I doubt the Tesla is eating into sales of the Cayenne, it's a SUV.
You might be right; OTOH I can certainly imagine a number of potential Cayenne buyers sitting on their money waiting for the Model X to become available. Whether or not that would be noticeable in Porsche's Cayenne sales figures I have no idea.
If you want to see where the state of the art is at (at Google, anyway), have a look at this video. The first part is high-level info about Google's approach to the problem; the actual demonstration of the software starts at the 7m50s mark, and an example of the car dealing with something unexpected is at the 11m00 mark.
Note that in none of the examples has the roadway been pre-fitted with any kind of tracking or placement system, and that these aren't imaginary scenarios; rather these cars have been on the roadways, in real life, for years already. If the problems were really as unsolvable as you suggest, I'd expect we'd have read about a number of hilarious and/or tragic mishaps by now.
HP has a solution for that -- the next update of the printer driver will apply simulated color-streaks at the image-rendering stage. Thus the out-of-ink indicator discrepancy will go away.
Speculation is moot. Show me trials before it becomes federal law or some ilk like that.
I've discovered this really useful web site called "The Google", it lets you type in a search term like "studies of the effectiveness of automatic braking systems", and it will show you what you're looking for. It's really cool!
i think people should be able to decide for themselves how much safety equipment they want to have
That would be fine if the only people who suffered were the people who made the bad decisions. In this case, however, it's not only the inattentive-and-cheap car owner who suffers, but also whatever (or whomever) he runs into.
That's pretty rich considering Apple's recent refusal to hand over iMessage data with a court order...
Good thing the NSA is bound by court orders! It would be a pretty grim situation if they were able to just hack into Apple's servers anytime they wanted to, or bribe/blackmail Apple employees into surreptitiously handing over whatever data they wanted to see.
I'm still running XP on a >10 year old desktop that's still healthy, and at this point in time I have absolutely zero intention of upgrading the OS for any reason. If the box dies and I have to rebuild it, it'll have some flavor of Linux on it, and damn the consequences.
I hear you. You might consider converting the XP box to a virtual machine, so that if/when the hardware dies you can still run the OS on other hardware.
Or does the fact that my computer has a multi-core cpu now mean that it has multiple personas inside that need to agree and they are on a par with humans?
I ride on the sidewalk -- but supposedly that's illegal in my area (because they think I'll hit a pedestrian).
It's probably different where you are, but around here there are a lot of sidewalks going past buildings with driveways between them. That means that anyone riding on the sidewalk is riding through an unprotected "blind intersection" at every driveway, and is in serious risk of getting t-boned (albeit probably at low speed) by a car coming out of the driveway, and possibly knocked out into the street for further abuse.
Given that, around here it's very unsafe to ride a bike on the sidewalks, although you can get away with it you're willing to bike slowly and slow further and look both ways carefully before crossing each driveway. Given that, it's usually faster and safer to just ride on the street, where drivers can see you and where your presence is more expected.
Discuss among yourselves the rest of the crap we can do to reduce city emissions (public transit would be nice).
If nothing else, sooner or later electric vehicles will be cheaper to own than gas vehicles, at which point the locally-emitted-smog problem will start to largely go away.
And, I'm sorry, but the driver with his right turn signal on who swoops across two lanes and turns left... or the ones who think they can use the oncoming lane because there's something in their lane... or who randomly brake because they can see a cat a half mile away... or cyclists who do crazy and random shit... or any number of crazy things you can see on a daily basis... all of these things will create situations in which the autonomous car utterly fails to do the right thing.
Your pessimistic prediction is based on a misunderstanding of how autonomous cars are programmed.
You're imagining that the autonomous car's programming is based on a legal model -- i.e. that it is assuming that other cars will always follow the law and do the right thing according to the DMV handbook. And you (correctly) infer that a program based on that assumption would often fail in the real world, since other drivers sometimes do crazy or illegal things.
