Don't you think there's something wrong with a system where the only way for 4.4 million Americans to feed and house themselves is to do a repetitive task that could be easily done better by robots?
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U.S. Senate panel puts self-driving cars in fast lane
- Thread starter ChouGoku
- Start date
Don't you think there's something wrong with a system where the only way for 4.4 million Americans to feed and house themselves is to do a repetitive task that could be easily done better by robots?
Tezzeractor
Member
Yes. All the cars in the iRobot future are likely electric as well, considering Detective Spooner's gasoline powered motorcycle is met with concerns from Dr. Calvin.
Compsiox
Banned
oh
demosthenes
Member
Self driving or autonomous? Because autonomous cars are not better than humans. The tech companies would like you to believe this but it's not true.
but driving is fun
Deadly fun
Skellig Gra
Member
As if car/truck drivers and unemployment are solely American things. Driving a truck is in no way an unskilled job. Its just highly specialized. You think you could just get behind the wheel of one of those 18 wheelers and drive it fine? Not likely. There is also no proof that driving a truck could be easily be done better by a robot. Transporting cargo has a lot of logistical challenges that arent easily programmed for. What happens if a robot driven truck driving hazardous materials gets in to an accident? Wait a couple hours for humans to show up?
Edit: I should also say there is no conclusive proof this tech is even ready for mass distribution so easily done is a ridiculous sentiment.
And_Gignac
Member
I wonder how many millions Uber spent lobbying for this.
The technology isn't ready going by their unfortunate tests. The first fatal accident produced by their self driving cars will be the end of it.
The technology isn't ready going by their unfortunate tests. The first fatal accident produced by their self driving cars will be the end of it.
What's likely to happen is platooning, so a human will be in one of every X trucks as a supervisory role. This is something that is actually an old goal that's been tested and passed in trials in Nevada, for example. Unless my memory is fuzzy, trials were done at least two years ago. Going between state lines might be what's holding mass adoption of this approach. In states like California for example, they mandate that all driverless vehicles have steering wheels. The pilot I'm thinking of had the driver use a tablet, so no wheel is what would prevent it from being used in California.
But for the sake of argument, let's imagine a platooning system of five cars. There are very clear problems to see here.
- Four of the five trucks are unmanned; that's four people out of that labor. This is how you can gut people from the most employed occupation in the United States with an eventual phasing out.
- The remaining driver is not only not going to be making more money due to the other people gone -- incomes have rarely spiked upwards when downsizing on human capital unless you're a rentier -- they are also sure as shit are going to be paid less than they currently are as more of what they do is being passed off to the machine. Our culture has always been a "work more, get less" type of commodification system for the last three decades, at least. That is, unless you're not a laborer, then you don't need to work and just get more.
To expand the above with numbers, in San Francisco, I believe it's $41,000 as a starting salary for a truck driver. Otto's driverless truck, for reference, is $30,000. In terms of math and costs, there's enough incentive in the world to do this, and the only major obstacle at present is a normalization of the technology in scope and efficiency. That's a target of when, not if.
They rushed it on cars largely because they want to get out of the whole employing people but not considering them actual employees thing that they're trying to do. Their test with their cars was shooting from the hip. Lyft is at least doing it right with a slower, more controlled pilot.
nabe_shogun
Member
Don't count on that. Just because a car drives itself, doesn't mean it won't need a title and registration. And if people aren't getting drivers licenses, they'll still need an ID card, which is done at the DMV.
But at least the car will go to the DMV and wait in line by itself
Shows the general ignorance of the tech in the population
demosthenes
Member
Have you talked with anyone that's actually driven in one of these? Because I find it the opposite. Most in this thread seem to think that within the decade a majority if vehicles will be full autonomous and from what I've discussed with people that have been in the cars they still have a long way to go.
It's a good thing these automated cars have cameras then huh? And it's not just dash cam either it's full 360.
LegendofJoe
Member
This, in the past 5 years alone four people I know have died in car accidents. One of them left behind two young children. And two others were trapped in their overturned vehicle and burned alive. I also have a family member who has been paralyzed from the waist down since her early 20s after being thrown from a car.
Driverless vehicle technology will save millions of lives. There is no excuse to slow its adoption; lives are more important than jobs.
That was the claim made by the person I was responding to! Context is valuable.
