Once we are on the other side of the autonomous creepy valley, sure things will be great and perfect and all that jazz. So far that is a mythical future you can't buy yet.
In the meantime the current crop of systems, and the ones planned for the next several years, all augment the driver rather than replace them. As such driving will be inherently BORING as hell while you are a quasi-passenger in your own car. Bored humans check phones, read email, nod off, watch movies, and other dumb stuff when they are still legally required to be in command and control of the vehicle. Google even admitted their employees were sleeping and working on laptops on the way home in their very beta test fleet (not that they fired them as they should have).
So the upshot is that while these autonomous systems will create this whole new class of collision by zombified drivers, even while potentially lowering the overall rate with their mostly good collision avoidance systems. Drivers will be out of practice and situationally unaware when HAL throws up its hands and gives back control, or when it fails to respond to trucks in the roadway, construction, black ice, pot holes, etc, etc.
So until your car is fully licensed to drive itself, these semi-autonomous systems need to be designed to keep the licensed driver on the ball and paying attention. Of course that takes away 90% of the sex appeal, so I expect the legal/ethical envelope to keep being pushed and more of these new types of crashes to keep occurring.
Ideas and good engineers are not appreciated like they used to be. CEO pay has exploded, engineer pay has mostly plateaued. Many of the better minds have followed the money to software and to Wall Street. Why work harder for relatively much less pay?
Open offices combined with onerous approval/funding models also create stifling work places with high barriers for new ideas. You can't get any real funding without months of proposals, meetings, etc. It is far easier to sit back and turn the crank rather on an incremental design than try and champion a new project in organization designed to never take any real risks.
Out of curiosity, how much help did HAM's provide during Harvey. I'm generally skeptical of the bold claims made by the HAM's I've known (many look to be a couple bacon cheeseburgers away from needing a rescue themselves), so this sounds a good disaster to measure what percentage of the communications they handled for the Houston area. Where can we get some stats?
You roll up on a nasty crawl, there are people with guns drawn and lots of yelling and screaming, maybe some blood on the ground. What should an over-armed under-trained local vigilante do?
Half or more of the guns might be held by other vigilantes who heard the same call, but without uniforms or badges, who is to know? The perp (if any) might even claim to be one of you. Hysterical and angry people screaming are hardly error-free sources of data.
Now the cops roll up and find out that not only do they have to deal with the original assault between two drunks, but have to sort out a dozen gun wielding local rednecks hopped up on adrenaline waving guns around spouting off about being sovereign citizens and who gets credit for the citizen arrest. If the locals have the wrong skin color they might "fear for their life" and just start shooting everyone.
All our Apple widgets get their update notifications about the same time (within 24 hours, faster if you tell it to check). My Nexus 6 seems to get OTA updates about 2-3 MONTHS after I see a press release about it.
Earlier this years there was a mandatory down-rev from 7.1.1 to 7.0. Now 7.1.1 is back, but after 3 weeks since the press release I still have no update, even when I manually tell it to check, and I don't expect it to show up for many more weeks.
I had very sour Android experiences from Sony and Samsung with lower end phones (still more phone than I needed if they didn't have so much crapware that they broke themselves), so I went with a pure Google solution with the Nexus 6 (as pure Google as was available at the time), and frankly the whole experience is still lousy compared to my wife's iphone experience. So while Apple's products are outrageously expensive, the just is no equivalent after-sales experience to be had in Android land.
My iPod touch is a time capsule, stuck at iOS6. Mostly it lives in my bike bag and plays music over bluetooth (i.e. no direct interaction). My iPad on the otherhand gets used daily and has the latest iOS10.
Every few weeks I need to do something like get a podcast, or change a setting on the iPod with the old OS. Given that I don't use it often and it has a horribly out of date OS it should be harder to use, right? Nope, twice as easy and 4x more logical to find crap compared to the iPad.
Usability has taken some major strides backwards. "It just works" is a joke.
How about we just implement an equivalent fine for false take down notices as users face for willful infringement? If media companies can't just spam every video with background music as infringing without risking monetary damage they might simmer down a bit.
+1. We figured this out before having our kid, and boy am I glad we did. He has not developed a real "sweet tooth", no cavities so far, etc. Meanwhile I struggle with hard to kick sugar addiction that I have yet to properly kick.
I remember babysitting a friends kid for a stretch, picking him up from daycare and a box of juice for the ride home was a required step, and the parents thought it was a responsible thing to do (and I knew no better at the time either).
There are some 900 cryptocurrencies at the moment, more variants than there are real currencies. I've been amazed the whole thing has maintained its hype so long. I expect a huge collapse before too long (not sure if its a year or ten however), as currently huge swaths of money are going into mining, but the amount of actual legal commerce enabled has been rounding error. At some point too many coin holders will ask the question: "Now what?"
Failing that I expect that when one too many criminal cases (especially money laundering and tax evasion) will get stymied by their involvement we will have major governments crack down and outlaw their anonymous sale and the whole mess will collapse. My conspiracy theory is that the NSA and its ilk have probably already cracked things well enough to track what is really going on, if not operating some of the exchanges themselves. Perhaps the whole thing has been turned into a giant honeypot already...
Google time and again hops into area with grand fanfare, claiming it will revolutionize an industry. The pattern however is that within a year or few when the fanfare dies down they lose interest and chase the next shiny object. Even if they come out with a new service I lust for, I would just be cynical and skeptical due to a long history of failing to follow through.
+1. Most folks use every raise to buy crap, sign up for another monthly bill, or upgrade an existing bill (more channels or lease a new model year). Backing off just a bit to only buying what matters to you, avoiding subscriptions and contracts as much as possible, and pocketing the extra will quickly snowball into a nice heap of cash to invest, and/or buy piece of mind.
+1. bought a Nexus 6 when it was on sale a couple years ago for $400, have it on a cheap plan, and it has been going strong. I am likely to still be using it in another year. Eventually I will repeat the process by buying last year's well reviewed phone on close out and use it for 3+ years.
Spending a lot every month for a phone and plan just seems a waste of hard earned money. I got off the new-shiny every year treadmill of financial disaster years ago and have not looked back. I'll be retired in a few years before 50 while the chumps and suckers will still be lining up outside the fruit stores for every release.
Most individuals cannot understand the law well enough not to look a fool in court, which in itself is damnation of the overly complex and impenetrable legal system we have.
I would welcome some reforms around class action suits to ensure that consumers get at least 80% of the payout, and add some duty to not settle for pennies on the dollar.
As much as I share the disgust for lawyers, it is easily eclipsed by the bad behavior of corporate entities like Wells Fargo, Comcast, De Beers, and so many others. No average individual has the resources to research, sue, and argue in court successfully. I'd rather have some non-profit or independent government entity fill that roll, but since that ain't never happening I'd rather have lawyers out that at least as a deterrent rather than just these one sided arbitration clauses.
Live cheap, retire early. Those with a decent salary could prioritize savings over shiny stuff and be able to retire well before age 65.
Most US workers don't even save 10%, and instead rack up debt well into their 40's. Living within your means and saving 30-50% of you after tax income lets you retire at that same lifestyle in a 20-25 years.
San Francisco is a megaopolis in denial. Allow more high density family housing while taxing the hell out of cars to pay for more subway lines. San Francisco is currently a giant suburb that needs to evolve more towards a dense city to satisfy housing demands.
Public transit quality varies quite a bit. Here in the suburbs of Portland OR my 7.5 mile commute choices are: Drive: 25-35 minutes, all on city streets (can't zone out) Bike: 35-40 minutes, plus 10 minutes extra for the extra shower each evening Light Rail: 50 minutes if I catch it right (one leg comes only every 30 minutes) Run: 1 hour 15 minutes, though only only practical one direction 2-3 times a week
Driving is fastest, but my least favorite due to all the stopping and traffic on busy city streets. 90+% of my commuting is by bike as a result.
I'm hoping they stick around. It would be a shame to see nVidia be the only "real" option, as they would inevitably slow down and become another Intel. It is a shame we don't have 3 or even 4 really competitive GPU vendors.
I wish no ill on Intel, but they really slowed to a crawl for innovation over the last 6-8 years. We need vibrant competition to keep prices low and performance increasing and Intel really showed what you get when there is minimal competition in the CPU arena.
The current state of "AI" is pretty damn crude, and the resulting "trained" system cannot be debugged as such. As best I can tell it is akin to shoving in data, desired behavior, and pressing "optimize". So while we would like to think there is thought and reasoning going on, there is not. If the algorithm has been poorly designed or trained there is no telling how it will react to data that is dissimilar to the training data. Graffiti is pretty random, which is easy to figure out for a human, apparently not so much for HAL.