Fortunately, Google's engineers aren't stupid, and they understand that problem also. Which is why they don't program their cars to rely on that assumption. Rather, they program their cars to assume only that other cars will follow only the laws of physics -- for example, they can safely assume that a car will not accelerate from 0mph to 150mph in one second, but they cannot safely assume that a car will stop at a red light.
Approaching the problem at that level is not only more reliable (since unlike the driving code, it's impossible to break the laws of physics) but also easier (since the laws of physics are simpler and easier to quantify than the US driving code, and they are MUCH easier than trying to predict human drivers' psychology). An autonomous car avoiding other cars on a real street isn't much different than a bot avoiding enemy missiles in a video game -- in both cases, the program knows the missiles' current positions, their velocities, and the possible ways in which they could accelerate/decelerate/change-direction if they chose to do so -- and it plans and executes its own actions accordingly. It's not trivial, and it's not guaranteed to avoid every possible accident -- but it's not rocket science, either. Remember that to succeed, the car doesn't have to be God-like in its abilities, only an order of magnitude or so better than the average human driver.
None of this is to say that the autonomous car doesn't need to understand the rules of the road -- but its understanding of the law is used to guide its own actions, not to make assumptions about the actions of the other cars.
I imagine that most people occasionally get into this sort of Mexican standoff with a car, in which neither driver is quite sure whether the other driver is going to go first or is planning to wait and go second.
When two humans are involved, the standoff can be quickly resolved with a hand gesture (not the one-fingered kind; I mean either a "thank you" wave if you want to go first, or a "go ahead" motion if you want them to)
I wonder if it would be worthwhile to put some kind of display on the front of the autonomous car that would allow it to communicate something similar? There is no reason (other than minimizing cost) for a self-driving car to be inscrutable.
Why? Batteries have been researched for hundreds of years and is limited to mixing chemicals with known electric potentials.
The difference is in the amount of research that is going on. Between the laptop industry, the mobile phone industry, and the electric car industry, the amount of money and man-hours being invested into commercial battery technology over the last 5 years dwarfs the previous efforts. Advances in battery technology are being discovered every week.
The problem then becomes, how to prevent the clever bad guy (with physical access to an AV for as much time as he needs) from fooling the AV into thinking it is carrying a person.
What's the motivation for replacing humans in various jobs with a robot?
To cut costs and/or improve quality.
The outcome is going to be terrible
Possibly. Then again, maybe not -- you've seen what the open Internet did for information (which is now easily available to most people at very low cost); perhaps robotics can do the same for goods and services.
"But what about all those people who will lose their menial jobs", you ask? They'll have to find some other way to make a living, is the answer. But with manufactured goods and services practically making themselves, that shouldn't be so difficult to do -- if nothing else, the government could put a tax on automation and use a portion of the wealth they generate to provide every citizen with a guaranteed stipend. People would then have time to learn more advanced skills that would make them employable again, or they could just become (effectively) retirees, and do things they enjoy rather than do menial work most of their lives. Either way, they wouldn't starve.
Of course that will require some political will, but that doesn't mean it can't happen. Our society has absorbed changes of similar magnitude before, it can probably do so again.
that's very Libertarian of you, endorsing even more government regulations. "Cognitive dissonance" in operation?
Isn't a strong defense of private property rights a Libertarian principle? In this case, the proposed law would be enforcing property owners' right not to have uninvited guests buzzing around in their private airspace.
There are some drawbacks to colocating wind and solar:
- It's not always the case that a single parcel of land is optimal for both wind and solar
- Wind turbines will cast shadows onto the solar panels if placed together, reducing the solar panels' output somewhat
Which isn't to say that placing both together isn't a good idea, only that there are some tradeoffs. I suspect that doing them separately also keeps the projects simpler to implement on both the regulatory and technical sides.
These guys weren't armed with anything more than good training, and the mental preparedness to take action in a crisis, nevermind the guts to do so at considerable personal risk.
"The only thing that can stop a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with training and mental preparedness to take action in a crisis".
