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Another automaker--- this time GM-- turning to "car sharing" and "ridesharing" as part of a strategy to shift motorcars and public transport (of which taxi is just one pillar) to "transport as a service" (and control the wires). Their "special sauce"? Bootstrap it by giving away cars to drivers--- typically millennials stuggling in the job market--- to join Lyft and then eventually phase them out...
http://venturebeat.com/2016/03/14/lyft-and-gm-say-new-rental-program-lays-infrastructure-for-self-driving-car-network/http://www.vanityfair.com/news/2016/01/self-driving-cars
"Detroit is indeed going the way of Silicon Valley. Ford and GM have been talking recently about re-inventing themselves as “mobility companies,” something they did back in the 1940s as well, when they went around the country—with the help of the Federal Department of Transportation—buying up streetcar and public-transit lines, and then closing them down so people would need to purchase their vehicles instead. And this could create something of an existential dilemma: the auto companies, which helped create the American middle class under the constant pressure of the union movement, are now taking advantage of a new “post-industrial” free market that can be a bit more cruel.The most effective use case scenario for autonomous cars is a chicken/egg one in which the great majority of vehicles on the road are already autonomous, allowing them the ability to communicate with one another without the intrusion of what our robot overlords so disdainfully call the Human Factor. But it's unlikely that autonomous technology will trickle down, affordably, to the lower ends of the automotive marketplace any time soon. Unless we succeed and elect Bernie Sanders, the rich will be able to spend their commutes getting richer in their mobile boardrooms, while the growing poor may crowd onto self-driving buses that have dispensed with unionized drivers."
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http://www.cnbc.com/2016/03/31/wheres-the-lane-self-driving-cars-confused-by-shabby-us-roadways.html
"...Shoddy infrastructure has become a roadblock to the development of self-driving cars, vexing engineers and adding time and cost. Poor markings and uneven signage on the 3 million miles of paved roads in the United States are forcing automakers to develop more sophisticated sensors and maps to compensate, industry executives say...."
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http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2016-03/30/roborace-driverless-autonomous-racing-car-formula-e
ooooooOOOOOooo
apologies if repost - this is another step closer to wip3out! minus pilots obvs (^_^)
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Well Lewis Hamilton started off racing remote control cars....
These are not rc cars but cars driven by computers. Taken at face value it sounds about as exciting as watching a computer play pong with itself.. F1 is about high risk. The titillation is the threat of destruction. Since they are unmanned it, I guess, should quickly shift over to be something like killer robot fighting-- the AI answer to dog fights. After morphing into a high-tech demolition derby it can later add a "rollerball" element for the human touch.
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GTC 2016 Opening Keynote
http://www.ustream.tv/recorded/85315086 -
Use local prostitutes.
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Yes, that's the greatest unsolved problem of robotisation (apart from all the other unsolved problems).
My main worry is that, while rail is by far and away the best way of transporting freight overland, if even salary costs fall away for driving (which I realise is some way off yet, but still), I think rail is going to be undermined even further.
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I love this song:
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Now we're even getting a convoy of post and repost. :)
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Yet another nail in the coffin of being a professional driver. What are these people going to do instead?
This has been the general tone of discussion throughout history. When the technological shift did not sync with periods of general prosperity or when a privledged group feels its losses out one sees a backlash-- including riots, revolt and even war. In the wake, for example, of the industrial revolution, there were a large number of bloody revolts. The Luddites, Canut revolts, Swing riots, Weavers revolt,.. Cork makers, porcelain, texile, farmers,.. The continuing microelectronic, IoT and AI revolution won't be any different..
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I think rail is going to be undermined even further.
You bet. Look at German National Rail ("Deutsche Bahn"). Used to the the poster child for national rails--- now neo-private and more or less profitable. Its freight division DB Cargo (ex-DB Schenker Rail) is, however, loosing money ..
http://www.zeit.de/wirtschaft/unternehmen/2016-03/deutsche-bahn-macht-1-3-milliarden-euro-verlust
so much that they just axed 2100 jobs...
http://www.welt.de/wirtschaft/article153587840/Deutsche-Bahn-streicht-2100-Stellen-im-Gueterverkehr.html
The government responce? Increase the costs of using the tracks.. and increase incentives for lorries such as allowing megaliner road trains.. I guess to be fair.. the trucks are made by either Daimler, MAN (part of VW), Scania (part of VW), Iveco (which now owns a number of the smaller German makers), Ford (Germany), Volvo AB (not to be confused with Volvo Cars which is Chinese), Renault (part of Volvo AB),... -
I see this sort of thing getting asked a lot about automation and it makes me think about what I'm doing at the moment.
I'm sat here with six active programmes running in my PC's taskbar. I move information between them on three seperate levels. I write strings of text to tell one application to change one piece of information into another. I press buttons that tell cause messages to pop up on the PC of people I only know by email addresses to pay money to a company. I do this and hundreds of other similar tasks on a daily basis.
Computers were heralded as the death of the office worker and yet I suspect that there are more office workers than there were 40 years ago when the portents of clerical doom were sounded. Even in my own job right now, I've increased automation of systems but don't yet seem to be able to run out of work to do. There's always some kind of clerical and/or administrative tasks that seem essential even since we did away with endless hallways filled with files and ledgers and records and casebooks and...
If we look at the industries that have died, such as coal mining, we can see how they are anachronistic and redundant in modern life. Moving things from A-B? It's an industry as old as civilisation. Ships gave way to ocean liners and the people who would have been sailors aren't out there wondering what to do. Horse and cart gave way to professional motor vehicle drivers but those would be drovers and drivers aren't sat by the side of the road twiddling their thumbs in despair.
Automation has changed virtually every industry in the world. With each additional step, jobs and positions become redundant and yet, there hasn't been a correlative increase in permanent unemployment. Your inability to imagine how both the industry and others around it will change doesn't mean it won't happen. History teaches us it always does.
Of course that doesn't mean there won't be some casualties in this particular bit of progress, there usually are. Hopefully this time we'll use the lessons we've should already have learned from the past to mitigate this. However, if you're alive today and comsuming virtually anything, you've contributed to the devastation of one livelihood or another.
Should we seek to preserve professional driving from the march of change that you've benefited from in so many other ways? Is it such a special industry that it deserves attention not afforded to others? Or should be take this opportunity to get ahead of the game and find ways to prevent people being tossed on some employment scrap heap? Again, the lessons of history are that attempting to preserve a profession against the challenges of automation is a forlorn endeavour that almost always results in failure.
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There are now 30 various managers instead of the previously needed 1 and 12 directors instead of a boss. Meanwhile, instead of working less hours for more money as production is automated, low paid, largely pointless jobs are encouraged because if you don't want to work you are scum.
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About
Robocars - Autonomous Drive, Self-driving, Driver-less cars
Posted by
@hippy
http://spectrum.ieee.org/cars-that-think/transportation/self-driving/driverless-cars-inspire-both-fear-and-hope
" 75% of U.S. Drivers Fear Self-Driving Cars..."
...
"61 percent of U.S. drivers surveyed said they wanted adaptive cruise control, lane departure warning, self-parking, or another type of semi-autonomous technology in their next car. Baby boomers were most likely to cite safety as a reason for wanting advanced car technologies. By comparison, millennials were more likely than baby boomers to cite “convenience” and “wanting the latest technology.”