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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's good to see more real world testing of these systems in a challenging environment. It will be interesting to see how they handle Pittsburgh's winter. I was hoping that they'd be ready by now, since my kid is about to get a driver's license, but at least I should be able to buy one in 5 or 6 years.
Jobs are miserable and robotic; giving them to robots is a great justice.
Instead, we should pay people to achieve the goals of civilization: maintaining land and buildings, participating in cultural events, having families, curating farms, maybe even maintaining old documents and cumulative knowledge.
The cube-slave period of humanity will be seen as the bleakest, if only by the alien archeologists sifting through our rubble for clues as to how to avoid the potential demise of their own civilization.
Alternative Right.
This blows a HUGE hole in Uber's argument that they aren't a taxi service and shouldn't be regulated as one. They can't argue that self driving cars are independent contractors or that they are merely middlemen facilitating a service with an app.
If I were a passenger in a self driving car, I would sit in the back seat and act panicked, banging on the windows with a horrified look on my face while mouthing "help me!", every time we passed another car.
It won't be long until it's the other way around - only a fool would ride with a human driver.
Uber-bot 54321 has filed a lawsuit against Uber-bot 12345 in federal court today. Uber-bot 54321 claims that Uber-bot 12345 failed to yield at the intersection of Beta Drive and Program Lane. It is still unclear if humans will be on the jury as they are becoming less and less reliable in every-day matters of state.
In other news, Uber-bot OS 10 has been released today leading to scattered reports of biological transport vehicles randomly stopping in the middle of transit lanes. AI developers promise a patch is forthcoming.
Chemical batteries are still overheating world wide, leading some in the Matrix Party to call re-ignite calls for the biological battery initiative to be readdressed in Congress. President Siri has not commented on this.
Turning to weather, the Arctic Tundra is expecting another comfortable day, with High's in the mid 80's...
So what? The whole medallion deal serves to create an artificial scarcity. Once there are no jobs to protect there'll be millions of these on the roads. I can't wait until I no longer need to own and drive a car.
I'd wager the AI drivers will STILL drive better than a majority of the human drivers...
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.
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.
What do you expect to happen? What would be different with a human driver?
If you think the driver won't call the cops on you, maybe you should consider that the passengers will.
All my liberal friends think I'm a conservative, all my conservative friends think I'm a liberal.
You don't realize exactly how little you understand the subject either. All your comments are totally empty and you make absolutely no point.
The improvement of AI technology over the last two-three years made AI better than humans in many fields. Go game is one thing. Driving is another. AI is better at driving as human already, because sight is now as good as human (even better when you add a radar) and reaction time is 100 times lower. Insurance companies won't have a problem, because better driver means less accidents. As of laws ... it seems some states are OK with it.
So please stop trolling and bring real arguments.
“Have you ever noticed that anybody driving slower than you is an idiot, and anyone going faster than you is a maniac?” -- George Carlin
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
What you don't seem to understand is that it's already there, on public roads now.
It's not decades away. It's already happening.
And it's less than a decade from being a product that you can go buy.
People were scared when elevators stopped having operators too. Sure, elevators are an easy problem, cars are a hard problem.
But when AIs have already driven millions of miles on public roads in traffic, you can't claim that it isn't going to happen without sounding like a crazy person.
And you can't claim that it won't be allowed to happen for decades when it's already being allowed without sounding a bit deranged.
Teslas are not self driving. The person watching Harry Potter was committing the same error as the RV riders of urban legend who turned on the cruise control on the Interstate and then went into the back to relax.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
I've been driving for 17 years. If I took all the data from 100 cars run over a year, that's 5 times more experience than me with all kinds of situations. Company analyzes the new data, figures out what updates are needed, and pushes them all out. Imagine 1,000 cars. 10,000. You just can't compete in terms of knowledge.
"Fancy cruise control" as you call it is already a product, is already in shipping cars, and you can buy it today. It's not five years away. Some currently available mass production cars already have the ability to maintain their lane, change lanes when directed, and maintain speed and distance in traffic. It's not just research and development, it's for sale.
What's going to be here in five years is a product that will take you from point A to point B without you doing anything but telling it where you want to be. Those points will likely not initially be any point in the country, but they will likely be any point within a city that's accessible by city street. Successful research and development leads to products, and by every reasonable measure, the current research and development is very successful, since they're already putting those research and development cars on the public streets.
And since you mention freeways, driving on the freeway is actually the easy part. City streets are a much harder problem, but they're a problem that's also nearly solved.
Please explain why you think I don't know what I'm talking about. Do you think the technology demonstrations have all been faked? Do you have some sort of insider knowledge about it not working that contradicts all the information that's been published about how well these systems work now?
You're declaring it "hype" when anybody paying attention can see it's happening. So please, if you've got something useful to add, do so.
Bad driving is typically not criminal, although some bad driving is illegal. There's a difference.. Whatever faults a self-driving car has, they're not likely to be against the law. Some of the things that lead to bad driving (like alcohol) are.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes