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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   37095 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 10, 2023

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Autonomous cars are hard because they need extensive training and testing to improve safety. That can only be done by rolling them out en masse. But they can only be mass deployed if they're safe. Chicken and egg problem.

Tesla's full self driving is still in beta and people are told to keep their hands on their wheel but the technology is physically running on hundreds of thousands of vehicles. Self driving taxis have been driving around Chinese cities for many years now. As in the US, lawmakers mostly require them to operate with a driver behind the wheel. But there are a few driverless cars on roads in Shenzhen, presumably more by now.

https://www.scmp.com/tech/policy/article/3187483/chinas-southern-tech-hub-shenzhen-becomes-first-city-mainland-regulate

I conclude that self-driving vehicles were a proven, existing technology as of 2022. You can quibble that they don't meet exacting definitions of safety or are pervasive, yet were cars terribly safe or pervasive a few years after they were invented? They might not have been as convenient as a horse or a train either. Yet they were a real capability.

We can, of course, choose to suppress and delay powerful technologies. Nuclear power has been pretty intensively hammered, it's illegal in a fair few countries. High Speed Rail might as well be illegal in the US, there's some combination of sabotage, incompetence and corruption going on in California. Nevertheless, the technology is real and works. Same with supersonic air transport for that matter. We might choose not to pursue and develop it but it's technically possible. It could develop economic returns too, in the right regulatory conditions.

For example in the UK they decided to effectively ban vehicles on public roads for some time:

Some successful vehicles provided mass transit until a backlash against these large vehicles resulted in the passage of legislation such as the UK Locomotives Act 1865, which required many self-propelled vehicles on public roads to be preceded by a man on foot waving a red flag and blowing a horn. This effectively halted road auto development in the United Kingdom for most of the rest of the 19th century; inventors and engineers shifted their efforts to improvements in railway locomotives. The law was not repealed until 1896, although the need for the red flag was removed in 1878.

And eventually it gets to the point where research is so expensive and the returns are so little that no one in their right mind would invest in it, and smaller firms go bust while larger ones scale back considerably, or at least try to direct their AI research towards applications where it might actually be used commercially.

But this hasn't happened. There's big investment in self driving vehicles today, investment is increasing and it's the same with AI.

I conclude that self-driving vehicles were a proven, existing technology as of 2022. You can quibble that they don't meet exacting definitions of safety or are pervasive, yet were cars terribly safe or pervasive a few years after they were invented? They might not have been as convenient as a horse or a train either. Yet they were a real capability.

When I was driving across Indiana earlier last year I turned on the adaptive cruise control and lane keep assist on my 2016 Subaru just to see what it could do in a relatively flat, straight, low-traffic environment. What it did was damn near drive the car itself, at least on the highway. Replace lane keep assist with lane centering and you could probably climb into the back seat and take a nap. But it's certainly not autonomous in any meaningful sense; I can't tell it where to go, it won't stop at intersections, and even on the highway I doubt it could deal with a lane disappearing.

We can argue about where the exact line between "autonomous" and "non-autonomous" is, and we can argue about whether the holdup is due to technology or regulation, and we can argue about how pervasive a technology has to become before it's proven and existing. But when most people heard that autonomous vehicles would be available by 2020, what they had in mind was that you'd be able to buy a car that you could program to go to the grocery store and it would drive you there while you took a nap. If you shift the goalposts to mean that some cities in China (and the US, for that matter) would have fully driverless rideshares then no one would really care or feel like it was that big of an accomplishment compared to what was available in 2017. If you told people that this meant that Tesla would have a better autopilot feature but that you'd still have to be alert and behind the wheel at all times, it wouldn't seem that much different than what Tesla was already offering in 2017. Until some auto manufacturer is offering for consumer purchase a vehicle that can be driven without the driver paying attention in at least some situations, nobody is going to feel like AVs have truly arrived.

You admit to using a car from 2016, to disprove his statement about 2022 (why last year?). By your method, ChatBots and AI image generation are still so poorly performing, they're of interest only to academics.

I was simply making the point that if you move the goalposts enough, self-driving cars were available in 2106.

Some successful vehicles provided mass transit until a backlash against these large vehicles resulted in the passage of legislation such as the UK Locomotives Act 1865

Talk about world changing mistake. If the British Empire had 20 or 30 years headstart on motor vehicles - WWI may have been much more shorter, decisive and with less blood spilled.

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