It seems inevitable to me. Its going to take a lot of work and time and increased CPU power and better sensors, etc to fully realize all that, but we will. The advantages are so large that any nation 'Luddite' enough to refuse will be stone age compared to the rest of the world 30 years later.
Well, we will have to disagree. I think the change is now inevitable and won't be seriously impeded just by a few accidents all that much. The cars being sold 10 years from now will largely be capable of self-driving in a wide variety of situations, and that will just snowball. Once the idea of the car as a utility that can simply drive itself to where it is needed and carry out simple tasks on its own takes hold driving will die a very swift death.
Actually the number has declined pretty sharply in the last 10 years, to 32,719 in 2014. Its still a huge number, and the number of injuries is staggering, numbering in the several millions. I didn't look for an economic loss estimate but at the rate of 90 deaths per hour in the US it has got to be quite expensive. Every person in this country is effectively paying something like $1000/yr just to pay for the consequences of crappy human driving.
Yeah, we could lower our medical costs drastically, by 300% anyway, but it would still be 1/3 of a huge number is a huge number.
I didn't mean to suggest otherwise, sure, it will start with 'highway mode', but that won't be a long phase. For obvious reasons people will desire the ability to drive on surface roads. Actually parking will come before surface roads, Ford already has a system that can autonomously move the car and park it, driving at low speeds in a dense environment. It will only be a matter of time, I still say about 5 years, before these capabilities have effectively merged and we have a car that can deal with most situations. It might not be allowed to just drive without a 'supervisor' for a certain time, but there will be a huge push to get rid of that limitation.
Think about it, an autonomous car can go to school and pick up the kids, it can go to the store and be loaded with groceries, it can go to the dealer and get maintained, it can come and fetch you, obviating the need for a second car in many cases, etc etc etc. People may think they want to drive right now, but really they don't. They want the power and convenience of instant effortless transportation.
And once that day comes, then they won't even care about owning a car, the concept will be silly. The entire edifice of the car culture will vanish like a puff of smoke into nothing. Cars will simply become a ubiquitous utility, a service you pay to access and which supplies you with however much personal transportation you need or can afford. And of course then it can be supplied at different grades, you can ride with other people going where you're going and its cheaper, you can ride a 'car' that stops at various stops and picks up and drops off lots of people, gosh its a bus! Everything is about to change. The entire edifice upon which most people's reasoning about autonomous vehicles is built will be quaint nostalgia in 20 years.
Those are all considerations, but 50,000 people are killed in automobile accidents in the US alone every year. When that carnage is reduced to 2500 the naysayers will have zero ammunition, especially since the COST is huge and thus the savings also huge. Just as people accepted the hazard of cars over that of horses to gain advantages so will they accept driving by machines. The more economically sensible alternatives pretty much always win out over time.
I think its one of those things that once it comes to fruition everything simply changes. Its like automobiles. Most people laughed and insisted that horses would be around for another 100 years and cars were 'a fad' or 'a toy for the rich', etc. Once Ford made the first cheap car horses were done in 10 years flat, off the road.
It will be the same way. Safe, automatic driving will free up people's time, it will reduce costs greatly, and it will start a whole series of changes in the transportation infrastructure that will snowball. That's how I see it. In 10 years people will start to balk at buying a car they have to drive for themselves, and eventually they won't even care to own one anymore, it will be trivial to summon up what you need from whomever you contract for that service. The whole fetish of car ownership will go up in a puff of smoke. There will of course always be a few nostalgics, hobbiests, collectors, people that drive in some specific situations perhaps, but not much.
Its not possible to say exactly how long the transition will take, but in 5 years automated driving will be much improved over its current state, which is already pretty good, if limited. Within 10 years it will probably be accepted, like cruise control is now, and somewhere down the line, probably within our lifetimes, certainly well within the lifetimes of younger people, it will be ubiquitous. I'm guessing about 20 years, after that a human driver will be an oddity, if not an outright hazardous situation to be dealt with.
Not hardly. I've driven in NYC, Boston, many other cities all over the US, as well as in more rural areas, in the NE, on bad roads, snow, ice, etc. I think I know all about driving in the US. Most people just want to get from A to Z. Once automatic driving is here it will rapidly kick the humans off the road, nobody will be stupid enough to ride with you.
