fail to do justice to the complexity of such systems. The truest physical representation of the knowledge learned by such work is the codebase plus email discussions of it (plus what developers carry in their heads).
We are about to see the emergence of companies licensing that publicly funded software and selling modified versions of such software as proprietary products. There will eventually be hundreds or thousands of paid automotive software engineers working on such software no matter how it is funded, because there will be great value in having such self-driving vehicles given the result of America's horrendous urban planning policies leaving the car as generally the most efficient means of transport in the suburb. The question is, will the results of the work be open for inspection and contribution by the public? Essentially, will those engineers and their employers be "owners" of the software, or will they instead be "stewards" of a larger free and open community development process?
Open source software is typically eventually of much higher quality ( http://www.fsf.org/software/re... ) and reliability because more eyes look over the code for problems and more voices contribute to adding innovative solutions. About 35,000 Americans are killed every year in driving fatalities, and hundreds of thousands more are seriously injured. Should the software that keeps people safe on roads, and which has already been created primarily with public funds, not also be kept under continuous public scrutiny?
Without concerted action, such software will likely be kept proprietary because that will be more profitable sooner to the people who get in early, and will fit into conventional expectations of business as usual. It will likely end up being available for inspection and testing at best to a few government employees under non-disclosure agreements. We are talking about an entire publicly funded infrastructure about to disappear from the public radar screen. There is something deeply wrong here.
And while it is true many planes like the 757 can fly themselves already for most of their journey, and their software is probably mostly proprietary, the software involved in driving is potentially far more complex as it requires visual recognition of cues in a more complex environment full of many more unpredictable agents operating on much faster timescales. Also, automotive intelligence will touch all of our lives on a daily basis, where as aircraft intelligence can be generally avoided in daily life.
Decisions on how this public intellectual property related to automotive intelligence will be handled will affect the health and safety of every American and later everyone in any developed country. Either way, the automotive software engineers and their employers will do well financially (for example, one might still buy a Volvo because their software engineers are better and they do more thorough testing of configurations). But which way will the public be better off:
* totally dependent on proprietary intelligences under the hoods of their cars which they have no way of understanding, or instead
* with ways to verify what those intelligences do, understand how they operate, and make
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
It's the mindset that needs to die, not fixating in the argument of "just" 4 billion over ten year. When you add up all the pet pork projects, that shit adds up real quick!
Life is not for the lazy.
What can't go on forever, WONT!. I've got savings in GOLD; and you can kneel before my cock if you think you can just take it from me!
Life is not for the lazy.
Truck drivers. There sure are a lot of them in the US.
Not just truck drivers - any job that involves moving someone or something from point A to point B with a human behind the wheel is a target for elimination. For the most part, a job in the transportation industry pays a livable wage. If transportation jobs are rendered obsolete by autonomous vehicles, we're talking a mind-mindbogglingly huge number of workers who will have to retrain for another career, or fight for the remaining low-wage jobs that are available to unskilled workers.
As much as politicians love scaring the American public with the specter of terrorism, it's the dropping value of an hour of unskilled human labor which should really be sending chills down peoples' spines. The point some members of the liberal camp fail to see is "minimum wage", is a misnomer. It's a minimum cost of labor, and raising it is akin to price fixing a commodity that is in obvious oversupply. Some municipalities have already done just that. Allow that to sink in: We have so many unskilled laborers willing to work for unlivable wages, that we've actually had to pass laws mandating they're paid more than the free market can bear.
Star Trek and and the Spaceship Earth attraction at EPCOT told us automation would provide us with a life of leisure, while we're free to pursue our dreams. You'd spend the day composing music, designing surfboards, painting, etc., while Mr. Roboto goes to work for you. In the real world though, Mr. Roboto works for the big corporations, and they see no need to employ *you*.
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DRM is like antifreeze, to the MPAA/RIAA it's sweet, to the consumers it's poison.
Why is he getting involved in this at all? We already have several companies working toward this goal. The only answer that makes sense is that he wants to fund those companies closest to him or his party.
Well, there's picking winners - more importantly, designating losers. Government subsidies slow development by putting the non-subsidized at a market disadvantage - so they tend to drop and NOT innovate - while reducing the need of the subsidized to innovate to achieve market penetration.
And there's the opportunity to turn another 4 billion dollars of the taxpayers' money into a slush fund for looting by cronies, using operations on the model of Solyndra.
But my guess is that he's offering the money to bribe selected hi-tech companies, in trade for installing backdoors for US intelligence - both in their current and future products.
- It would (allegedly more than) cover their losses due to lower sales and usage of their products (especially internationally) .
- It would pay for installing the infrastructure to TRACK everyone using driverless cars - and forwarding this info to the government.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Derpy derpy derp. The deficit is lower than it has been in a decade, the economy is in a great shape, investing in infrastructure like this is exactly what we should be doing right now. We should make sure that it is US manufacturers that lead the industry as self-driving cars become a thing. We set the standards, and everyone else will be licensing our tech. Setting up nation-wide standards in the world's biggest auto market is a big step toward that. Otherwise we'll be paying EU and Japanese companies and playing catch-up. The current state-by-state legislation where a self-driving vehicle couldn't cross state lines is plain stupid and inefficient.
It's such a small amount of money, you won't mind if I take it from you. At gunpoint.
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... and got automobiles?
So those jobs will go. Re-educate and get a new job.
Way to jump on the autonomous vehicle bandwagon. And way to give US citizen's money away...again. It's as if the Google, Ford, Honda, Toyota, GM, etc need your help to get these vehicles on the road. You are a dumb fuck, Obama.
Tesla only got a loan. That's because Tesla technology works and requires no robbery. This autonomous vehicle proposal is because autonomous vehicles don't and won't work in the real world. Bush gave away cash for hydrogen vehicles, another tech with fundamental problems. Are we all driving hydrogen vehicles now? This is buzz and rob, buzz and rob.
I tried making a Basic income, but it wasn't much so I learned C.
If there is an interest in cutting death toll, then why not attack the much bigger problem: guns. There are many more people shot each year in the US than killed in car accidents! In fact, the past four years more US residents died than in the wars in Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan together. It is time the US as a whole gets the priorities straight: repeal the 2nd Amendment!