Self-driving Chevy Bolts are coming to the streets of Manhattan in 2018
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I disagree. Pennsylvania is often rated as the worst roads by truckers in the entire USA and the greater Pittsburgh is especially bad with all the aforementioned problems (well not so much double and triple parking) plus the added benefit of having a horribly thought out road system that often has no rhyme or reason as to why roads where designed the way they where. It's a reason why Uber is testing their self driving cars here
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I'd suspect Manhattan would probably be easier. Especially in the gridded sections. The roads are pretty straightforward, and speed limits are relatively low at 25MPH.
The toughest challenge would probably be pedestrians, but pedestrians usually stay out of the car's way.
The toughest challenge would probably be pedestrians, but pedestrians usually stay out of the car's way.
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I don't see where they said Manhattan is the hardest challenge ever. They only said it was harder than the prior areas.
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Do they have any proven testing beforehand? Or alpha testing again at the risk of the public's safety?
I would like to see these proven on the racetrack and offroad courses before they hurdle these things at us.
I would like to see these proven on the racetrack and offroad courses before they hurdle these things at us.
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No, Uber is testing in Pittsburgh because they bought out the CMU automation lab and those folks didn't feel like moving to Silly Valley. That said the 3D nature of Pittsburgh where you can be 300 feet laterally but 600 feet vertically from where you need to be is a unique challenge and one my dad said would drive holographic display technology =)
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I wonder how many Jaywalkers will get hit by these drones. That will be the real test of the lidar system. There are so many people here that crosses the street in the middle of the road while their attention is on their iPhones.
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Yes, they had 30 initial test vehicles last year, then 130 more this year.
So they've already done alpha and beta testing.
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Pedestrian detection has been a solved problem for awhile now. I think Volvo has had it since the early 2000s.
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Tougher than SF? They've been testing the Chevy Bolts here for awhile and our streets are a disaster. Hard to imagine Manhattan being worse. We have steep roads, construction everywhere, pedestrians/cyclists everywhere, potholes, confusing signage, etc.
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As much as I love technological progression, (who honestly wants to go back to mid-90s tech?), I'm afraid that parts of society's progression will drag behind technological progression and we may experience some severe growing pains. Not enough jobs to go around coupled with more and more jobs being automated out of existence with a heavy dose of "You don't work, you don't eat, fuck you" mindset, which takes about two seconds to find examples of, would be pure pain and misery for countless number of people.That worries me.
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Hint: if you read the third paragraph you can find out details about where else these cars have been testing.
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After watching the documentary "Short Circuit" I can only assume that when one of these cars is hit by lightning they will gain sentience and help out their friends in fun adventures.
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Well, except rural roads of the type where I grew up. Single-lane bridges that have crude signs indicating which direction has priority, river fords with handmade water-level markers indicating safe water depths for crossing, grade rail crossings with no signals, roads that wash away after storms and require careful evaluation of whether it's safe to proceed.
I'm sure autonomous or semi-autonomous cars will be a more and more viable option in cities over the coming decade, but once you get off the beaten track, where conditions are unpredictable and there are no centimeter-precision maps to rely upon, then it's going to require human control for the foreseeable future.
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It will be interesting to see how this rollout goes... because if GM succeeds, I'd think the biggest loser out of this would be the taxis and Uber.
NYC is already trying to reduce traffic in the city - and a fleet of autonomous EV's would likely be the recipe they're looking for.
NYC is already trying to reduce traffic in the city - and a fleet of autonomous EV's would likely be the recipe they're looking for.
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I too, am no Luddite, but I can easily see that this kind of automation will cause societal havoc. Millions of jobs will be lost world wide, and this is just the beginning. I don't welcome this at all.
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I realize my opinion may not be popular, especially on a tech news site, but I just don't like where all this is going. It can be argued either way, but the side I am on is that this will ultimately dumb down our society. I refer to the movie "Wall-E" countless times these days as I think into what the future might look like. There will one day be a generation that has no idea how to drive a vehicle 'manually'. Think "Demolition Man"...
Businesses make stuff to sell to people that want to buy their stuff. Simple. So this kind of thing will be a 'success' based on that statement alone. The sale is easy once a person sees that they can do other stuff while in the car; especially the ones that have long commutes to work daily (like myself). I did the math a while ago, and I literally spend 1 month each year just driving to and from work. It is appealing to me to get one of these cars; I won't deny it.
