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Lyft Plans Self-Driving Taxi Fleet By 2017 (bgr.com)
An anonymous reader writes:
Lyft hopes to launch a self-driving fleet of taxis as soon as next year, according to reports, arriving in the market years before Apple and Google. "There will still be a human 'driver' in the cars, as mandated by law for the time being," writes BGR, adding that eventually the driver will become obsolete. "But said human will be there solely in the event of a malfunction. Otherwise, Lyft's new vehicles will drive themselves."
Meanwhile, Fortune writes that most analysts believe it will be four years before Apple gets a car on the road, though they're moving in that direction and even hired a Tesla executive last month. They add that both Apple and Google are now eyeing at least 400,000 square feet of Bay Area real estate to use in the development of their self-driving fleets.
Meanwhile, Fortune writes that most analysts believe it will be four years before Apple gets a car on the road, though they're moving in that direction and even hired a Tesla executive last month. They add that both Apple and Google are now eyeing at least 400,000 square feet of Bay Area real estate to use in the development of their self-driving fleets.
Doing it first, doesn't usually mean you get it right.
Apple makes good ideas with shitty implementations and make them not suck.
Tesla and the others will have the Windows CE implementation until Apple gets theirs in front of the public, and then they'll be an android copy of the apple car that .... works ... sorta ... but you'll be tracked 100% of the time by malware because no one other than Apple will treat you as the customer, everyone else will treat you as the data mining product.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
"Self-driving" crap is not beyond prototype stage in very specific easy-to-handle road environments where results are reported by the businesses that stand to gain from it.
The moment even one independently performed and reported test is carried out negotiating the streets of New York, London, Manila and a snowy mountain in the north of Madrid, I'll start to take this shit seriously. Until then, it's just another case of the Press Release replacing the Journalist.
Sure, it's boring, but I can, like, look into a second job working on line for $55 an hour!
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
Is the human driver aspect a make-work program for under- or unemployed college grads who majored in [INSERT USELESS LIBERAL ARTS MAJOR] ? Can't fathom someone sitting idly in a vehicle most of the day, doing nothing. They'd lose their mind.
Possibly invented by the now out of work ex-drivers.
While everyone is concentrating on the technical aspects of the driverless vehicle revolution, I see precious little about the human aspects.
Even aside from the destructive folks making a mess out of the vehicles, what about preferences? There are otherwise normal people who have an aversion to going through areas with a high population of "chocolate" people, and would shit themselves being in a driverless car in an area populated by them. Yeah, that will go over well.
And will Lyft try to emulate the traditional taxi experience, by programming the vehicles to ignore African Americans? http://www.nydailynews.com/new...
Technical factors can sometimes be the easy part - human factors? Not so much.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
Seriously, they should leave NOW.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
A self driving car with a human "supervisor" makes no sense at all.
That would be like being a driving teacher, always anticipating what the car/student is going to do, contemplating if that makes sense and being ready to correct faults of the student and danger coming from other drivers/cars.
That is much more challenging than simply driving the car yourself and have the car have some active safety features like pedestrian and sign recognition and distance warnings etc.
I certainly would not use such a taxi ...
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
As under the law with self driveing cars you need to have extra training and other stuff very sorry area to area so will lift be giving that training or just be hiring with out checking for that?
Will be interesting to see what if any effect the recent failure of uber/lyft to buy regulations in austin will be.
That these companies think they can flout the law and no one will notice. So tired of hype. It would greatly benefit all of us and likely actually move things along more quickly if we addressed and worked with the actual realities of things.
Lyft and Uber drivers gonna be unemployed real soon--bitches.
Now that there's no barrier to entry to creating a taxi service, why use them?
Google copied the entire iOS
Huh? Nope. Google bought a small start-up founded by former Google employee and which back then was already working for a Java-based Phone OS.
(Java was very popular for making software on feature- / smart- phones)
They just happen both to have been unveiled around the same time frame (2007).
Under the hood, they share nearly nothing:
- Android is a new beast, using a Linux kernel, but running an entirely new user-space, mostly based around a Java-like platform, instead of the regular GNU userland.
(again very common on older feature phone. Linux is a nice powerful kernel that comes for free. But most feature-phones didn't have enough power to run a full-blown GNU userland, thus tended to use custom software).
- iOS is a Mac OS X derivative : more or less similar BSD-ish root, but with a different GUI layer.
On the surface, none of them is anything new:
- They look similar to the earlier success Palm OS, which in turn look similar to Apple's own ill-fated commercial flop "Newton", which in turn shared a lot with the even older EPOC system by Psion, etc.
Apple just put the marketing effort to take a concept that is very popular in a smaller market (PDA) and bring it to a wider audiance.
Even if it took them a precedent failed attempt (the above mentioned "Newton"), and other companies were on a similarly successful path at the same time (Palm OS-powered smartphone started to appear around the same time, and at that point Palm OS was already very successful in the business world).
Had Apple not vulgarized smart-phone with the iPhone, palm would have been successful in it any way, and google would be releasing Android all the same.
and Samesung copied the iPhone hardware down to the last detail.
These are smartphones. It's a slab with a big screen and a touch interface. It's been these way all the way back from the dawn of PDAs.
(With the exception of Psion having a touch interface AND a compact clamshell keyboard. Since then it's touch screens everywhere).
Of course they are going to look more or less similar. But nobody is putting a tantrum because iPhone look remotely like Palm and iPAQ.
Windows is a copied version of the Macintosh GUI.
As mentioned by others:
- Xerox PARC actually invented and demoed the first GUI.
- Lots of company have started producing GUI, some with very little resemblance to Mac OS (e.g.: Amiga OS).
If there were a revolution in self-driving cars coming from Apple, you can bet its competitors are going to make billions copying Apple,
Or you can bet that it is going to be a big flop, like Apple Newton was on their first attempt at making pocket computers.
