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Uber Starts Self Driving Car Pickups In Pittsburgh (techcrunch.com)
The reports were true. Uber on Wednesday announced it a select group of Pittsburgh users will get a surprise the next time they book a cab: the option to ride in a self-driving car. TechCrunch reports: The announcement comes a year-and-a-half after Uber hired dozens of researchers from Carnegie Mellon University's robotics center to develop the technology. Uber gave a few members of the press a sneak peek Tuesday when a fleet of 14 Ford Fusions equipped with radar, cameras and other sensing equipment pulled up to Uber's Advanced Technologies Campus (ATC) northeast of downtown Pittsburgh. During my 45-minute ride across the city, it became clear that this is not a bid at launching the first fully formed autonomous cars. Instead, this is a research exercise. Uber wants to learn and refine how self driving cars act in the real world. That includes how the cars react to passengers -- and how passengers react to them. "How do drivers in cars next to us react to us? How do passengers who get into the backseat who are experiencing our hardware and software fully experience it for the first time, and what does that really mean?" said Raffi Krikorian, director of Uber ATC.When a couple of drivers were asked about Uber's push to get cabs drive themselves, they weren't pleased.
It won't be long until it's the other way around - only a fool would ride with a human driver.
Instead, we should pay people to achieve the goals of civilization: [...]
Who is this "we" that's doing the paying?
I thought that self-driving cars still had to have a "driver" in them, ready to take control in the event of of an incident. Are these Uber cars going to come with an Uber "driver", or is the passenger expected to take over when* that incident happens?
What if that passenger does not hold a licence, or is not fit to drive through intoxication? Does the passenger get some sort of discount because they might be expected to step in and do a bit of driving?
* note 'when', not 'if'
RTFA. The passenger will never be expected to take control.
The cars have two Uber engineers in the front seat. The one in the driver's seat has his hands and feet hovering above the steering wheel and pedals, ready to take control as quickly as humanly possible. "Whenever a stopped vehicle blocked an entire lane, he toggled back into manual mode to switch lanes and drive around — an action Uber’s self driving cars will not yet take." The article didn't elaborate, so I'll have to guess that under autonomous control the response to a stopped vehicle blocking an entire lane will be to stop and wait for the stopped vehicle to move on, rather than attempting to change lanes and pass.
Also, from TFA: "You don’t notice how many unexpected incidents occur during a routine drive until you ask a robot to take the wheel." Really? I don't know about you, but I notice a lot of unexpected incidents pretty much every time I get behind the wheel.
Instead, we should pay people to achieve the goals of civilization: [...]
Who is this "we" that's doing the paying?
That's the problem with society today. We seemingly only find value in the almighty dollar.
Humans have already proven for thousands of years that money is not a necessary component of survival, no matter how the world today wants to paint it.
If by "not anytime soon" you mean "sometime within the next five years" you're right.
This is happening, and it's happening quickly. The AIs that exist now are already better than average human drivers. They will quickly improve to the point that they're better than any human driver. A driving AI doesn't have to be better than a human at everything, it just has to be better than a human at driving. And that's rapidly becoming a solved problem.
It's the chess situation all over again. Lots of people denied that computers would ever be able to beat a grandmaster right up until the point where it happened.
Instead, we should pay people to achieve the goals of civilization: [...]
Who is this "we" that's doing the paying?
That's the problem with society today. We seemingly only find value in the almighty dollar.
Humans have already proven for thousands of years that money is not a necessary component of survival, no matter how the world today wants to paint it.
Comments like your betray a deep and important misunderstanding of what money is. Money is a convenient fiction, no more and no less. It's a stand-in that we use to represent real resources and labor, to make exchanging them easy. The focus on "the almighty dollar" is actually a focus on "goods and services needed and desired by humans".
If what you're saying is that modern humanity is too materialistic, too focused on comfort and convenience and too accustomed to living in a world of plenty, you can make that argument. But complaining about a focus on money just demonstrates that you don't understand what money is.
Note that I'm not claiming that money is the only way to manage the production and exchange of goods and services. It's just the best one we've yet found in an environment of economic scarcity. If automation transitions us to a post-scarcity economy, in which there's so much of everything that everyone can have whatever they like, money may no longer be a good way to manage it. But we're certainly not there yet.
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