5 ms·

Just give the money to the NSF instead. Why spend $4 billion on this (pointless, worthless) technology that Silicon Valley is already running headlong to create

Just give the money to the NSF instead. Why spend $4 billion on this (pointless, worthless) technology that Silicon Valley is already running headlong to create?

bosdev 11y ago
Saying this is pointless and worthless is insane to me. More than thirty thousand people die in motor vehicle deaths in the US every year. The amount of pain and suffering this technology will eliminate is incalculable.
- astazangasta 11y ago
  Those problems can be solved without the ridiculous effort of creating self driving cars. People die mostly because of drunk driving accidents. More bus passes and free taxis can save people much cheaper. Plus, how many more die of cancer and heart disease? Are you really arguing that driving deaths are a major problem that requires intensive effort to solve?
  - function_seven 11y ago
    You think it will be cheaper to pay for more taxis than it will be to have cars drive themselves? Let alone many drunk drivers would still drive themselves even if a free taxi were available. > Are you really arguing that driving deaths are a major problem that requires intensive effort to solve? It's obvious to any observer that driving deaths are a major problem, and that an intensive effort to solve this problem is appropriate. We've made tremendous progress over that last 50 years. Let's continue that path.
    - astazangasta 11y ago
      Yes, of course it will be cheaper to pay for taxis (not more taxis) for drunk people than it will be to have cars drive themselves. You're talking about converting the entire US car fleet, developing a non-existent technology, and refining it to the extreme (less than 2 deaths per 100 million miles traveled on average, which is the human driving record right now). It is MUCH, MUCH cheaper to implement a program where you make sure that drunk people leaving bars get into taxis. >It's obvious to any observer that driving deaths are a major problem, and that an intensive effort to solve this problem is appropriate. We've made tremendous progress over that last 50 years. Let's continue that path. This is disingenuous. Driverless cars are not part of an effort to reduce driving deaths, that's just how they're being sold. It's just as likely that driverless cars will increase driving deaths, until their safety record is refined over a period of many years and lots of testing (the same way it happened with humans). Driverless cars are being pursued because tech companies see an opportunity to use their machine learning expertise to turn driving into a commodity service that they control and can make billions off. It has nothing to do with driving safety, and if that were the goal (which, again, it is not, the goal is to make money by turning driving into a service and eliminate the cost of labor for drivers), there are a hundred cheaper ways to do it. If increasing driving safety were a goal that society actually cared about, Tracy Morgan would not have been hit by a truck.
      - jessaustin 11y ago
        You're talking about converting the entire US car fleet... No one is talking about that. Poorly-driven vehicles will be with us for decades, because freedom. Everyone knows that.
        astazangasta 11y ago
        Again, the implicit assumption that machines will automatically be better drivers than humans, because, magic. As we all know, all of the technology and computer systems we make work flawlessly and never miscommunicate, crash, or fail for any reason, unlike those damn meat puppets that operate them.
        jessaustin 11y ago
        Sure there will be problems. Regardless, the suggestion that "they're going to take your car away" is FUD. No one wants to do that. If a robocar can't handle a human driver in the next lane then it can't handle any number of other common and unpreventable factors.
        brazzledazzle 11y ago
        There are certain things that computers are better at. The fastest reflexes in the world can't compete with a computer. A computer can't be distracted. A computer can be programmed to always drive safe distances, something almost no human does. A computer will never fail to check if a lane change is safe but you better believe humans do every day. Humans are quite capable and will always be able to handle things that computers can't in situations they're not designed for. At least until an AI is invented that is indistinguishable from a human mind. There will be mistakes and bugs (just as there are now in software made for cars). But believing that humans who drive while tired, eating cheeseburgers, playing with their phone, texting, not accounting for blind spots and tailgating others are going to be safer in the long run is bordering on religious faith in some kind of fantasy that humans are more than they are. No one is talking about replacing F1 drivers, we're talking about a sea of idiots that anyone who commutes every day with any awareness would recognize as being a major hazard. I'll take the patchable bugs over the psychos I see every day that put lives at risk with their self-centered hyper aggressive driving that relies on the attentiveness of everyone around them to prevent an accident. There is no software update for people like this–you either wait years for them to grow up or for them to kill someone.
