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24th October 2018, 06:03 PM | #881 |
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25th October 2018, 05:43 AM | #882 |
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You're missing the beauty of it though - this is both progressive and regressive. We can let the rich guys go to the head of the line, the way they always want to do - but only if they're willing to cough up a lot of money in taxes. Imagine what it would be like if an Uber was about to choose between running over Donald Trump or Warren Buffet. Trump just might finally conclude that avoiding all his taxes doesn't actually "make him smart". |
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26th October 2018, 01:11 PM | #883 |
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No, people buy a card. It costs as much money as you wish to pay. If an out of control car approaches and is considering hitting that person it emits a signal that says avoid this person. He is worth $so much. If several people have these cards then the car will hit the person whose card is worth the least.
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26th October 2018, 01:33 PM | #884 |
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26th October 2018, 03:00 PM | #885 |
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8th January 2019, 10:29 AM | #886 |
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An interesting update on the basic question that comes up in this and other similar threads, about the ultimate takeover of self-driving cars:
https://medium.com/radical-urbanist/...t-c5fe5aa01699 |
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Like many humorless and indignant people, he is hard on everybody but himself, and does not perceive it when he fails his own ideal (Molière) A pedant is a man who studies a vacuum through instruments that allow him to draw cross-sections of the details (John Ciardi) |
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8th January 2019, 12:23 PM | #887 |
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“If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?” Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago |
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9th January 2019, 09:28 AM | #888 |
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People get killed by drivers who smoke pot every day. Banning SD cars will omly make the problem worse.
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9th January 2019, 09:38 AM | #889 |
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9th January 2019, 09:40 AM | #890 |
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9th January 2019, 11:15 AM | #891 |
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Don't care. I still laughed.
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9th January 2019, 12:38 PM | #892 |
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The article I cited certainly did not advocate banning SD cars, coming as it does from a major developer of them. What it does mention is the concern many of us have had and expressed over the prediction made by some that totally driverless cars would become mandatory. Partly on the grounds that there will always be situations and places where it's impossible to do safely, or wildly overexpensive, and partly on the grounds that the huge cost of development and implementation of the vehicles and the infrastructure would be better spent on other forms of transit. This article seems to agree with that. It's not a call to ban self driving cars or even to curtail their development.
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Like many humorless and indignant people, he is hard on everybody but himself, and does not perceive it when he fails his own ideal (Molière) A pedant is a man who studies a vacuum through instruments that allow him to draw cross-sections of the details (John Ciardi) |
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10th January 2019, 03:07 AM | #893 |
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“If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?” Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago |
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10th January 2019, 08:23 AM | #894 |
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I live in a town which is very bicycle-friendly, which is good But this is re-enforced by a very powerful pro-bicycle lobby that is IMO is near cult like. Their central principle is that cars are evil and they actively seek to force people away from the evil of driving into their true religion of cycling by using their political power more and more to arrange streets, parking, etc. to make it extremely unpleasant or impossible for people to drive.
I am not against the concept of diminishing unnecessary driving, but I wish the pro-bicycle cult showed some sign of realizing just how many people there are in town who are too old or physically frail to cycle. Not to mention transporting large packages, etc. |
10th January 2019, 08:26 AM | #895 |
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10th January 2019, 09:18 AM | #896 |
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It's important, I think, to remember that the article cited is not by the president of Waymo, whose observation of the limitation of self driving cars is what I was most interested in. The writer of the article goes off on a bike tangent that I think is unfortunately one-sided.