Most drivers accidents are in places they are familiar with. Its not entirely clear if this is simply due to mostly driving in such places, but it is commonly asserted that over familiarity often leads to inattention. I know this is true for me, and so presumably for many others. The fact remains, human drivers have a high error rate, and so far all the automated driving systems being tested in the US fall far below that number, even given that they drive in controlled circumstances.
It won't even amount to a statistic. Yes, there's plenty of work to continue to do, but even today cars can drive well enough to avoid the vast majority of accidents that humans get into because they're attentive and alert at all times, and they have much better adapted sensors, deployed in more and better locations, etc. The driving record of the existing autonomous systems is really incredibly good. Yes, they may only drive in conditions they're already prepared for, but as I said, most driving is of that sort anyway. Given another 5 years of polish and good heuristics on when NOT to use autonomous driving I think the accident rate of these vehicles will be a fraction of a percent of what it is for humans.
that 99.9% of the routes that cars drive today are on the same few miles of road? Do you know that its really easy for different computers to exchange information. In other words if its pre-mapped, its pre-mapped for EVERYONE, and you really don't need to pre-map a ton of routes hither and yon to get everyone doing 98% automated driving. That's 98% fewer accidents.
Yeah, its hard to believe fixed routes won't be entirely mapped soon. Aren't there city buses that can already do that? I believe so. Because its a small fixed route it can be completely mapped and analyzed to the point where there aren't any surprises except what normally isn't there, you can pick it all out, you already know all your navigation decisions, etc. It will still take a couple more decades for the whole thing to get routine. I doubt truck drivers are losing TOO much sleep yet.
I use a number of products like that which really don't get much in the way of updates. Even so, at least your project has a maintainer that probably answers the very infrequent question and obviously addresses any bug reports in some fashion. Lots and lots of sourceforge projects never ever release code. I expect many die at the "I had an idea" stage, but others just never really sort out the organizational or "marketing" issues (IE getting people interested and trying the code so that something grows).
Clearly the LCOE for SPV and ST (even with storage) is NOW competitive with nuclear power. Its probably not yet competitive with NG, but again NG is getting a free pass on CO2 and other issues. Given that recent research suggests that the actual social cost of carbon may be as high as $1000/ton we're pretty sure at this point that SPV is a huge good deal. Why do you think it is growing by leaps and bounds?
Yes, of course subsidies help, but they don't even cancel out 10% of the subsidy that coal/gas/oil get. Just the EXPLICIT subsidies on fossil fuel use are on a par with ALL the subsidies for renewables, so it isn't even clear to me that in terms of incentive we wouldn't be best off just getting rid of everyone's subsidy, not even counting carbon costs.
The truth can be determined with FIVE MINUTES of looking, and invariably the people who are trotting out this "solar panels use more energy than you get" BULLSHIT aren't interested in facts. Its an outright lie that someone has perpetrated on the public and the people who continue to circulate it are either VERY ignorant, like they haven't read Wikipedia, or they're actively dishonest. There's no legitimate skepticism involved at this point. If someone had brought this up 20 years ago we'd have all scratched our heads and thought "well, that's a good question, sounds wrong, but we'll get back to you." Today, in 2015? Its just a scurrilous lie.
All you probably NOTICE are the more successful FLOSS projects. For each one of those, there are 100, possibly even 1000 that languish, maybe make a release or two, and then lie in their shallow graves on sourceforge for the next 10 years.
I'm sure you can find some person somewhere who's mentality is so limited they don't make basic connections between actions and consequences, or fail to make basic generalizations. I don't think that means such things aren't part of basic human intellect.
You're right of course, but that's the SIMPLE PART. The harder part is judgement. Even the stupidest human being has a vast amount of common sense, masses of rules of thumb which they have internalized and a deceptively deep understanding of context. How would a robot even know how to classify things as clothing or not clothing? Or more to the point washable or not washable? All but the stupidest humans would hesitate to throw piece of clothing with a large wet ink stain into a laundry machine with other clothes for instance, and said humans could reason this out from first principles (IE an understanding of how the washing process works, what ink is, etc). The level at which even the most sophisticated software operates is nowhere near robust enough make those sorts of reasoned decisions except in very carefully set up situations.
