Sorry, I can't see the caravan (trailer for the USians). I presume it's round the next corner.
You may well enjoy the myth of driving as sold by the glossy adverts produced by the car companies but it's just that, a myth. There are no empty twisty roads left and SUV's don't spend their lives climbing mountains.
1) Except he has 100 grand invested in a metal box and I have it invested in my clothes/bank account/bigger house/yacht.
2) You press the reject/service button, it goes off to get cleaned and you get another.
3) PRT will have cabs waiting for you at the stations (there's a novel thought, public transport waiting for you, not the other way round). When really busy during rush hour, 90% of journeys will have a cab waiting, in 98% of cases a called cab will arrive within 1 min and 99.9% a cab will arrive within 3 mins.
When fully computer controlled there's no reason an automated taxi couldn't have similar statistics, you idle them in a grid pattern, there's no driver to pay.
If it's the day of the big game I know from personal experience that all the roads are choked anyway. With something like the skyweb PRT OTOH, the system can handle 36 thousand vehicles per hour, if everyone is going to a stadium, friends would share cabs giving a capacity on the order of 80 thousand to 120 thousand people per hour. No more waiting 3 hours to exit the car park.
It's the next logical step. Then you have a car which can drive itself...
But if cars can drive themselves it doesn't really make sense that everyone has one, after all, it isn't really a good use of resources to have a car or three sitting idle in office/mall garages for an individual when it can be off transporting your children to school and your wife to the shops or her own job. There's no longer a need for a 3 car family, you simply call the car and tell it when and where you want to be picked up. Why spend 80 grand on multiple cars when you can spend 30 grand on one car and the other 50 on something more enjoyable?
But wait, we can take this a step further, why limit it just to private transport, the same applies to public transport. Why own a car at all when you can simply call an autotaxi and it'll pick you up when and where you want and deliver you when and where you want. Instead of investing 80 grand in hardware which depreciates by 30% the second it rolls out of the showroom and then continues to cost you 2 grand a year in fuel, servicing and insurance. Simply call an autocab.
Course there's still the problem of traffic, just because most of the cars are driven automatically doesn't reduce the numbers on the road and there are still going to be normally driven cars on the road so you're still going to get stuck in traffic jams during rush hour. You could take the public autotaxis off the road and put them on separate raised "roads" which allows full computer control and which bypass the normal roads, thereby bypassing the traffic jams.
e.g. http://www.skywebexpress.com/
and http://www.atsltd.co.uk/
and http://www.yorkprt.com/
and http://www.austrans.com/
The concept is called Personal Rapid Transit and is basically a packet based mass transit system. It's perfectly possible to implement today.
More info: http://faculty.washington.edu/~jbs/itrans/P RT/ http://www.cprt.org/ http://www.acprt.org/
The very first object of the charter of the BBC is:
"To provide, as public services, sound and television broadcasting services (whether by
analogue or digital means) and to provide sound and television programmes of information,
education and entertainment for general reception in Our United Kingdom of Great Britain
and Northern Ireland, the Channel Islands and the Isle of Man and the territorial waters
thereof, and on board ships and aircraft (such services being hereinafter referred to as "the
Home Services") and for reception elsewhere within the Commonwealth and in other
countries and places overseas (such services being hereinafter referred to as "the World
Service") the Home Services and the World Service together being hereinafter referred to as
"the Public Services"."
Anyway. Knowledge is power. By distributing knowledge and information you empower people making the world a better place and if it's a better place then it's a better place for British people as well.
"But the singularity being spoken of here is not a physical singularity"
But it is. The singularity they are talking about is computing power and a physical limit I can see to that right now is heat dissipation. Other technological progress has similar limitations.
In general terms a singularity is the point where a function goes to infinity. It cannot happen in the real world with physical resource constraints, instead of a singularity we have a step function with exponential growth which we're seeing at the moment, then the limits will kick in and it'll level off to a steady state plateau.
Sure it may well change society, but it's a continuous process and we'll recognise the results from what is around us now. The SF authors though assume the trends will continue exponentially, hence the singularity... They won't.
One of the problems with the type of extrapolation which the SF writers are talking about is that they can't or don't account for the plateau, it's been mentioned in the thread already but trends simply cannot continue increasing to the point where they reach singularity in the real world, some limit always kicks in to form a plateau. We simply can't see what it is at the moment.
They are not us. Not we. They are other and therefore to be feared and hated. Treated like every other competitor for resources. I don't know if you've noticed what humanity does to every plausible competitor. It's written into our history.
"Enough to know that it's a hard problem, maybe not fully solvable in my lifetime."
How do you know? Before powered flight, how reasonable would the description of a 747 have sounded?
Well, 100 billion neurons or so. Given that these guys are building a system today which emulates 20 billion neurons: http://www.ad.com/ human level consciousness might not be all that far away.
"no matter how massive the computational power available to them is, aren't going to spontaneously "wake up" (what the hell is he talking about there?) and develop consciousness"
No? What do you know about consciousness then?
Given enough research into the structure of the brain and hardware fast enough to run the emulation seems to me that a good emulation might just wake up and be conscious.
"doesn't anyone see the gross similarity between the rapture and the singularity?"
Yes, apart from the sucky writing.
"is there any real reason to beleive that humanity will 'transcend itself'?"
Of course not. There are loads of things in the world which in theory predict exponential increases and singularities, population growth etc, however we live in a real world with real limits.
Countless, so you'll be able to quote one then? Cos I can quote studies that show that the correlation between speeding and accidents is weak and tenuous. Various types of bad driving are far more important factors.
e.g. http://www.safespeed.org.uk/onethirdemail. html
Because statistically, talking on the phone while driving is almost as dangerous as driving while drunk, both are several hundred percent more likely to get you into an accident than speeding alone and neither are going to be picked up by any black boxes in cars. Speeding is only targeted because it's easy, not because it's a significant factor.
Rather than a model. Any inventor will have at least one and probably several working prototypes anyway, if you don't have one you're not exactly an inventor. No need for the patent office to hold the prototype, it's up to the inventor to maintain it while the patent is in effect.
You have to pay and select a destination before a PRT car/pod will open. Also, all of the systems in development have a "Rejected because this pod is damaged/filthy" button so presumably in production they will be able to be taken out of service and cleaned as needed.
It absolutely is public transport. It won't replace the car, there will always be somewhere you want to go to that the system doesn't support.
However, what it does do is make public transport useful, threatens buses and light rail systems which are bloody useless unless you happen to want to go where they do, hence the low utilisation.
No changes, no stopping, the PRT pods are single vehicles, you don't have to share with strangers, the cars come when *you* call them, you aren't restricted by a schedule. It's like a taxi which doesn't get stuck in traffic.
I'm a big supporter of removing journeys entirely, put everything within walking distance. It's not practical to do on existing cities and would take decades.
In the meantime the solution turns out to be a feature of the Information Revolution, as the Steam engine was a feature of the Industrial Revolution. The application of information technology to transport will solve many of the congestion and environmental problems.
Slashdot Mirror
Sorry, I can't see the caravan (trailer for the USians). I presume it's round the next corner.
You may well enjoy the myth of driving as sold by the glossy adverts produced by the car companies but it's just that, a myth. There are no empty twisty roads left and SUV's don't spend their lives climbing mountains.
1) Except he has 100 grand invested in a metal box and I have it invested in my clothes/bank account/bigger house/yacht.
2) You press the reject/service button, it goes off to get cleaned and you get another.
3) PRT will have cabs waiting for you at the stations (there's a novel thought, public transport waiting for you, not the other way round). When really busy during rush hour, 90% of journeys will have a cab waiting, in 98% of cases a called cab will arrive within 1 min and 99.9% a cab will arrive within 3 mins.
When fully computer controlled there's no reason an automated taxi couldn't have similar statistics, you idle them in a grid pattern, there's no driver to pay.
If it's the day of the big game I know from personal experience that all the roads are choked anyway. With something like the skyweb PRT OTOH, the system can handle 36 thousand vehicles per hour, if everyone is going to a stadium, friends would share cabs giving a capacity on the order of 80 thousand to 120 thousand people per hour. No more waiting 3 hours to exit the car park.
Sure. I love driving.
2 0R OADS/220540dTraffic%20jam%20Hamme-pp.JPG
http://www.travelpictures.co.uk/TP/TRAFFIC%20&%
Great fun.
It's the next logical step. Then you have a car which can drive itself...
P RT/
But if cars can drive themselves it doesn't really make sense that everyone has one, after all, it isn't really a good use of resources to have a car or three sitting idle in office/mall garages for an individual when it can be off transporting your children to school and your wife to the shops or her own job. There's no longer a need for a 3 car family, you simply call the car and tell it when and where you want to be picked up. Why spend 80 grand on multiple cars when you can spend 30 grand on one car and the other 50 on something more enjoyable?
But wait, we can take this a step further, why limit it just to private transport, the same applies to public transport. Why own a car at all when you can simply call an autotaxi and it'll pick you up when and where you want and deliver you when and where you want. Instead of investing 80 grand in hardware which depreciates by 30% the second it rolls out of the showroom and then continues to cost you 2 grand a year in fuel, servicing and insurance. Simply call an autocab.
Course there's still the problem of traffic, just because most of the cars are driven automatically doesn't reduce the numbers on the road and there are still going to be normally driven cars on the road so you're still going to get stuck in traffic jams during rush hour. You could take the public autotaxis off the road and put them on separate raised "roads" which allows full computer control and which bypass the normal roads, thereby bypassing the traffic jams.
e.g.
http://www.skywebexpress.com/
and
http://www.atsltd.co.uk/
and
http://www.yorkprt.com/
and
http://www.austrans.com/
The concept is called Personal Rapid Transit and is basically a packet based mass transit system. It's perfectly possible to implement today.
