having everything is overrated..it doesn't make you any happier.
i love living in a sci-fi dystopia
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Unclebaldrick
Well-Known Member
I've never considered the "everything" in that song to be material.
TacoMac
Well-Known Member
Another way to put it is:
Tesla has sold a total of 927,000 cars. Of those, 37 have burst into flame and burnt to the ground. Numerous others have had failures of all kinds. It is the worst rated car for repair service in the world. There are also 23 active NTSB investigations into Tesla for various accident failures and customer complaints.
The only car maker more dangerous right now for fires is Kia. Kia, however, are recalling hundreds of thousands of cars to fix the issue. Tesla still denies it has one by releasing completely bogus, irrelevant factoids.
i never said it was. my statement can apply to anything if you let.
DIY-HP-LED
Well-Known Member
The Costly Pursuit of Self-Driving Cars Continues On. And On. And On. - The New York Times (nytimes.com)
The Costly Pursuit of Self-Driving Cars Continues On. And On. And On.
Many in Silicon Valley promised that self-driving cars would be a common sight by 2021. Now the industry is resetting expectations and settling in for years of more work.
It was seven years ago when Waymo discovered that spring blossoms made its self-driving cars get twitchy on the brakes. So did soap bubbles. And road flares.
New tests, in years of tests, revealed more and more distractions for the driverless cars. Their road skills improved, but matching the competence of human drivers was elusive. The cluttered roads of America, it turned out, were a daunting place for a robot.
The wizards of Silicon Valley said people would be commuting to work in self-driving cars by now. Instead, there have been court fights, injuries and deaths, and tens of billions of dollars spent on a frustratingly fickle technology that some researchers say is still years from becoming the industry’s next big thing.
Now the pursuit of autonomous cars is undergoing a reset. Companies like Uber and Lyft, worried about blowing through their cash in pursuit of autonomous technology, have tapped out. Only the most deep pocketed outfits like Waymo, which is a subsidiary of Google’s parent company Alphabet, auto industry giants, and a handful of start-ups are managing to stay in the game.
Late last month, Lyft sold its autonomous vehicle unit to a Toyota subsidiary called Woven Planet in a deal valued at $550 million. Uber offloaded its autonomous vehicle unit to another competitor in December. And three prominent self-driving start-ups have sold themselves to companies with much bigger budgets over the past year.
The tech and auto giants could still toil for years on their driverless car projects. Each will spend an additional $6 billion to $10 billion before the technology becomes commonplace — sometime around the end of the decade, according to estimates from Pitchbook, a research firm that tracks financial activity. But even that prediction might be overly optimistic.
“This is a transformation that is going to happen over 30 years and possibly longer,” said Chris Urmson, an early engineer on the Google self-driving car project before it became the Alphabet business unit called Waymo. He is now chief executive of Aurora, the company that acquired Uber’s autonomous vehicle unit.
So what went wrong? Some researchers would say nothing — that’s how science works. You can’t entirely predict what will happen in an experiment. The self-driving car project just happened to be one of the most hyped technology experiments of this century, occurring on streets all over the country and run by some of its most high-profile companies.
Image
The request screen for hailing a self-driving car within the Lyft app.Credit...Lyft
That hype drew billions of dollars of investments, but it set up unrealistic expectations. In 2015, the electric carmaker Tesla’s billionaire boss, Elon Musk, said that fully functional self-driving cars were just two years away. More than five years later, Tesla cars offered simpler autonomy designed solely for highway driving. Even that has been tinged with controversy after several fatal crashes (which the company blamed on misuse of the technology).
Perhaps no company experienced the turbulence of driverless car development more fitfully than Uber. After poaching 40 robotics experts from Carnegie Mellon University and acquiring a self-driving truck start-up for $680 million in stock, the ride-hailing company settled a lawsuit from Waymo, which was followed by a guilty plea from a former executive accused of stealing intellectual property. A pedestrian in Arizona was also killed in a crash with one of its driverless cars. In the end, Uber essentially paid Aurora to acquire its self-driving unit.
But for the most deep-pocketed companies, the science, they hope, continues to advance one improved ride at a time. In October, Waymo reached a notable milestone: It launched the world’s first “fully autonomous” taxi service. In the suburbs of Phoenix, Ariz., anyone can now ride in a minivan with no driver behind the wheel. But that does not mean the company will immediately deploy its technology in other parts of the country.