And then there are the higher level dimensions to the whole thing. When is it appropriate to wash things and when not? Which things do you have a RIGHT to wash and which things do you have a RESPONSIBILITY to wash? Since the 1950's people have gone on about the "3 laws of robotics", but Asimov would have been the first to point out that such things couldn't possibly ever be imbued into a machine. Its not even just the logical and epistemological limitations of those sorts of strictures themselves, but simply that we cannot define the situations wherein they would operate or determine when they were being violated. We can't make a self-driving car because we would have to teach it things like "Its better to run over the old man than to run over the baby when you cannot avoid them both." Obviously we'll live with robot cars that simply do one or the other by chance, but to imagine that anything short of a fully conscious general AI could make that sort of decision in a 'human-like' way is patently ridiculous, and we haven't got even the slightest idea how such an intelligence would be developed.
You say 20 years, but I say 100 years. We've barely set our foot on the first step of the path to understanding how to make something like that, and the most critical challenges involved have barely been imagined.
I mean basically we have $1 trillion worth of funny money from QE1-42 that has to be burned sooner or later anyway. If no actual real money is spent, is it really a valuation? Is it really a bubble?
No, you cannot 'unilaterally' create a condition between two groups of people. You can DO something unilaterally, "The introduction of systemd has unilaterally created a polarization..." is a misuse of the word. The EFFECT of what systemd did was a polarization, in which BOTH PARTIES moved further away from one another "towards opposite extremes." Polarization cannot, definitionaly, be unilateral. Its crappy writing. I suppose complaining about crappy writing on/. is like complaining about the smell of sewage on a particular day, but so be it.
As soon as we lost that it all went to hell, and until we get it back there's really nothing that's going to fire up competition, nor can we maintain network neutrality when so few entities control the last mile.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P... is the original nuclear fusion powered starship study. It would be a 500 ton scientific payload reaching 0.12C, but it does require some capabilities not yet available. An Orion type system, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P... using nuclear pulse propulsion however could presumably be built today with existing tech and would suffice for a trip to 8000 AU.
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It seems inevitable to me. Its going to take a lot of work and time and increased CPU power and better sensors, etc to fully realize all that, but we will. The advantages are so large that any nation 'Luddite' enough to refuse will be stone age compared to the rest of the world 30 years later.
Well, we will have to disagree. I think the change is now inevitable and won't be seriously impeded just by a few accidents all that much. The cars being sold 10 years from now will largely be capable of self-driving in a wide variety of situations, and that will just snowball. Once the idea of the car as a utility that can simply drive itself to where it is needed and carry out simple tasks on its own takes hold driving will die a very swift death.
Actually the number has declined pretty sharply in the last 10 years, to 32,719 in 2014. Its still a huge number, and the number of injuries is staggering, numbering in the several millions. I didn't look for an economic loss estimate but at the rate of 90 deaths per hour in the US it has got to be quite expensive. Every person in this country is effectively paying something like $1000/yr just to pay for the consequences of crappy human driving.
Yeah, we could lower our medical costs drastically, by 300% anyway, but it would still be 1/3 of a huge number is a huge number.
I didn't mean to suggest otherwise, sure, it will start with 'highway mode', but that won't be a long phase. For obvious reasons people will desire the ability to drive on surface roads. Actually parking will come before surface roads, Ford already has a system that can autonomously move the car and park it, driving at low speeds in a dense environment. It will only be a matter of time, I still say about 5 years, before these capabilities have effectively merged and we have a car that can deal with most situations. It might not be allowed to just drive without a 'supervisor' for a certain time, but there will be a huge push to get rid of that limitation.
Think about it, an autonomous car can go to school and pick up the kids, it can go to the store and be loaded with groceries, it can go to the dealer and get maintained, it can come and fetch you, obviating the need for a second car in many cases, etc etc etc. People may think they want to drive right now, but really they don't. They want the power and convenience of instant effortless transportation.
And once that day comes, then they won't even care about owning a car, the concept will be silly. The entire edifice of the car culture will vanish like a puff of smoke into nothing. Cars will simply become a ubiquitous utility, a service you pay to access and which supplies you with however much personal transportation you need or can afford. And of course then it can be supplied at different grades, you can ride with other people going where you're going and its cheaper, you can ride a 'car' that stops at various stops and picks up and drops off lots of people, gosh its a bus! Everything is about to change. The entire edifice upon which most people's reasoning about autonomous vehicles is built will be quaint nostalgia in 20 years.