Hmm. It'll never fit on a bumper sticker, but training more people how to effectively handle a violent person might be a better idea than handing everyone a gun and hoping for the best.
we have ultra right and middle right. that's about it.
Doesn't the Overton window apply here? i.e. what was the "middle right" is now referred to as "the left", and what was the "ultra right" is now referred to as "the right"?
Primaries have become a curse upon the nation. The people most likely to vote in them are the extremists
A good description of the problem -- are there any realistic proposals for a solution? (The only thing I can think of is doing away with primaries and holding only a general election, but even with a more elegant voting system like e.g. approval voting or range voting, I suspect that the general election would turn into a confusing 27-candidate circus if we did that, and the problems introduced might be as bad as or worse than what we have now)
How long has it been that the Republicans have been holding primaries with something approaching two dozen candidates? It seems like a relatively recent phenomenon, like in the last three elections or so.
I think you can largely attribute that phenomenon to the Citizens United ruling, which effectively allowed billionaires to give as much money to a campaign as they feel like giving. Before that, most candidates had to raise money from many sources, and therefore only the candidates who were widely seen as viable and acceptable could afford to stay in the race. Post-Citizens, any candidate with his own billionaire sugar daddy can now run and keep running for as long as the sugar daddy continues to pay the bills, regardless of what the party would prefer. Hence the large number of candidates.
My prediction is that in another election or three, the novelty of buying your own personal Presidential candidate will wear off, and not so many sugar daddies will be interested in throwing their money away on unlikely campaigns. So the number of candidates will probably go back down again.
.... and the horror of C++ is that it supports unlimited design patterns. Therefore C++ programmers are doomed to spend their lives learning new design patterns rather than getting productive work done.;)
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I doubt the Tesla is eating into sales of the Cayenne, it's a SUV.
You might be right; OTOH I can certainly imagine a number of potential Cayenne buyers sitting on their money waiting for the Model X to become available. Whether or not that would be noticeable in Porsche's Cayenne sales figures I have no idea.
If you want to see where the state of the art is at (at Google, anyway), have a look at this video. The first part is high-level info about Google's approach to the problem; the actual demonstration of the software starts at the 7m50s mark, and an example of the car dealing with something unexpected is at the 11m00 mark.
Note that in none of the examples has the roadway been pre-fitted with any kind of tracking or placement system, and that these aren't imaginary scenarios; rather these cars have been on the roadways, in real life, for years already. If the problems were really as unsolvable as you suggest, I'd expect we'd have read about a number of hilarious and/or tragic mishaps by now.
HP has a solution for that -- the next update of the printer driver will apply simulated color-streaks at the image-rendering stage. Thus the out-of-ink indicator discrepancy will go away.
Speculation is moot. Show me trials before it becomes federal law or some ilk like that.
I've discovered this really useful web site called "The Google", it lets you type in a search term like "studies of the effectiveness of automatic braking systems", and it will show you what you're looking for. It's really cool!
i think people should be able to decide for themselves how much safety equipment they want to have
That would be fine if the only people who suffered were the people who made the bad decisions. In this case, however, it's not only the inattentive-and-cheap car owner who suffers, but also whatever (or whomever) he runs into.
That's pretty rich considering Apple's recent refusal to hand over iMessage data with a court order...
Good thing the NSA is bound by court orders! It would be a pretty grim situation if they were able to just hack into Apple's servers anytime they wanted to, or bribe/blackmail Apple employees into surreptitiously handing over whatever data they wanted to see.
And... you're what's wrong with USA these days. Congratulations.
I'm pretty sure he was sarcastically paraphrasing one of the characters in the movie Idiocracy.
Then again, you never know.
I'm still running XP on a >10 year old desktop that's still healthy, and at this point in time I have absolutely zero intention of upgrading the OS for any reason. If the box dies and I have to rebuild it, it'll have some flavor of Linux on it, and damn the consequences.
I hear you. You might consider converting the XP box to a virtual machine, so that if/when the hardware dies you can still run the OS on other hardware.