  - huac 11y ago
    With self driving cars, drunk drivers can't do nearly as much harm.
  - Grishnakh 11y ago
    Buses are crap and should just be eliminated. If you want good public transit, you need to build SkyTran. $4B could do a lot of good in developing SkyTran and getting it so that cities spend money on deploying it instead of wasting that money on roads.
    - Grishnakh 11y ago
      Just to add to this: buses are so bad that you actually will have less pollution if all the bus riders just get cars and drive themselves. This isn't true if the bus is a nice coach and all its seats are full, and it's driving all these people from one place to another fairly distant place, but for city buses it absolutely is because of their low-speed, herky-jerky operation and the fact that they're rarely full and frequently mostly empty.
    - astazangasta 11y ago
      Buses are crap in the US. Try a bus in Geneva; they are a wonder of cleanliness and efficiency.
      - Grishnakh 11y ago
        No, they're not. They might be better if they're electric (but we have those here in the US too in some places, like NYC), but they'll never be efficient. The only efficient system is an automated personal rapid transit system which can move people between arbitrary points without any stops in between. Only something like SkyTran can do that. As long as you have to stop and pick up other riders in-between, or have to stop for traffic lights, you'll never get an efficient trip.
beisner 11y ago
I'm curious, why do you say it's "pointless, worthless" technology?
- astazangasta 11y ago
  What problem will it remove? Commuting boredom? It might have no effect on congestion or pollution; it might make them worse. Maybe in the future it will reduce accidents, but its likely it will cause more on the interim. This is a solution without a problem.
  - circlecrimson 11y ago
    Commuting downtime is a major drain on productivity. Self driving cars could possibly remove traffic lights completely.
  - jonnathanson 11y ago
    Spend a few months here in Los Angeles -- heck, just try driving anywhere on any given Thursday -- and you'll appreciate what a productivity-sapping, infuriating, stress-inducing, risky, ever-worsening nightmare the daily commute can be. My drive home tonight was a pleasant, breezy, 45-minute cruise covering 2 freaking miles of road, in which I was nearly hit at least twice -- once by a crazed/enraged driver who flipped an erratic u-turn from one busy lane into my lane going the opposite direction; and once by a driver who decided that a red light was just a suggestion. These are not uncommon occurrences. And they are happening a lot more frequently. At times I feel like Han Solo navigating an asteroid field. As for me? I'll trust the future to swarms of interconnected, cross-communicating AI cars over a random, haphazard swarm of humans any day of the week. The cars can think and operate together. We just think about ourselves. We can't possibly take all of the data on the road into account as well as connected cars will eventually be able to. I don't know what they can do right this second, but I am very optimistic about what they'll be able to do in the not-too-distant future.
    - astazangasta 11y ago
      I am weary of this argument, which is rather as fruitless as trying to argue against creationism in a Christian fundamentalist forum. I think the optimism behind driverless cars is very millenarian and places irrational hope in a strange place. LA is a hell for cars made by urban planners who deliberately made it that way. What problems do you think will be solved by robot cars that shouldn't already be solved by Lyft or Uber (which are functionally identical except for the presence of a human driver)? Cars will never be able to zoom through a downtown metropolis at 60 mph, unless the city is entirely stripped of pedestrians. The problems you highlight are NOT caused by human drivers, they are caused by cars, and autonomous or not, those issues will remain. I don't have these issues because I live in a dense very walkable city and ride my bike everywhere. This is how we should be thinking: cars simply don't belong in cities, and a robot fleet won't change that.
jgreen10 11y ago
Don't you mean that Silicon Valley is improving DARPA-funded autonomous driving technology? Lets not rewrite history. Government funding drives most technological development.