A couple years back I read a good article on simple image recognition (simple in the sense that it was just images, not video from a moving car) with example images. Scrambled yellow random garbage would come back as a school bus with >99% probability, and so on. Basically false positives occur easily if there is not great effort made to train HAL to prevent it. My guess is that these systems are obscenely hard to get working well on good signage and without anything nefarious going on, and adding intentional counter-measures will make that job an order of magnitude harder.
Bikers share the road you insensitive clod. I need almost all the same signs when I am biking as when I am driving. Pretty much only the speed limits become mostly ignorable.
Also, "soon" will be at least 25+ years. Cars readily last 20 years these days, and you will not have 100% autonomous cars being sold within 5 years (not even close!). You will have a long tail that will include classic car drivers, and those pesky libertarian types who want the right to choose to drive for themselves, or the right to repair or modify their vehicles beyond what HAL will allow.
So every sign will have to be accurate and up to date with the database, at all times, across the entire country? Further, you'll have two masters now. What should a car do if/when it encounters a conflict? Should it stop and hand back control, use the database and ignore all signs, or use the signs as posted? All options are messy, other than making sure HAL is as good as a human at reading damaged and defaced signs.
Once you ask these dumb things to navigate back roads, or poorly maintained hellscapes that are our cities there will be numerous cases of ambiguous, changed, damaged, or vandalized signage. Humans can usually slow down and figure things out, or at least mostly know to proceed with caution despite awful signage.
My general prediction is that once these systems are run through the regulatory process needed before public release they will be programmed to be timid to the point of frustration. Drivers will be annoyed and frustrated that HAL will drive like their grandma on Sunday. If HAL takes 10-20% longer to get you to work and occasionally gives up you'll shut it off in short order. Also, if HAL can't be trusted to go on the interstate while I nap or zone out I'll never turn it on. I can't wait to read the disclaimer (and you think the itunes TOS is bad...), or to hear the howls when HAL refuses to engage until you change the oil, rotate the tires, clean the cameras, and pay a monthly service fee.
Basically this self driving frenzy is likely to go the way of the VR hype. It will be awesome tech that only a few will shell out money for, and even fewer will make use of.
Slashdot Mirror
You read all the TOS before clicking "Accept", right?
Once we are on the other side of the autonomous creepy valley, sure things will be great and perfect and all that jazz. So far that is a mythical future you can't buy yet.
In the meantime the current crop of systems, and the ones planned for the next several years, all augment the driver rather than replace them. As such driving will be inherently BORING as hell while you are a quasi-passenger in your own car. Bored humans check phones, read email, nod off, watch movies, and other dumb stuff when they are still legally required to be in command and control of the vehicle. Google even admitted their employees were sleeping and working on laptops on the way home in their very beta test fleet (not that they fired them as they should have).
So the upshot is that while these autonomous systems will create this whole new class of collision by zombified drivers, even while potentially lowering the overall rate with their mostly good collision avoidance systems. Drivers will be out of practice and situationally unaware when HAL throws up its hands and gives back control, or when it fails to respond to trucks in the roadway, construction, black ice, pot holes, etc, etc.
So until your car is fully licensed to drive itself, these semi-autonomous systems need to be designed to keep the licensed driver on the ball and paying attention. Of course that takes away 90% of the sex appeal, so I expect the legal/ethical envelope to keep being pushed and more of these new types of crashes to keep occurring.
But after 5 years you become unemployable anywhere else, so there's that.
Ideas and good engineers are not appreciated like they used to be. CEO pay has exploded, engineer pay has mostly plateaued. Many of the better minds have followed the money to software and to Wall Street. Why work harder for relatively much less pay?
Open offices combined with onerous approval/funding models also create stifling work places with high barriers for new ideas. You can't get any real funding without months of proposals, meetings, etc. It is far easier to sit back and turn the crank rather on an incremental design than try and champion a new project in organization designed to never take any real risks.
Out of curiosity, how much help did HAM's provide during Harvey. I'm generally skeptical of the bold claims made by the HAM's I've known (many look to be a couple bacon cheeseburgers away from needing a rescue themselves), so this sounds a good disaster to measure what percentage of the communications they handled for the Houston area. Where can we get some stats?
"Any help is better than no help."
You roll up on a nasty crawl, there are people with guns drawn and lots of yelling and screaming, maybe some blood on the ground. What should an over-armed under-trained local vigilante do?
Half or more of the guns might be held by other vigilantes who heard the same call, but without uniforms or badges, who is to know? The perp (if any) might even claim to be one of you. Hysterical and angry people screaming are hardly error-free sources of data.