Or does the fact that my computer has a multi-core cpu now mean that it has multiple personas inside that need to agree and they are on a par with humans?
"Windows 10: Your computer, run by committee"
I ride on the sidewalk -- but supposedly that's illegal in my area (because they think I'll hit a pedestrian).
It's probably different where you are, but around here there are a lot of sidewalks going past buildings with driveways between them. That means that anyone riding on the sidewalk is riding through an unprotected "blind intersection" at every driveway, and is in serious risk of getting t-boned (albeit probably at low speed) by a car coming out of the driveway, and possibly knocked out into the street for further abuse.
Given that, around here it's very unsafe to ride a bike on the sidewalks, although you can get away with it you're willing to bike slowly and slow further and look both ways carefully before crossing each driveway. Given that, it's usually faster and safer to just ride on the street, where drivers can see you and where your presence is more expected.
Discuss among yourselves the rest of the crap we can do to reduce city emissions (public transit would be nice).
If nothing else, sooner or later electric vehicles will be cheaper to own than gas vehicles, at which point the locally-emitted-smog problem will start to largely go away.
And, I'm sorry, but the driver with his right turn signal on who swoops across two lanes and turns left ... or the ones who think they can use the oncoming lane because there's something in their lane ... or who randomly brake because they can see a cat a half mile away ... or cyclists who do crazy and random shit ... or any number of crazy things you can see on a daily basis ... all of these things will create situations in which the autonomous car utterly fails to do the right thing.
Your pessimistic prediction is based on a misunderstanding of how autonomous cars are programmed.
You're imagining that the autonomous car's programming is based on a legal model -- i.e. that it is assuming that other cars will always follow the law and do the right thing according to the DMV handbook. And you (correctly) infer that a program based on that assumption would often fail in the real world, since other drivers sometimes do crazy or illegal things.
Fortunately, Google's engineers aren't stupid, and they understand that problem also. Which is why they don't program their cars to rely on that assumption. Rather, they program their cars to assume only that other cars will follow only the laws of physics -- for example, they can safely assume that a car will not accelerate from 0mph to 150mph in one second, but they cannot safely assume that a car will stop at a red light.
Approaching the problem at that level is not only more reliable (since unlike the driving code, it's impossible to break the laws of physics) but also easier (since the laws of physics are simpler and easier to quantify than the US driving code, and they are MUCH easier than trying to predict human drivers' psychology). An autonomous car avoiding other cars on a real street isn't much different than a bot avoiding enemy missiles in a video game -- in both cases, the program knows the missiles' current positions, their velocities, and the possible ways in which they could accelerate/decelerate/change-direction if they chose to do so -- and it plans and executes its own actions accordingly. It's not trivial, and it's not guaranteed to avoid every possible accident -- but it's not rocket science, either. Remember that to succeed, the car doesn't have to be God-like in its abilities, only an order of magnitude or so better than the average human driver.
None of this is to say that the autonomous car doesn't need to understand the rules of the road -- but its understanding of the law is used to guide its own actions, not to make assumptions about the actions of the other cars.
I imagine that most people occasionally get into this sort of Mexican standoff with a car, in which neither driver is quite sure whether the other driver is going to go first or is planning to wait and go second.
When two humans are involved, the standoff can be quickly resolved with a hand gesture (not the one-fingered kind; I mean either a "thank you" wave if you want to go first, or a "go ahead" motion if you want them to)
I wonder if it would be worthwhile to put some kind of display on the front of the autonomous car that would allow it to communicate something similar? There is no reason (other than minimizing cost) for a self-driving car to be inscrutable.
Why? Batteries have been researched for hundreds of years and is limited to mixing chemicals with known electric potentials.
The difference is in the amount of research that is going on. Between the laptop industry, the mobile phone industry, and the electric car industry, the amount of money and man-hours being invested into commercial battery technology over the last 5 years dwarfs the previous efforts. Advances in battery technology are being discovered every week.
or maybe space aliens will write the code for us -- no way humans are gonna do it
Baxter says hi.