A parking lot full of Uber self-driving Volvos in Pittsburgh before the company pulled out of the effort.Credit...
The Costly Pursuit of Self-Driving Cars Continues On. And On. And On.
Many in Silicon Valley promised that self-driving cars would be a common sight by 2021. Now the industry is resetting expectations and settling in for years of more work.
It was seven years ago when Waymo discovered that spring blossoms made its self-driving cars get twitchy on the brakes. So did soap bubbles. And road flares.
New tests, in years of tests, revealed more and more distractions for the driverless cars. Their road skills improved, but matching the competence of human drivers was elusive. The cluttered roads of America, it turned out, were a daunting place for a robot.
The wizards of Silicon Valley said people would be commuting to work in self-driving cars by now. Instead, there have been court fights, injuries and deaths, and tens of billions of dollars spent on a frustratingly fickle technology that some researchers say is still years from becoming the industry’s next big thing.
Now the pursuit of autonomous cars is undergoing a reset. Companies like Uber and Lyft, worried about blowing through their cash in pursuit of autonomous technology, have tapped out. Only the most deep pocketed outfits like Waymo, which is a subsidiary of Google’s parent company Alphabet, auto industry giants, and a handful of start-ups are managing to stay in the game.
Late last month, Lyft sold its autonomous vehicle unit to a Toyota subsidiary called Woven Planet in a deal valued at $550 million. Uber offloaded its autonomous vehicle unit to another competitor in December. And three prominent self-driving start-ups have sold themselves to companies with much bigger budgets over the past year.
The tech and auto giants could still toil for years on their driverless car projects. Each will spend an additional $6 billion to $10 billion before the technology becomes commonplace — sometime around the end of the decade, according to estimates from Pitchbook, a research firm that tracks financial activity. But even that prediction might be overly optimistic.
“This is a transformation that is going to happen over 30 years and possibly longer,” said Chris Urmson, an early engineer on the Google self-driving car project before it became the Alphabet business unit called Waymo. He is now chief executive of Aurora, the company that acquired Uber’s autonomous vehicle unit.
So what went wrong? Some researchers would say nothing — that’s how science works. You can’t entirely predict what will happen in an experiment. The self-driving car project just happened to be one of the most hyped technology experiments of this century, occurring on streets all over the country and run by some of its most high-profile companies.
Image
The request screen for hailing a self-driving car within the Lyft app.Credit...Lyft
That hype drew billions of dollars of investments, but it set up unrealistic expectations. In 2015, the electric carmaker Tesla’s billionaire boss, Elon Musk, said that fully functional self-driving cars were just two years away. More than five years later, Tesla cars offered simpler autonomy designed solely for highway driving. Even that has been tinged with controversy after several fatal crashes (which the company blamed on misuse of the technology).
Perhaps no company experienced the turbulence of driverless car development more fitfully than Uber. After poaching 40 robotics experts from Carnegie Mellon University and acquiring a self-driving truck start-up for $680 million in stock, the ride-hailing company settled a lawsuit from Waymo, which was followed by a guilty plea from a former executive accused of stealing intellectual property. A pedestrian in Arizona was also killed in a crash with one of its driverless cars. In the end, Uber essentially paid Aurora to acquire its self-driving unit.
But for the most deep-pocketed companies, the science, they hope, continues to advance one improved ride at a time. In October, Waymo reached a notable milestone: It launched the world’s first “fully autonomous” taxi service. In the suburbs of Phoenix, Ariz., anyone can now ride in a minivan with no driver behind the wheel. But that does not mean the company will immediately deploy its technology in other parts of the country.
A parking lot full of Uber self-driving Volvos in Pittsburgh before the company pulled out of the effort.Credit...
DIY-HP-LED
Well-Known Member
Dmitri Dolgov, who recently took over as Waymo’s co-chief executive after the departure of John Krafcik, an automobile industry veteran, said the company considers its Arizona service a test case. Based on what it has learned in Arizona, he said, Waymo is building a new version of its self-driving technology that it will eventually deploy in other geographies and other kinds of vehicles, including long-haul trucks.
The suburbs of Phoenix are particularly well suited to driverless cars. Streets are wide, pedestrians are few and there is almost no rain or snow. Waymo supports its autonomous vehicles with remote technicians and roadside assistance crews who can help get cars out of a tight spot, either via the internet or in person.