Let's just say there will NEVER be a wide-spread hack of Tesla's network, and let's just say there will NEVER be an accident caused by an AV. Because none of that will EVER happen. /s
Study this and study that, I get it. They are safer. We can't deny it. They react much faster than humans do; more specifically the distracted human. I believe safety will also be a huge factor into the success story of the AV.
Although the AV concept has already left the station (punny), I believe the focus should be shifted to educating and enforcing safe driving. Using a smart phone while driving should be equivalent to drunk driving. Think about it -- they both weave in and out of their lane, and they both cause thousands of fatalities each year.
Do we really need this?
Businesses make stuff to sell to people that want to buy their stuff. Simple. So this kind of thing will be a 'success' based on that statement alone. The sale is easy once a person sees that they can do other stuff while in the car; especially the ones that have long commutes to work daily (like myself). I did the math a while ago, and I literally spend 1 month each year just driving to and from work. It is appealing to me to get one of these cars; I won't deny it.
Let's just say there will NEVER be a wide-spread hack of Tesla's network, and let's just say there will NEVER be an accident caused by an AV. Because none of that will EVER happen. /s
Study this and study that, I get it. They are safer. We can't deny it. They react much faster than humans do; more specifically the distracted human. I believe safety will also be a huge factor into the success story of the AV.
Although the AV concept has already left the station (punny), I believe the focus should be shifted to educating and enforcing safe driving. Using a smart phone while driving should be equivalent to drunk driving. Think about it -- they both weave in and out of their lane, and they both cause thousands of fatalities each year.
Do we really need this?
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Really? You did read the bit where there are not one but two humans in the car at all times? And who said anything about full production? It clearly states in the first sentence that this is a test program.
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There is no reason to think automation reduces employment on a national scale. It changes what jobs there are and what they pay. It increases productivity, and improves quality in the industries where it is applied. But there is no evidence that on a national scale it leads to unemployment. And there is no reason to think that banning it or freezing it will lead, nationally, to better outcomes.
It may be that if you are an old fashioned print operator, the move to electronic typesetting lowers your premium and your wages. But there is no reason to think that the newspaper industry moving to electronics lowers employment for the whole country. In fact, it probably increases it. But it does lower the number of typesetters.
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Haha, never been to New York? I wanna see how this deals with specific intersections like anything along Times Square where you need to inch up until the point where the pedestrians decide to go behind you instead of in front of you. And only then are you able to actually go through the intersection.
Or the grid lock version where if you don't force your way into the intersection, the opposing traffic will eventually block you out again once they get the green light.
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My worry would be software quality. How many lines of code, how many undiscovered features where it does exactly what the coder believed he had been told to do, but actually in these particular circumstances it has killed half a dozen bystanders.
The first thing to look at is the software assurance and management procedures, are they really up to the task? Have they applied rigorous methods to prove it? Ones commensurate with the risk to life that is involved?
I doubt it. It seems likely that to be safe enough for mass use the environment will have to be much more restricted and controlled, and that we will simply have to give up on mixing human and computer driven vehicles - not to mention the bikes and walkers.
They can still be a great boon. But the way this is being done the potential for unforeseen disasters is huge.
The first thing to look at is the software assurance and management procedures, are they really up to the task? Have they applied rigorous methods to prove it? Ones commensurate with the risk to life that is involved?
I doubt it. It seems likely that to be safe enough for mass use the environment will have to be much more restricted and controlled, and that we will simply have to give up on mixing human and computer driven vehicles - not to mention the bikes and walkers.
They can still be a great boon. But the way this is being done the potential for unforeseen disasters is huge.
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I'm not sure driving counts as an essential human skill. As a species we've only ever done it for about 100 years, and only about 70 years as a common practice. And even now there are plenty of people who don't do it but aren't somehow devolving into incompetent humans.
I get your concern and, in general, there might be some reason to think too much automation is problematic in certain cases. But letting a machine drive me around vs. Letting a human drive me around (taxis, Lyft, public transit) isn't one of those areas.
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As someone struck by a taxi in Manhattan, as well as having rid in a few taxis in Manhattan, I welcome the transition to autonomous cars. Driving a car simply requires a ton of concentration, quick reflexes, and calm emotional response, and no human is capable of being up to the task 100% of the time. There's simply too many distractions and variables. Even the best driver fails occasionally, although they often luck out when other drivers, pedestrians, etc. who do happen to be paying attention at that moment compensate.