Now the cops roll up and find out that not only do they have to deal with the original assault between two drunks, but have to sort out a dozen gun wielding local rednecks hopped up on adrenaline waving guns around spouting off about being sovereign citizens and who gets credit for the citizen arrest. If the locals have the wrong skin color they might "fear for their life" and just start shooting everyone.
Great.
All our Apple widgets get their update notifications about the same time (within 24 hours, faster if you tell it to check). My Nexus 6 seems to get OTA updates about 2-3 MONTHS after I see a press release about it.
Earlier this years there was a mandatory down-rev from 7.1.1 to 7.0. Now 7.1.1 is back, but after 3 weeks since the press release I still have no update, even when I manually tell it to check, and I don't expect it to show up for many more weeks.
I had very sour Android experiences from Sony and Samsung with lower end phones (still more phone than I needed if they didn't have so much crapware that they broke themselves), so I went with a pure Google solution with the Nexus 6 (as pure Google as was available at the time), and frankly the whole experience is still lousy compared to my wife's iphone experience. So while Apple's products are outrageously expensive, the just is no equivalent after-sales experience to be had in Android land.
My iPod touch is a time capsule, stuck at iOS6. Mostly it lives in my bike bag and plays music over bluetooth (i.e. no direct interaction). My iPad on the otherhand gets used daily and has the latest iOS10.
Every few weeks I need to do something like get a podcast, or change a setting on the iPod with the old OS. Given that I don't use it often and it has a horribly out of date OS it should be harder to use, right? Nope, twice as easy and 4x more logical to find crap compared to the iPad.
Usability has taken some major strides backwards. "It just works" is a joke.
How about we just implement an equivalent fine for false take down notices as users face for willful infringement? If media companies can't just spam every video with background music as infringing without risking monetary damage they might simmer down a bit.
+1. We figured this out before having our kid, and boy am I glad we did. He has not developed a real "sweet tooth", no cavities so far, etc. Meanwhile I struggle with hard to kick sugar addiction that I have yet to properly kick.
I remember babysitting a friends kid for a stretch, picking him up from daycare and a box of juice for the ride home was a required step, and the parents thought it was a responsible thing to do (and I knew no better at the time either).
The key is to add metal weights. Many products do this to give the "heft of quality" for pennies of metal.
There are some 900 cryptocurrencies at the moment, more variants than there are real currencies. I've been amazed the whole thing has maintained its hype so long. I expect a huge collapse before too long (not sure if its a year or ten however), as currently huge swaths of money are going into mining, but the amount of actual legal commerce enabled has been rounding error. At some point too many coin holders will ask the question: "Now what?"
Failing that I expect that when one too many criminal cases (especially money laundering and tax evasion) will get stymied by their involvement we will have major governments crack down and outlaw their anonymous sale and the whole mess will collapse. My conspiracy theory is that the NSA and its ilk have probably already cracked things well enough to track what is really going on, if not operating some of the exchanges themselves. Perhaps the whole thing has been turned into a giant honeypot already...
Google time and again hops into area with grand fanfare, claiming it will revolutionize an industry. The pattern however is that within a year or few when the fanfare dies down they lose interest and chase the next shiny object. Even if they come out with a new service I lust for, I would just be cynical and skeptical due to a long history of failing to follow through.
+1. Most folks use every raise to buy crap, sign up for another monthly bill, or upgrade an existing bill (more channels or lease a new model year). Backing off just a bit to only buying what matters to you, avoiding subscriptions and contracts as much as possible, and pocketing the extra will quickly snowball into a nice heap of cash to invest, and/or buy piece of mind.
+1. bought a Nexus 6 when it was on sale a couple years ago for $400, have it on a cheap plan, and it has been going strong. I am likely to still be using it in another year. Eventually I will repeat the process by buying last year's well reviewed phone on close out and use it for 3+ years.
Spending a lot every month for a phone and plan just seems a waste of hard earned money. I got off the new-shiny every year treadmill of financial disaster years ago and have not looked back. I'll be retired in a few years before 50 while the chumps and suckers will still be lining up outside the fruit stores for every release.
When your ONLY choice is Comcast or no ISP at all, good luck with that.
Most individuals cannot understand the law well enough not to look a fool in court, which in itself is damnation of the overly complex and impenetrable legal system we have.
I would welcome some reforms around class action suits to ensure that consumers get at least 80% of the payout, and add some duty to not settle for pennies on the dollar.