“Autonomous vehicles can be deployed today, in certain situations,” said Elliot Katz, a former lawyer who counseled many of the big autonomous vehicle companies before launching a start-up, Phantom Auto, that provides software for remotely assisting and operating self-driving vehicles when they get stuck in difficult positions. “But you still need a human in the loop.”
A Waymo autonomous vehicle in Chandler, Ariz.Credit...Caitlin O'Hara for The New York Times
Self-driving tech is not yet nimble enough to reliably handle the variety of situations human drivers encounter each day. They can usually handle suburban Phoenix, but they can’t duplicate the human chutzpah needed for merging into the Lincoln Tunnel in New York or dashing for an offramp on Highway 101 in Los Angeles.
“You have to peel back every layer before you can see the next layer” of challenges for the technology, said Nathaniel Fairfield, a Waymo software engineer who has worked on the project since 2009, in describing some of the distractions faced by the cars. “Your car has to be pretty good at driving before you can really get it into the situations where it handles the next most challenging thing.”
Like Waymo, Aurora is now developing autonomous trucks as well as passenger vehicles. No company has deployed trucks without safety drivers behind the wheel, but Mr. Urmson and others argue that autonomous trucks will make it to market faster than anything designed to transport regular consumers.
Sterling Anderson, left, and Chris Urmson at Aurora Innovation, a start-up founded by three veterans of autonomous vehicle research, including Mr. Urmson.Credit...Jason Henry for The New York Times
Long-haul trucking does not involve passengers who might not be forgiving of twitchy brakes. The routes are also simpler. Once you master one stretch of highway, Mr. Urmson said, it is easier to master another. But even driving down a long, relatively straight highway is extraordinarily difficult. Delivering dinner orders across a small neighborhood is an even greater challenge.
“This is one of the biggest technical challenges of our generation,” said Dave Ferguson, another early engineer on the Google team who is now president of Nuro, a company focused on delivering groceries, pizzas and other goods.
Mr. Ferguson said that many thought self-driving technology would improve like an internet service or a smartphone app. But robotics is a lot more challenging. It was wrong to claim anything else.
“If you look at almost every industry that is trying to solve really really difficult technical challenges, the folks that tend to be involved are a little bit crazy and little bit optimistic,” he said. “You need to have that optimism to get up everyday and bang your head against the wall to try to solve a problem that has never been solved, and it’s not guaranteed that it ever will be solved.”
Uber and Lyft aren’t entirely giving up on driverless cars. Even though it may not help the bottom line for a long time, they still want to deploy autonomous vehicles by partnering with the companies that are still working on the technology. Lyft now says autonomous rides could arrive by 2023.
Jody Kelman, the executive of Lyft, said her company still wants to use self-driving car technology.Credit...Lauren Segal for The New York Times
“These cars will be able to operate on a limited set of streets under a limited set of weather conditions at certain speeds,” said Jody Kelman, the executive of Lyft. “We will very safely be able to deploy these cars, but they won’t be able to go that many places.”
The suburbs of Phoenix are particularly well suited to driverless cars. Streets are wide, pedestrians are few and there is almost no rain or snow. Waymo supports its autonomous vehicles with remote technicians and roadside assistance crews who can help get cars out of a tight spot, either via the internet or in person.
“Autonomous vehicles can be deployed today, in certain situations,” said Elliot Katz, a former lawyer who counseled many of the big autonomous vehicle companies before launching a start-up, Phantom Auto, that provides software for remotely assisting and operating self-driving vehicles when they get stuck in difficult positions. “But you still need a human in the loop.”
A Waymo autonomous vehicle in Chandler, Ariz.Credit...Caitlin O'Hara for The New York Times
Self-driving tech is not yet nimble enough to reliably handle the variety of situations human drivers encounter each day. They can usually handle suburban Phoenix, but they can’t duplicate the human chutzpah needed for merging into the Lincoln Tunnel in New York or dashing for an offramp on Highway 101 in Los Angeles.
“You have to peel back every layer before you can see the next layer” of challenges for the technology, said Nathaniel Fairfield, a Waymo software engineer who has worked on the project since 2009, in describing some of the distractions faced by the cars. “Your car has to be pretty good at driving before you can really get it into the situations where it handles the next most challenging thing.”
Like Waymo, Aurora is now developing autonomous trucks as well as passenger vehicles. No company has deployed trucks without safety drivers behind the wheel, but Mr. Urmson and others argue that autonomous trucks will make it to market faster than anything designed to transport regular consumers.