More info:
http://faculty.washington.edu/~jbs/itrans/
http://www.cprt.org/
http://www.acprt.org/
Personal Rapid Transit, a packet based mass transit system.
e.g.
http://www.cprt.org/
Not that PRT will make the car obsolete, but it will reduce the need for it as day to day transport leaving it mainly as a pleasure vehicle.
You should read it BTW, it's a right laugh.
The very first object of the charter of the BBC is:
Anyway. Knowledge is power. By distributing knowledge and information you empower people making the world a better place and if it's a better place then it's a better place for British people as well.
Peer to peer distribution of recorded shows. It'll never happen though.
Really? A Tivo costs $99 now.
"But the singularity being spoken of here is not a physical singularity"
But it is. The singularity they are talking about is computing power and a physical limit I can see to that right now is heat dissipation. Other technological progress has similar limitations.
In general terms a singularity is the point where a function goes to infinity. It cannot happen in the real world with physical resource constraints, instead of a singularity we have a step function with exponential growth which we're seeing at the moment, then the limits will kick in and it'll level off to a steady state plateau.
Sure it may well change society, but it's a continuous process and we'll recognise the results from what is around us now. The SF authors though assume the trends will continue exponentially, hence the singularity... They won't.
One of the problems with the type of extrapolation which the SF writers are talking about is that they can't or don't account for the plateau, it's been mentioned in the thread already but trends simply cannot continue increasing to the point where they reach singularity in the real world, some limit always kicks in to form a plateau. We simply can't see what it is at the moment.
They are not us. Not we. They are other and therefore to be feared and hated. Treated like every other competitor for resources. I don't know if you've noticed what humanity does to every plausible competitor. It's written into our history.
2.6 billion making a chess board? Hmm, I wonder who's paying for that then.
I know, it's all you SUV drivers.
"Enough to know that it's a hard problem, maybe not fully solvable in my lifetime."
How do you know? Before powered flight, how reasonable would the description of a 747 have sounded?
Well, 100 billion neurons or so. Given that these guys are building a system today which emulates 20 billion neurons: http://www.ad.com/ human level consciousness might not be all that far away.
"no matter how massive the computational power available to them is, aren't going to spontaneously "wake up" (what the hell is he talking about there?) and develop consciousness"
No? What do you know about consciousness then?
Given enough research into the structure of the brain and hardware fast enough to run the emulation seems to me that a good emulation might just wake up and be conscious.
"doesn't anyone see the gross similarity between the rapture and the singularity?"
Yes, apart from the sucky writing.
"is there any real reason to beleive that humanity will 'transcend itself'?"
Of course not. There are loads of things in the world which in theory predict exponential increases and singularities, population growth etc, however we live in a real world with real limits.
Countless, so you'll be able to quote one then? Cos I can quote studies that show that the correlation between speeding and accidents is weak and tenuous. Various types of bad driving are far more important factors.
. html
e.g.
http://www.safespeed.org.uk/onethirdemail
Hmm?
Because statistically, talking on the phone while driving is almost as dangerous as driving while drunk, both are several hundred percent more likely to get you into an accident than speeding alone and neither are going to be picked up by any black boxes in cars. Speeding is only targeted because it's easy, not because it's a significant factor.
Rather than a model. Any inventor will have at least one and probably several working prototypes anyway, if you don't have one you're not exactly an inventor. No need for the patent office to hold the prototype, it's up to the inventor to maintain it while the patent is in effect.
Am I the only one who finds the fact that nostalgia is driving the current Science Fiction series aired to be supremely ironic?
I mean, seiously. "News for Nerds. Stuff that matters."
You have to pay and select a destination before a PRT car/pod will open. Also, all of the systems in development have a "Rejected because this pod is damaged/filthy" button so presumably in production they will be able to be taken out of service and cleaned as needed.
It absolutely is public transport. It won't replace the car, there will always be somewhere you want to go to that the system doesn't support.
However, what it does do is make public transport useful, threatens buses and light rail systems which are bloody useless unless you happen to want to go where they do, hence the low utilisation.
No changes, no stopping, the PRT pods are single vehicles, you don't have to share with strangers, the cars come when *you* call them, you aren't restricted by a schedule. It's like a taxi which doesn't get stuck in traffic.
The Citroen DS for instance, forty years ago.
The problem has to be re-thought entirely.
d .co.uk/
I'm a big supporter of removing journeys entirely, put everything within walking distance. It's not practical to do on existing cities and would take decades.
In the meantime the solution turns out to be a feature of the Information Revolution, as the Steam engine was a feature of the Industrial Revolution. The application of information technology to transport will solve many of the congestion and environmental problems.
Personal Rapid Transport:
http://www.cprt.org/
A couple of PRT systems:
http://www.skywebexpress.com/
http://www.atslt