Those are all considerations, but 50,000 people are killed in automobile accidents in the US alone every year. When that carnage is reduced to 2500 the naysayers will have zero ammunition, especially since the COST is huge and thus the savings also huge. Just as people accepted the hazard of cars over that of horses to gain advantages so will they accept driving by machines. The more economically sensible alternatives pretty much always win out over time.
I think its one of those things that once it comes to fruition everything simply changes. Its like automobiles. Most people laughed and insisted that horses would be around for another 100 years and cars were 'a fad' or 'a toy for the rich', etc. Once Ford made the first cheap car horses were done in 10 years flat, off the road.
It will be the same way. Safe, automatic driving will free up people's time, it will reduce costs greatly, and it will start a whole series of changes in the transportation infrastructure that will snowball. That's how I see it. In 10 years people will start to balk at buying a car they have to drive for themselves, and eventually they won't even care to own one anymore, it will be trivial to summon up what you need from whomever you contract for that service. The whole fetish of car ownership will go up in a puff of smoke. There will of course always be a few nostalgics, hobbiests, collectors, people that drive in some specific situations perhaps, but not much.
Its not possible to say exactly how long the transition will take, but in 5 years automated driving will be much improved over its current state, which is already pretty good, if limited. Within 10 years it will probably be accepted, like cruise control is now, and somewhere down the line, probably within our lifetimes, certainly well within the lifetimes of younger people, it will be ubiquitous. I'm guessing about 20 years, after that a human driver will be an oddity, if not an outright hazardous situation to be dealt with.
Not hardly. I've driven in NYC, Boston, many other cities all over the US, as well as in more rural areas, in the NE, on bad roads, snow, ice, etc. I think I know all about driving in the US. Most people just want to get from A to Z. Once automatic driving is here it will rapidly kick the humans off the road, nobody will be stupid enough to ride with you.
Most drivers accidents are in places they are familiar with. Its not entirely clear if this is simply due to mostly driving in such places, but it is commonly asserted that over familiarity often leads to inattention. I know this is true for me, and so presumably for many others. The fact remains, human drivers have a high error rate, and so far all the automated driving systems being tested in the US fall far below that number, even given that they drive in controlled circumstances.
It won't even amount to a statistic. Yes, there's plenty of work to continue to do, but even today cars can drive well enough to avoid the vast majority of accidents that humans get into because they're attentive and alert at all times, and they have much better adapted sensors, deployed in more and better locations, etc. The driving record of the existing autonomous systems is really incredibly good. Yes, they may only drive in conditions they're already prepared for, but as I said, most driving is of that sort anyway. Given another 5 years of polish and good heuristics on when NOT to use autonomous driving I think the accident rate of these vehicles will be a fraction of a percent of what it is for humans.
that 99.9% of the routes that cars drive today are on the same few miles of road? Do you know that its really easy for different computers to exchange information. In other words if its pre-mapped, its pre-mapped for EVERYONE, and you really don't need to pre-map a ton of routes hither and yon to get everyone doing 98% automated driving. That's 98% fewer accidents.
Yeah, its hard to believe fixed routes won't be entirely mapped soon. Aren't there city buses that can already do that? I believe so. Because its a small fixed route it can be completely mapped and analyzed to the point where there aren't any surprises except what normally isn't there, you can pick it all out, you already know all your navigation decisions, etc. It will still take a couple more decades for the whole thing to get routine. I doubt truck drivers are losing TOO much sleep yet.
I use a number of products like that which really don't get much in the way of updates. Even so, at least your project has a maintainer that probably answers the very infrequent question and obviously addresses any bug reports in some fashion. Lots and lots of sourceforge projects never ever release code. I expect many die at the "I had an idea" stage, but others just never really sort out the organizational or "marketing" issues (IE getting people interested and trying the code so that something grows).
http://www.lazard.com/PDF/Leve...
Clearly the LCOE for SPV and ST (even with storage) is NOW competitive with nuclear power. Its probably not yet competitive with NG, but again NG is getting a free pass on CO2 and other issues. Given that recent research suggests that the actual social cost of carbon may be as high as $1000/ton we're pretty sure at this point that SPV is a huge good deal. Why do you think it is growing by leaps and bounds?