In any case, I put the article forward because I think it an interesting counterpoint to some arguments we've heard (the most obvious from the now-banned Joey McGee) that assert that in the foreseeable future we will see only driverless cars, and that driverless cars, even without steering wheels, will be mandated. I've argued in the past that out here in the boonies driverless cars will just not work, and also that in some places where they might they won't solve the issues that our dependence on cars have produced: congestion, pollution and limited access, and it's interesting to me to see someone who is clearly invested in the improvement of autonomous vehicles making a similar observation. |
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Like many humorless and indignant people, he is hard on everybody but himself, and does not perceive it when he fails his own ideal (Molière) A pedant is a man who studies a vacuum through instruments that allow him to draw cross-sections of the details (John Ciardi) |
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10th January 2019, 10:19 AM | #897 |
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Same in my city. We are a municipality historically governed by liberal Democrats, doing their best in one of the reddest states in the Union. The city wants to be friendly to bicycles and pedestrians, blissfully indifferent to the fact that it's cold and snowy six months out of the year.
Or a Utah winter. Reference the above-noted snow and cold temperatures. But the red state government is extremely friendly to businesses that dump tons of pollutants into our air, and hostile to any legislation to do anything meaningful about it. They'd rather stifle their citizens than "innovation." Also six months out of the year, our inverted temperatures trap these pollutants close to the ground. Our media blares constant warnings of unsafe air, reminding us to limit our outdoor exertion. So even healthy, young people aren't dumb enough to brave the snowdrifts and frigid air to suck lungfuls of industrial pollutants while biking to and fro. My street was chosen to be a pilot for hard-curbed bike lanes, which I'll go into detail about if asked. This street connects downtown to the university. The problem is that if you want to ride up to attend classes, you have to climb a hill that straddles the Wasatch fault. In the space of two blocks, the elevation climbs 200 feet as you go from the lower techtonic plate to the upper one. If you go one block to the south, or two blocks to the north, the slope is much gentler. That's where the bikers actually ride. No casual commuters are going to first-gear it up that hill breathing air you can feel against your teeth. The best option for our downtown area is not civil engineering designed to force people to leave their cars at home and ride bikes through soups of factory emissions. What would work for our downtown are self-driving electric cars. |
6th March 2019, 07:26 AM | #898 |
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Arizona prosecutor: Uber not liable in deadly crash (but back-up driver may face charges)
https://hotair.com/archives/2019/03/...-face-charges/ So I guess live testing can go on then? Seems an odd ruling, eliminating any Uber responsibility. It seems to me that while the driver was not paying attention, the vehicle's systems also did not work too well. Also notes the oddly dark video we were shown, that does not seem to match reality. I wonder what back up drivers are thinking then? It seems clear that they are probably going to be held totally liable for any crashes, so they either won't want to be in that position, or they will just end up driving the car themselves most of the time anyway. If you are going to be held completely liable, then you might as well just drive the car. |
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6th March 2019, 07:50 AM | #899 |
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Welll yeah, the driver behind the wheel is the responsible party in every state. But that is what will have to change for truly self driving cars to become reality. Or maybe just once they really are self-driving, then the system WILL be the legal driver? But Uber isn't ready to take that legal responsibility. My insurance costs me $1,000 per year, I wonder what Uber will pay?
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6th March 2019, 08:28 AM | #900 |
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I'm pretty surprised at the decision. It's my recollection that Uber had switched off a safety mechanism that might have prevented the accident, as it was prone to 'false positives'. Anyway, good luck to them finding drivers to mind their AVs.
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6th March 2019, 08:34 AM | #901 |
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Uber might be off the hook for criminal charges, but I imagine they are still very vulnerable for a wrongful death lawsuit. It's going to be hard to argue that Uber shouldn't be held liable when the company was product testing on a public roadway.
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6th March 2019, 09:11 AM | #902 |
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I think that's a bad decision.
Yup I'd think that in the UK, one could easily make a case against them under the Health and Safety at work act - which can have quite severe personal implications for the directors of the company. The person who was nominally in charge of the car was supposed to supervise the car and only intervene when something went wrong. That is a recipe for disaster. It takes me quite a lot of effort to concentrate in an hour's meeting, especially if I am not contributing. Being in a car and not intervening for, say 90-minutes must be mind-numbingly boring. It would be almost impossible to be ready to respond in time for that length of time, whereas, it could be quite easy for someone driving to be able to concentrate for that length of time. |
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6th March 2019, 11:58 AM | #903 |
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There may have been a legal reasoning behind Uber's decision to test in Arizona. Versus Massachusetts- or England.