Just give the money to the NSF instead. Why spend $4 billion on this (pointless, worthless) technology that Silicon Valley is already running headlong to create?

bosdev 11y ago

Saying this is pointless and worthless is insane to me. More than thirty thousand people die in motor vehicle deaths in the US every year. The amount of pain and suffering this technology will eliminate is incalculable.

astazangasta 11y ago
Those problems can be solved without the ridiculous effort of creating self driving cars. People die mostly because of drunk driving accidents. More bus passes and free taxis can save people much cheaper. Plus, how many more die of cancer and heart disease? Are you really arguing that driving deaths are a major problem that requires intensive effort to solve?
- function_seven 11y ago
  You think it will be cheaper to pay for more taxis than it will be to have cars drive themselves? Let alone many drunk drivers would still drive themselves even if a free taxi were available. > Are you really arguing that driving deaths are a major problem that requires intensive effort to solve? It's obvious to any observer that driving deaths are a major problem, and that an intensive effort to solve this problem is appropriate. We've made tremendous progress over that last 50 years. Let's continue that path.
  - astazangasta 11y ago
    Yes, of course it will be cheaper to pay for taxis (not more taxis) for drunk people than it will be to have cars drive themselves. You're talking about converting the entire US car fleet, developing a non-existent technology, and refining it to the extreme (less than 2 deaths per 100 million miles traveled on average, which is the human driving record right now). It is MUCH, MUCH cheaper to implement a program where you make sure that drunk people leaving bars get into taxis. >It's obvious to any observer that driving deaths are a major problem, and that an intensive effort to solve this problem is appropriate. We've made tremendous progress over that last 50 years. Let's continue that path. This is disingenuous. Driverless cars are not part of an effort to reduce driving deaths, that's just how they're being sold. It's just as likely that driverless cars will increase driving deaths, until their safety record is refined over a period of many years and lots of testing (the same way it happened with humans). Driverless cars are being pursued because tech companies see an opportunity to use their machine learning expertise to turn driving into a commodity service that they control and can make billions off. It has nothing to do with driving safety, and if that were the goal (which, again, it is not, the goal is to make money by turning driving into a service and eliminate the cost of labor for drivers), there are a hundred cheaper ways to do it. If increasing driving safety were a goal that society actually cared about, Tracy Morgan would not have been hit by a truck.
    - jessaustin 11y ago
      You're talking about converting the entire US car fleet... No one is talking about that. Poorly-driven vehicles will be with us for decades, because freedom. Everyone knows that.
      - astazangasta 11y ago
        Again, the implicit assumption that machines will automatically be better drivers than humans, because, magic. As we all know, all of the technology and computer systems we make work flawlessly and never miscommunicate, crash, or fail for any reason, unlike those damn meat puppets that operate them.
        jessaustin 11y ago
        Sure there will be problems. Regardless, the suggestion that "they're going to take your car away" is FUD. No one wants to do that. If a robocar can't handle a human driver in the next lane then it can't handle any number of other common and unpreventable factors.
        brazzledazzle 11y ago
        There are certain things that computers are better at. The fastest reflexes in the world can't compete with a computer. A computer can't be distracted. A computer can be programmed to always drive safe distances, something almost no human does. A computer will never fail to check if a lane change is safe but you better believe humans do every day. Humans are quite capable and will always be able to handle things that computers can't in situations they're not designed for. At least until an AI is invented that is indistinguishable from a human mind. There will be mistakes and bugs (just as there are now in software made for cars). But believing that humans who drive while tired, eating cheeseburgers, playing with their phone, texting, not accounting for blind spots and tailgating others are going to be safer in the long run is bordering on religious faith in some kind of fantasy that humans are more than they are. No one is talking about replacing F1 drivers, we're talking about a sea of idiots that anyone who commutes every day with any awareness would recognize as being a major hazard. I'll take the patchable bugs over the psychos I see every day that put lives at risk with their self-centered hyper aggressive driving that relies on the attentiveness of everyone around them to prevent an accident. There is no software update for people like this–you either wait years for them to grow up or for them to kill someone.
- huac 11y ago
  With self driving cars, drunk drivers can't do nearly as much harm.
- Grishnakh 11y ago
  Buses are crap and should just be eliminated. If you want good public transit, you need to build SkyTran. $4B could do a lot of good in developing SkyTran and getting it so that cities spend money on deploying it instead of wasting that money on roads.
  - Grishnakh 11y ago
    Just to add to this: buses are so bad that you actually will have less pollution if all the bus riders just get cars and drive themselves. This isn't true if the bus is a nice coach and all its seats are full, and it's driving all these people from one place to another fairly distant place, but for city buses it absolutely is because of their low-speed, herky-jerky operation and the fact that they're rarely full and frequently mostly empty.
  - astazangasta 11y ago
    Buses are crap in the US. Try a bus in Geneva; they are a wonder of cleanliness and efficiency.
    - Grishnakh 11y ago
      No, they're not. They might be better if they're electric (but we have those here in the US too in some places, like NYC), but they'll never be efficient. The only efficient system is an automated personal rapid transit system which can move people between arbitrary points without any stops in between. Only something like SkyTran can do that. As long as you have to stop and pick up other riders in-between, or have to stop for traffic lights, you'll never get an efficient trip.