Better to just take the task away from them. I typically use mass transit to commute to work, and I don't feel I've become dumber by removing myself from the driver's seat. Instead, I can use the commute time to actually pay attention to the music/podcast I'm listening to, or read, or play a game, or respond to emails... etc. Even talking on the phone (speakerphone) in a car has been shown to significantly impact driver reaction speeds.
While there's a few that actually just like the act of driving and give it the proper respect and attention, for the majority of people they'd rather be doing something else, and often try. The commute isn't a joy, but a chore. They're not being intellectually stimulated, but are becoming bored and distracted.
And all of this is without accounting for emotions. Automated cars aren't going to experience road rage, or start speeding, taking corners fast, etc. because they're running late. No rubbernecking at accidents on the road (which there should hopefully be less of). Or making errors about their state of wakefulness or intoxication.
People have only been driving cars up to this point because we're the only beings remotely capable of it. But objectively speaking, as a group, we're pretty terrible at it, and it's something that should be handed over to automation as soon as it's safe to do so.
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I'm don't share your concern there. We have tons of examples of life and death scenarios where we rely on software. Medical devices. Flying. Even existing cars with drive by wire.
Whether the self driving capabilities will be up to the standards we need for it to be released into the work remains to be seen. But rigorous testing is being performed, the above article describing one example of that. In time there will be enough miles on the system in enough environments that we can safely say that most of the bugs are worked out.
Eventually a bug might cause a fatality, but we have to accept that and understand that as we fix these bugs they are fixed for millions of cars at once (assuming we don't run them on android and they never get updated
).
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I'm not FOND of the idea, but your alarmist views fail to take into account a little something called "history".
Millions of jobs will be CREATED when you lose millions of jobs. The fact is no matter what industry you want to look at, once you get a paradigm shift in that industry (transportation going from horse to automobile, for example), jobs are ALWAYS lost. Blacksmiths and livery stables became non-viable due to vast oversupply of those services in the economy.
But a major increase in job availability came as a result of new road construction, blacksmiths became car mechanics, livery stables became gas stations and everyone had jobs again.
That's just ONE example of how an economy handles changes in technology. It's happened time and again when people simply find new vocations/occupations to handle changes in how things are done.
So the whole doom and gloom, "the sky is falling" and "millions will be unemployed" nonsense is, well, pure bullshit from an overall point of view. The jobs will be there in some form or another.
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You seem to be saying that they shouldn't do ANY testing in live situations ever? So they should go from completely controlled areas straight to a full fleet of these being available everywhere? Or would you rather they take a small number of cars and test them in increasingly more difficult situations, minimizing the risk as much as possible (have a human in the car, etc.), consistently making improvements if they find any issues? Because that last one is what they are doing and it's the safest way to do this.
They've already DONE the "not in public" testing. They feel confident that it's ready for these roads based on the results of that testing. So they're doing some testing actually on the roads as a "just in case" because they don't want to release until they've done some testing in the public areas as well.
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However, as we can see with the coal industry in Appalachia, destroying the jobs is easy. Getting the people retrained and employed is a different issue altogether, especially the older the worker is.
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I guess you've not been to NYC?
It's not that NYC is particularly unique in the types of challenges presented. SF and DC for example also have lots of pedestrians, bikes and bike courriers, utility vehicles, roadwork, double/triple parking, messy intersections, etc.
But NYC might bring these things to the next level. Everyone just does whatever they want, ranging from other drivers to pedestrians. Jaywalking is practically the standard, and people totally assume that cars will stop for them. People just pull over randomly without blinkers, block side streets all the time, and speed limits and red lights are often taken more as suggestions than hard rules.
I drive in DC daily and drove in SF several times, but subjectively, I feel like NYC is a bit more challenging to deal with. In my line of work, I travel a fair amount and have driven in some pretty crazy places (eg. Haiti where there are no rules, lights, speed limits etc.) and I've always felt like driving in NYC and DC has prepped me very well for these situations. Although I heard India is just on another level entirely, but I can't speak from experience.
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Feel free to spell it out, then. Which millions of new jobs will be created to replace taxi drivers and truck drivers? When cars replaced horses, yes, all of the infrastructure around cars required different but comparable jobs to the former infrastructure supporting horses. When cars that don't need human operators replace cars that do need human operators, it's harder to figure out which jobs will magically be created to re-employ the former operators given that the other infrastructure already exists.