If you think truck driving is a skilled profession that couldn't easily be automated, great. Then it won't get automated. My observation is that people make exactly the same claims about driving cars and we know those can be automated.
But either way, we shouldn't avoid implementing automation because we're worried that we'll put people out of work. Work isn't a goal in itself! Accomplishing stuff is. If we can accomplish all the things we want done as a society without making people work tedious or unrewarding jobs, that should be a victory, not a problem. The very idea that automation will create permanently unemployable people is a fundamentally warped one, focusing on capitalistic goals over human ones.
CadetMahoney
Member
I bet assholes damage/vandalize the seatbelts or superglues the sockets via slight of hand under a large coat and shit to avoid the cameras.
They'll do some shit.
They'll do some shit.
This is a great post. And I feel like this whole driverless car thing is just another fast track to you can't go anywhere we don't want you to go type of thing. What's next? Regulations on where our car goes? Regulated hours in the car? God only knows what are superiors are planning for us.
And most intelligent people would say robots are to make this world easier and more pleasurable for humans. But then you have this royalty that just wants the poor to be poor so they can have theirs.
Skellig Gra
Member
Skilled functions can be automated(example being woodwork, metalwork, etc) but that isn't really part of this discussion anyway. I agree we shouldn't avoid automating because people will lose their jobs, my point is that lumping automated cars and automated trucks together doesn't make sense. Hell, the battery tech required to get a fully realized fleet of cross country driving driverless trucks does not exist. You still need human intervention somewhere for the foreseeable future. One day everything thing will be automated but it is far off and a lot of hard work and innovation stands in the way.
Yes, I read that, too. I wouldn't be too worried, though, since my phone GPS already knows the speed limit (and where it changes) everywhere I drive, and sounds alerts when I go over. I doubt the new self-driving cars are going to ditch that kind of existing know-how, to rely on what a camera may, or may not, see. The GPS will know the normal speed limit, no matter if the posted sign's been snowed over or painted over.
No decent engineer should build a system that is required to make such decisions.
The computer will know precisely how far it can see and how long it will take to stop in current conditions, so it can be perfect every single time.
Given perfect decision making, there is no reason for there to ever be an accident aside from sensor failure or someone teleporting right in front of the vehicle.
The reason humans have accidents is because they get distracted, they have shitty reaction times, they react improperly to unexpected events, etc. If at any point there is a trolley problem scenario, it's because there was already a mistake made. Such dilemmas are not some unavoidable fact of life, they exist because human beings are flawed.
I'm not sure it's that people want the poor to be poor, but really honing in on efficiency, which in a society like ours means having as few hands in the pie as possible.
This is, of course, counterintuitive to the social demands that there must be infinite pies for everyone, so the change and what we demand become two different worlds.
Sooner or later, people will wake up to Barack Obama's warnings that automation is the middle class killer of our times. Perhaps before then we can begin to question social norms that demand jobs, when the goal of technology like automation is simply to replace human labor with superior methods, which of course cuts people from demand.
Unless you count the Capitalistic people who are all "make money at all cost and not pay the worker" as part of the example of royalty, they're not the majority curating the waves coming to us.
You clearly haven't thought this through. Someone can jump off a curb, exit a driveway, or cross a lane divider at any time during a car's transit. So while, yes, an AI car will know how long it takes to brake to any point in its line of sight, unless it's going to trot along at a casual 5 mph, it cannot predict a random occurrence such as I noted which happens, say, 30-100 feet in front of it. Thus, it cannot obviate the need to make a decision such as the one in the question I put forth.
No, I've thought it through plenty, you just aren't considering that the roads and the speed limits and traffic laws are all part of the engineered system.
Barring things just falling from the sky, we have designed most of our road infrastructure such that situations like you suggest can't happen. On high speed roads all the traffic is going the same direction at similar speed, so even if something does happen 30-100 feet in front of you, you have a much greater distance to actually correct for it.
On surface streets where something might actually jump out in front the speed limits are low enough that stopping distance with modern brake systems is basically nothing.
If you are designing your infrastructure such that drivers are ever in a position to make moral judgments about whose life to value, you have fucked up, regardless if the driver is human or robot. We don't design train systems or aircraft autopilots this way, why would it be any different in a car?