Yes, of course subsidies help, but they don't even cancel out 10% of the subsidy that coal/gas/oil get. Just the EXPLICIT subsidies on fossil fuel use are on a par with ALL the subsidies for renewables, so it isn't even clear to me that in terms of incentive we wouldn't be best off just getting rid of everyone's subsidy, not even counting carbon costs.
The truth can be determined with FIVE MINUTES of looking, and invariably the people who are trotting out this "solar panels use more energy than you get" BULLSHIT aren't interested in facts. Its an outright lie that someone has perpetrated on the public and the people who continue to circulate it are either VERY ignorant, like they haven't read Wikipedia, or they're actively dishonest. There's no legitimate skepticism involved at this point. If someone had brought this up 20 years ago we'd have all scratched our heads and thought "well, that's a good question, sounds wrong, but we'll get back to you." Today, in 2015? Its just a scurrilous lie.
All you probably NOTICE are the more successful FLOSS projects. For each one of those, there are 100, possibly even 1000 that languish, maybe make a release or two, and then lie in their shallow graves on sourceforge for the next 10 years.
Yeah, a couple, like since the 1970's. This old canard is just PURE FUD, it was never true, never even half true, etc.
I'm sure you can find some person somewhere who's mentality is so limited they don't make basic connections between actions and consequences, or fail to make basic generalizations. I don't think that means such things aren't part of basic human intellect.
You're right of course, but that's the SIMPLE PART. The harder part is judgement. Even the stupidest human being has a vast amount of common sense, masses of rules of thumb which they have internalized and a deceptively deep understanding of context. How would a robot even know how to classify things as clothing or not clothing? Or more to the point washable or not washable? All but the stupidest humans would hesitate to throw piece of clothing with a large wet ink stain into a laundry machine with other clothes for instance, and said humans could reason this out from first principles (IE an understanding of how the washing process works, what ink is, etc). The level at which even the most sophisticated software operates is nowhere near robust enough make those sorts of reasoned decisions except in very carefully set up situations.
And then there are the higher level dimensions to the whole thing. When is it appropriate to wash things and when not? Which things do you have a RIGHT to wash and which things do you have a RESPONSIBILITY to wash? Since the 1950's people have gone on about the "3 laws of robotics", but Asimov would have been the first to point out that such things couldn't possibly ever be imbued into a machine. Its not even just the logical and epistemological limitations of those sorts of strictures themselves, but simply that we cannot define the situations wherein they would operate or determine when they were being violated. We can't make a self-driving car because we would have to teach it things like "Its better to run over the old man than to run over the baby when you cannot avoid them both." Obviously we'll live with robot cars that simply do one or the other by chance, but to imagine that anything short of a fully conscious general AI could make that sort of decision in a 'human-like' way is patently ridiculous, and we haven't got even the slightest idea how such an intelligence would be developed.
You say 20 years, but I say 100 years. We've barely set our foot on the first step of the path to understanding how to make something like that, and the most critical challenges involved have barely been imagined.
lol, yeah, that's what I was thinking, they must be doing this research at NIMH!
Gold isn't any more 'real' or 'funny' than any other sort of money.
I mean basically we have $1 trillion worth of funny money from QE1-42 that has to be burned sooner or later anyway. If no actual real money is spent, is it really a valuation? Is it really a bubble?
No, you cannot 'unilaterally' create a condition between two groups of people. You can DO something unilaterally, "The introduction of systemd has unilaterally created a polarization..." is a misuse of the word. The EFFECT of what systemd did was a polarization, in which BOTH PARTIES moved further away from one another "towards opposite extremes." Polarization cannot, definitionaly, be unilateral. Its crappy writing. I suppose complaining about crappy writing on /. is like complaining about the smell of sewage on a particular day, but so be it.
Really, someone should get a dictionary for their birthday and read the definition for "unilateral" lol.
As soon as we lost that it all went to hell, and until we get it back there's really nothing that's going to fire up competition, nor can we maintain network neutrality when so few entities control the last mile.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P... is the original nuclear fusion powered starship study. It would be a 500 ton scientific payload reaching 0.12C, but it does require some capabilities not yet available. An Orion type system, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P... using nuclear pulse propulsion however could presumably be built today with existing tech and would suffice for a trip to 8000 AU.