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6th March 2019, 05:31 PM | #904 |
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I'd have one foot hovering over the brake and a hand an inch from the wheel the entire time. I guess a person would get used to it, maybe pretty quickly, but I know computers and programming and it would take a lot for me (I think) to feel comfortable in one as a tester. Are these companies going to allow (I'd say it should be mandated) the cars to track each other within a certain radius and read important data from each other in order to make traffic more efficient? For instance, you really shouldn't need traffic lights if all cars were SD. You could move through an intersection barely missing the other cars, knowing that your car would not hit another one because it was aware of what the other cars were doing. I don't think it's enough for the cars simply to react to each other without some sharing of data. |
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Why bother? |
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6th March 2019, 06:10 PM | #905 |
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That will cause people to crap and piss and vomit because of uncontrollable terror. Also people won't be able to prevent knee-jerk instinctual reactions like slamming the brakes and swerving the steering wheel. Our minds and bodies won't trust a robot car in those close situations. So either we can't have any controls or we need to ride blindfolded.
I'm talking about close traffic encounters where there won't be a collision but the passenger is convinced that there will be. These robot cars will need to drive just like we do or else everyone riding inside will be terrified. |
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6th March 2019, 07:18 PM | #906 |
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Only until we get used to it.
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7th March 2019, 02:55 PM | #907 |
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Haven't read this entire thread but haven't seen any posts citing statistics about number of hours driven by self driving cars and number of accidents. Accidents where the blame can be attributed to the poor response or decision by the SD car that is.
The statistics should then be compared to those of other cars with humans in control. Only after this kind of study can a meaningful conclusion be made about the safety of SD cars. |
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7th March 2019, 05:11 PM | #908 |
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The current problem is the kind of roads etc. where self driving cars are tested.
It's possible to generate millions of miles of testing, on freeways, in perfect visibility, where all the car has to do is stay in its own lane, and keep a safe distance from the vehicle in front... However, this can't really be extrapolated to the circumstances where most vehicle collisions occur. (Poor lighting, unmanaged intersections, loose surface, road damage, rain, snow, etc.) Similarly making comparisons between brand new cars, with fully functioning braking systems vs collisions caused by poorly maintained cars, is problematic at best. We've seen surprising circumstances, like a car trying to force its way past a stationary bus, cars driving into trucks (at low and high speed), a car that identifies a pedestrian crossing the road and then driving through her... These things are somewhat disquieting. Recent information about machine vision struggling to identify people with darker skin, because those people reflect less light, is also troubling. I would really like to see statistics compiled that clearly identify the road and driving conditions managed by self-driving cars. Unfortunately, those statistics are currently only collected for vehicle collisions, not for safe journeys, so it will be a long time before we can make meaningful comparisons. |
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11th March 2019, 05:21 AM | #909 |
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Yeah, this. I was recently taking a tour bus through Vietnam, where traffic pretty much already involves hundreds of "traffic encounters where there won't be a collision but the passenger is convinced that there will be". Sure, I was freaked out, but the Vietnamese just took it all in stride, because to them it was normal. |
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12th March 2019, 03:24 PM | #910 |
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13th March 2019, 01:55 AM | #911 |
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Generally such statistics are measured in miles (or kilometers) driven rather than hours.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transp..._United_States
Quote:
Autonomous vehicles really need to drive several billion miles first, before a meaningful comparison can be made. Right now they are logging about 1 million/month. |
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13th March 2019, 09:52 AM | #912 |
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OECD healthcare spending Public/Compulsory Expenditure on healthcare https://data.oecd.org/chart/60Tt Every year since 1990 the US Public healthcare spending has been greater than the UK as a proportion of GDP. More US Tax goes to healthcare than the UK |
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