The problem then becomes, how to prevent the clever bad guy (with physical access to an AV for as much time as he needs) from fooling the AV into thinking it is carrying a person.
What's the motivation for replacing humans in various jobs with a robot?
To cut costs and/or improve quality.
The outcome is going to be terrible
Possibly. Then again, maybe not -- you've seen what the open Internet did for information (which is now easily available to most people at very low cost); perhaps robotics can do the same for goods and services.
"But what about all those people who will lose their menial jobs", you ask? They'll have to find some other way to make a living, is the answer. But with manufactured goods and services practically making themselves, that shouldn't be so difficult to do -- if nothing else, the government could put a tax on automation and use a portion of the wealth they generate to provide every citizen with a guaranteed stipend. People would then have time to learn more advanced skills that would make them employable again, or they could just become (effectively) retirees, and do things they enjoy rather than do menial work most of their lives. Either way, they wouldn't starve.
Of course that will require some political will, but that doesn't mean it can't happen. Our society has absorbed changes of similar magnitude before, it can probably do so again.
that's very Libertarian of you, endorsing even more government regulations. "Cognitive dissonance" in operation?
Isn't a strong defense of private property rights a Libertarian principle? In this case, the proposed law would be enforcing property owners' right not to have uninvited guests buzzing around in their private airspace.
Can we all just start to admit that wind and solar farms have their own negative environmental implications just like everything else.
Straw man argument -- nobody ever claimed otherwise. Obviously, anything humans do has environmental implications.
The claim is that wind and solar farms have less environmental impact than the use of coal and other fossil fuels they intend to replace.
There are some drawbacks to colocating wind and solar:
- It's not always the case that a single parcel of land is optimal for both wind and solar
- Wind turbines will cast shadows onto the solar panels if placed together, reducing the solar panels' output somewhat
Which isn't to say that placing both together isn't a good idea, only that there are some tradeoffs. I suspect that doing them separately also keeps the projects simpler to implement on both the regulatory and technical sides.
These guys weren't armed with anything more than good training, and the mental preparedness to take action in a crisis, nevermind the guts to do so at considerable personal risk.
"The only thing that can stop a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with training and mental preparedness to take action in a crisis".
Hmm. It'll never fit on a bumper sticker, but training more people how to effectively handle a violent person might be a better idea than handing everyone a gun and hoping for the best.
we have ultra right and middle right. that's about it.
Doesn't the Overton window apply here? i.e. what was the "middle right" is now referred to as "the left", and what was the "ultra right" is now referred to as "the right"?
Or is that too Orwellian? ;)
Primaries have become a curse upon the nation. The people most likely to vote in them are the extremists
A good description of the problem -- are there any realistic proposals for a solution? (The only thing I can think of is doing away with primaries and holding only a general election, but even with a more elegant voting system like e.g. approval voting or range voting, I suspect that the general election would turn into a confusing 27-candidate circus if we did that, and the problems introduced might be as bad as or worse than what we have now)
How long has it been that the Republicans have been holding primaries with something approaching two dozen candidates? It seems like a relatively recent phenomenon, like in the last three elections or so.
I think you can largely attribute that phenomenon to the Citizens United ruling, which effectively allowed billionaires to give as much money to a campaign as they feel like giving. Before that, most candidates had to raise money from many sources, and therefore only the candidates who were widely seen as viable and acceptable could afford to stay in the race. Post-Citizens, any candidate with his own billionaire sugar daddy can now run and keep running for as long as the sugar daddy continues to pay the bills, regardless of what the party would prefer. Hence the large number of candidates.
My prediction is that in another election or three, the novelty of buying your own personal Presidential candidate will wear off, and not so many sugar daddies will be interested in throwing their money away on unlikely campaigns. So the number of candidates will probably go back down again.
.... and the horror of C++ is that it supports unlimited design patterns. Therefore C++ programmers are doomed to spend their lives learning new design patterns rather than getting productive work done. ;)