beisner 11y ago

I'm curious, why do you say it's "pointless, worthless" technology?

astazangasta 11y ago
What problem will it remove? Commuting boredom? It might have no effect on congestion or pollution; it might make them worse. Maybe in the future it will reduce accidents, but its likely it will cause more on the interim. This is a solution without a problem.
- circlecrimson 11y ago
  Commuting downtime is a major drain on productivity. Self driving cars could possibly remove traffic lights completely.
- jonnathanson 11y ago
  Spend a few months here in Los Angeles -- heck, just try driving anywhere on any given Thursday -- and you'll appreciate what a productivity-sapping, infuriating, stress-inducing, risky, ever-worsening nightmare the daily commute can be. My drive home tonight was a pleasant, breezy, 45-minute cruise covering 2 freaking miles of road, in which I was nearly hit at least twice -- once by a crazed/enraged driver who flipped an erratic u-turn from one busy lane into my lane going the opposite direction; and once by a driver who decided that a red light was just a suggestion. These are not uncommon occurrences. And they are happening a lot more frequently. At times I feel like Han Solo navigating an asteroid field. As for me? I'll trust the future to swarms of interconnected, cross-communicating AI cars over a random, haphazard swarm of humans any day of the week. The cars can think and operate together. We just think about ourselves. We can't possibly take all of the data on the road into account as well as connected cars will eventually be able to. I don't know what they can do right this second, but I am very optimistic about what they'll be able to do in the not-too-distant future.
  - astazangasta 11y ago
    I am weary of this argument, which is rather as fruitless as trying to argue against creationism in a Christian fundamentalist forum. I think the optimism behind driverless cars is very millenarian and places irrational hope in a strange place. LA is a hell for cars made by urban planners who deliberately made it that way. What problems do you think will be solved by robot cars that shouldn't already be solved by Lyft or Uber (which are functionally identical except for the presence of a human driver)? Cars will never be able to zoom through a downtown metropolis at 60 mph, unless the city is entirely stripped of pedestrians. The problems you highlight are NOT caused by human drivers, they are caused by cars, and autonomous or not, those issues will remain. I don't have these issues because I live in a dense very walkable city and ride my bike everywhere. This is how we should be thinking: cars simply don't belong in cities, and a robot fleet won't change that.

jgreen10 11y ago

Don't you mean that Silicon Valley is improving DARPA-funded autonomous driving technology? Lets not rewrite history. Government funding drives most technological development.