As much as I share the disgust for lawyers, it is easily eclipsed by the bad behavior of corporate entities like Wells Fargo, Comcast, De Beers, and so many others. No average individual has the resources to research, sue, and argue in court successfully. I'd rather have some non-profit or independent government entity fill that roll, but since that ain't never happening I'd rather have lawyers out that at least as a deterrent rather than just these one sided arbitration clauses.
Live cheap, retire early. Those with a decent salary could prioritize savings over shiny stuff and be able to retire well before age 65.
Most US workers don't even save 10%, and instead rack up debt well into their 40's. Living within your means and saving 30-50% of you after tax income lets you retire at that same lifestyle in a 20-25 years.
San Francisco is a megaopolis in denial. Allow more high density family housing while taxing the hell out of cars to pay for more subway lines. San Francisco is currently a giant suburb that needs to evolve more towards a dense city to satisfy housing demands.
Public transit quality varies quite a bit. Here in the suburbs of Portland OR my 7.5 mile commute choices are:
Drive: 25-35 minutes, all on city streets (can't zone out)
Bike: 35-40 minutes, plus 10 minutes extra for the extra shower each evening
Light Rail: 50 minutes if I catch it right (one leg comes only every 30 minutes)
Run: 1 hour 15 minutes, though only only practical one direction 2-3 times a week
Driving is fastest, but my least favorite due to all the stopping and traffic on busy city streets. 90+% of my commuting is by bike as a result.
I'm hoping they stick around. It would be a shame to see nVidia be the only "real" option, as they would inevitably slow down and become another Intel. It is a shame we don't have 3 or even 4 really competitive GPU vendors.
I wish no ill on Intel, but they really slowed to a crawl for innovation over the last 6-8 years. We need vibrant competition to keep prices low and performance increasing and Intel really showed what you get when there is minimal competition in the CPU arena.
The current state of "AI" is pretty damn crude, and the resulting "trained" system cannot be debugged as such. As best I can tell it is akin to shoving in data, desired behavior, and pressing "optimize". So while we would like to think there is thought and reasoning going on, there is not. If the algorithm has been poorly designed or trained there is no telling how it will react to data that is dissimilar to the training data. Graffiti is pretty random, which is easy to figure out for a human, apparently not so much for HAL.
A couple years back I read a good article on simple image recognition (simple in the sense that it was just images, not video from a moving car) with example images. Scrambled yellow random garbage would come back as a school bus with >99% probability, and so on. Basically false positives occur easily if there is not great effort made to train HAL to prevent it. My guess is that these systems are obscenely hard to get working well on good signage and without anything nefarious going on, and adding intentional counter-measures will make that job an order of magnitude harder.
Bikers share the road you insensitive clod. I need almost all the same signs when I am biking as when I am driving. Pretty much only the speed limits become mostly ignorable.
Also, "soon" will be at least 25+ years. Cars readily last 20 years these days, and you will not have 100% autonomous cars being sold within 5 years (not even close!). You will have a long tail that will include classic car drivers, and those pesky libertarian types who want the right to choose to drive for themselves, or the right to repair or modify their vehicles beyond what HAL will allow.
So every sign will have to be accurate and up to date with the database, at all times, across the entire country? Further, you'll have two masters now. What should a car do if/when it encounters a conflict? Should it stop and hand back control, use the database and ignore all signs, or use the signs as posted? All options are messy, other than making sure HAL is as good as a human at reading damaged and defaced signs.
Once you ask these dumb things to navigate back roads, or poorly maintained hellscapes that are our cities there will be numerous cases of ambiguous, changed, damaged, or vandalized signage. Humans can usually slow down and figure things out, or at least mostly know to proceed with caution despite awful signage.
My general prediction is that once these systems are run through the regulatory process needed before public release they will be programmed to be timid to the point of frustration. Drivers will be annoyed and frustrated that HAL will drive like their grandma on Sunday. If HAL takes 10-20% longer to get you to work and occasionally gives up you'll shut it off in short order. Also, if HAL can't be trusted to go on the interstate while I nap or zone out I'll never turn it on. I can't wait to read the disclaimer (and you think the itunes TOS is bad...), or to hear the howls when HAL refuses to engage until you change the oil, rotate the tires, clean the cameras, and pay a monthly service fee.
Basically this self driving frenzy is likely to go the way of the VR hype. It will be awesome tech that only a few will shell out money for, and even fewer will make use of.
Music on my bike ride to work. It is nice to leave my phone in the panniers and not deal with wires.