Or it's going to be the "meh" that Apple's iWatch is currently being. (Overpriced, not very interesting feature-wise, with a shitty battery life. Not very useful, looks like just an attempt to jump into the same bandwagon all the other constructors tried to jump in once they noticed the relative popularitime of Pebble's Kickstarted)
Or it's going to be as popular as iMac's original hockey-puck single button mice.
thanks to the pathetic IP laws that are not capable of dealing with the rapid IP innovations of the modern world.
Yeah, because trademarking rounded corner is totally non pathetic.
Apple use their patent portfolio as simply a weapon trying to block potential competitors.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
There's already precedent with car sharing (car that you can quickly pick up for a short ride, while never interracting with any human being) :
- The company needs anyway to have the full billing information of their client (of course, you need to *bill* them for the ride).
- When the next customer enters the car, they'll notice the stupid things done by the predecessor, and they'll call customer service to complain.
- Customer service assigns the shit-discoverer to another (hopefully clean) car
- The soiled car gets blocked for reservation (and remaining reservations are re-assigned)
- A technician comes to pick-up the car and bring it for cleaning
- The car shitter (remember: the car-sharing companies knows precisely who booked which car when - they have a log of which customer card was used to unlock which vehicle. They need it to do proper billing) gets billed a huge fine to cover cleaning and act as a deterrent.
This fine is currently already working as an efficient deterrent against intentional car-shitting.
Never heard of- nor personnally experienced- finding such a shared car filled with poop.
The only difference with potential self driving cars:
- the users of self-driving taxis would eventually be legally allowed lay (more appropriate than "drive" in this context) passed-out on booze, thus leading to an increasing rate of car-shitting of the *non-intentional* kind (*).
- on the other hand, self driving taxis could autonomously drive to get cleaned instead of waiting a technician to come an pick them up.
----
(*) as in, the ride you have booked arrives at your place with the preceeding occupant of the car still inside, inconsious in their own pool of vomit and shit.
On the other hand, as a positive note, an autonomous car would be able to detect "failure to exit the vehicle at the intended destination" condition and subsequently try to seek (i.e.: autonomously drive to...) proper medical assitance for their passed-out passenger.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Are you also saying tht unattended places are immune from people bustung or messing them up? Is this going to be different from other unattended places?
All of your self driving perfection is ignoring the fact that ATM's get held up - and they have cameras, public restrooms have issues. Somehow some way this taxicab that won't have money is somehow immune.
On the other hand, fully unattended car-sharing DOES ALREADY EXIST OUT-THERE (and that's just the few with which I have personnal experience), and none of them have reported the chronical "people-taking-a-dump-in-cars" problems that you are afraid of, despite being as unattended as ATMs or public toilets.
I'm not throwing imaginary technical solutions at you. I'm speaking how things are currently happening out there on the street.
Yes it is going to be different from unattended places and - in the case of carsharing - is arleady different today.
The main difference is that while both your examples (ATMs, public toilets) and cars (car-sharing, self driving autonomous vehicles) are 100% unattended,
the former are percieved more or less as anonymous (though in practice some of your exemple do have cameras, as you mention, but that still requires authorities to track down the culprit - which they won't have the resource to do systematically, only in case of a big heist), whereas as the later are definitely not simply due to the fact how these service work (either today for car-sharing or potentially in the future for self-driving cars).
As you're more or less anonymous in a public rest-room, or in front of an ATM (to which you haven't log-in already with your card), the GIFT comes into play (and this is nothing new to the internet, the concept of perceived anonymity possibly leading to anti-social behaviours has been debating since antiquity). The sensation that vandals have that: they aren't seen, won't be caught, and other will discover their deeds only to late - leads the vandals to feel impunity and try to do (litteral or metaphorical) shit.
Shared cars (and very likely future autonomous variants of it), by the very way which the service works, require you to log-in before being able to access the cars (They need to know who accessed which car when in order to correctly bill). You're not imagining yourself as an anonymous, uncatchable vandal. The person taking a dump in the car is clearly user John Doe, user-id #123456, billing info [blabla] - because he needed to unlock the door before accessing this substitue toilet, and he's required to provide that info to do the unlock. When the next user discovers the dump, billing you for the cleaning is absolutely trivial (just a couple extra line of code in the whole booking/renting/billing platform).
I'm not (only) speaking about a technical solution that will eventually need to be implemented.
I'm mostly pointing out that the current setup of car-sharing is a good enough psychological deterrent against poop-vandalism of cars. Not because of magic pixie dust, but simply by virtue of lacking the necessary "I won't get caught" sensation that is necessary to spark the antisocial incar-dump-taking behaviour.
Imagine a world were, before getting access to a public toilet, we need to first swipe both your driver's license and credit card to open a secure door.
Do you really think that you'll see as much vandalism as currently ?
That's how car-sharing work (and very likely future autonomous car will work) - because the whole system need it for administrative purpose.
My point, lost in this parade of people telling me I am wrong abot the whole thing,
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
You are probably not old enough to remember elevator operators. They said in an elevator all day and skyscrapers in major cities and drove the elevator. No, really! They were kept on "for safety reasons" for several years after the invention of automatic elevators.
You have probably never seen Linotypes or handset metal type; everything is offset and digitial today. The unions that helped kill the newspaper business in America required something called "bogus type"; a union typesetter would take what had already come in, rekey it in metal and then throw it out.
And by the way, people do you find that these jobs! If you remember the movie quote the shining", then Jack Nicholson is typing "all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.", That was folklore in the print trades many decades ago.
https://tech.slashdot.org/stor...
Star Trek transporters are just 3d printers.
Article has misread the report it links to, which says by 2020.
2017 is when they will start testing it.