As it is you've just posted an ideological assertion (jobs created always >= jobs lost due to technological change), which isn't worth much.
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My guess is few to none. That's really not the challenge for AVs. They are always aware and very adept at seeing things like pedestrians or bicyclists coming from nowhere (read: outside of human eyesight).
The bigger challenges for AVs are things like the article mentioned, primarily negotiating complicated scenarios where the conservative programming may cause the AV to simply be incapable of proceeding (e.g. where pedestrians refuse to wait for the AV to proceed.
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In developed countries primary and secondary sectors of economy employ relatively few people. As a result, most people are employed in services, like e.g. drivers. Once such employment becomes unsustainable, what new types of jobs are on the horizon? Information workers? That seems be computerized right now.
So far technology creates new jobs, maybe even more than was before, but can this hold for long enough? Are self-driving cars that kind of disruptive technology that can in sufficiently disrupt available jobs for long enough to cause social problems, before new jobs are created or needed?
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Yes, we need this. 38,000 people died on US roads in 2015. 100 people per day. Not to mention something like 4 million serious injuries due to traffic accidents each year as well. It's unbelievable that we tolerate this. I don't know why we are so de-sensitized to it.
Could you imagine getting a text every time someone was injured in a car accident? It'd be something like every 10 seconds... "broken arm", "broken nose", "fatality", over and over and over and over again.
I appreciate your optimism about humans and driving, but everyone knows that texting and driving is dangerous just like everyone knows that driving drunk is dangerous. But still people do it. And people fall asleep while driving. And people look back into the back seat while driving. Or put on their makeup. Or pick up something off the floor... or take their eyes off the road for just a moment...
There will no doubt be significant displacement because of the self-driving car revolution. But 30,000 dead people year after year after year? 4 million serious injuries year after year after year? I know which side I'm on.
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I hope you are correct, but I am dubious that this reference to historical trends can be projected forward in perpetuity.
Your examples are entirely valid, but they aren't exactly always relevant.
Technology shifts jobs in one of two ways: It can change the fundamental demand for goods and services, and it can shift workers from one labor "category" to another.
Let's start with your example of the transition from horse-driven transportation to automobiles. What changed here was a change in demand from one type of good to another (horses and their supporting infrastructure to automobiles and their supporting infrastructure). The reason there was a net gain in jobs was because of two factors:
1) The labor category didn't change. We had human beings creating things and human beings offering services for both environments. The jobs just transitioned from one product to another.
2) The demand increased because of the overall increase in material wealth and the complexity of providing the services. Cars are much more labor intensive to have as part of our economy than horses. They need to be manufactured, serviced, fueled and require an extensive road network. All of this leads to a greatly increased need for a labor pool to support the ecosystem. Ergo: even more jobs.
But as automation starts to enter the picture, many of the jobs that used to be taken up by humans start to vanish. Things like manufacturing, road work, etc. (For example, look at coal mining. The loss of jobs there is as much from automation as it is from a reduction in demand). These jobs are permanently lost to automation. But until now, these lost jobs are more than made up for by the increased number of jobs in information and services.
This is what I mean by a transition from one labor 'category' to another. Manufacturing and other easy to automate jobs are lost, but the humans shift to the next labor categories: Information workers and service workers. And as the economy grows, the demand for these types of goods and services also grows.
But the problem here is that there is not an endless supply of labor categories, and there is not an endless opportunity for growth. As automation becomes more sophisticated, people will be displaced from service work (for example: drivers replaced by automated vehicles). These people cannot (generally) switch back to manual labor jobs because those have already been displaced. They will have to switch to information work. But as automation starts to encroach there (think IBM's Watson) there will be fewer jobs available there as well.
Meanwhile, the implication that an ever growing economy can drive enough increased demand to offset this loss of jobs is not reliable anymore either. It is much easier to absorb this increased growth with more automated jobs than with more, highly trained humans. So as demand for new types of goods and services grows, there will no longer automatically be a corresponding increase in demand for labor to provide these goods and services. That is already evident today. Even as we see whole new industries develop, we aren't seeing massive increases in any jobs in areas that are already automated. We only see increases in those labor categories that are still filled by humans. But once a category is automated, even the largest increases in demand in that category will not result in new jobs.
And we are running out of labor categories.
But there is an even simpler way of looking at it. The closer technology becomes to doing what a human can do, it will always be easier and cheaper to double the number of these 'robots' than it will be to add more humans to the labor pool.
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