Sterling Anderson, left, and Chris Urmson at Aurora Innovation, a start-up founded by three veterans of autonomous vehicle research, including Mr. Urmson.Credit...Jason Henry for The New York Times
Long-haul trucking does not involve passengers who might not be forgiving of twitchy brakes. The routes are also simpler. Once you master one stretch of highway, Mr. Urmson said, it is easier to master another. But even driving down a long, relatively straight highway is extraordinarily difficult. Delivering dinner orders across a small neighborhood is an even greater challenge.
“This is one of the biggest technical challenges of our generation,” said Dave Ferguson, another early engineer on the Google team who is now president of Nuro, a company focused on delivering groceries, pizzas and other goods.
Mr. Ferguson said that many thought self-driving technology would improve like an internet service or a smartphone app. But robotics is a lot more challenging. It was wrong to claim anything else.
“If you look at almost every industry that is trying to solve really really difficult technical challenges, the folks that tend to be involved are a little bit crazy and little bit optimistic,” he said. “You need to have that optimism to get up everyday and bang your head against the wall to try to solve a problem that has never been solved, and it’s not guaranteed that it ever will be solved.”
Uber and Lyft aren’t entirely giving up on driverless cars. Even though it may not help the bottom line for a long time, they still want to deploy autonomous vehicles by partnering with the companies that are still working on the technology. Lyft now says autonomous rides could arrive by 2023.
Jody Kelman, the executive of Lyft, said her company still wants to use self-driving car technology.Credit...Lauren Segal for The New York Times
“These cars will be able to operate on a limited set of streets under a limited set of weather conditions at certain speeds,” said Jody Kelman, the executive of Lyft. “We will very safely be able to deploy these cars, but they won’t be able to go that many places.”
this is worse than Apple Maps bad.The Costly Pursuit of Self-Driving Cars Continues On. And On. And On. - The New York Times (nytimes.com)
The Costly Pursuit of Self-Driving Cars Continues On. And On. And On.
Many in Silicon Valley promised that self-driving cars would be a common sight by 2021. Now the industry is resetting expectations and settling in for years of more work.
It was seven years ago when Waymo discovered that spring blossoms made its self-driving cars get twitchy on the brakes. So did soap bubbles. And road flares.
New tests, in years of tests, revealed more and more distractions for the driverless cars. Their road skills improved, but matching the competence of human drivers was elusive. The cluttered roads of America, it turned out, were a daunting place for a robot.
The wizards of Silicon Valley said people would be commuting to work in self-driving cars by now. Instead, there have been court fights, injuries and deaths, and tens of billions of dollars spent on a frustratingly fickle technology that some researchers say is still years from becoming the industry’s next big thing.
Now the pursuit of autonomous cars is undergoing a reset. Companies like Uber and Lyft, worried about blowing through their cash in pursuit of autonomous technology, have tapped out. Only the most deep pocketed outfits like Waymo, which is a subsidiary of Google’s parent company Alphabet, auto industry giants, and a handful of start-ups are managing to stay in the game.
Late last month, Lyft sold its autonomous vehicle unit to a Toyota subsidiary called Woven Planet in a deal valued at $550 million. Uber offloaded its autonomous vehicle unit to another competitor in December. And three prominent self-driving start-ups have sold themselves to companies with much bigger budgets over the past year.
The tech and auto giants could still toil for years on their driverless car projects. Each will spend an additional $6 billion to $10 billion before the technology becomes commonplace — sometime around the end of the decade, according to estimates from Pitchbook, a research firm that tracks financial activity. But even that prediction might be overly optimistic.
“This is a transformation that is going to happen over 30 years and possibly longer,” said Chris Urmson, an early engineer on the Google self-driving car project before it became the Alphabet business unit called Waymo. He is now chief executive of Aurora, the company that acquired Uber’s autonomous vehicle unit.
So what went wrong? Some researchers would say nothing — that’s how science works. You can’t entirely predict what will happen in an experiment. The self-driving car project just happened to be one of the most hyped technology experiments of this century, occurring on streets all over the country and run by some of its most high-profile companies.
Image
The request screen for hailing a self-driving car within the Lyft app.Credit...Lyft
That hype drew billions of dollars of investments, but it set up unrealistic expectations. In 2015, the electric carmaker Tesla’s billionaire boss, Elon Musk, said that fully functional self-driving cars were just two years away. More than five years later, Tesla cars offered simpler autonomy designed solely for highway driving. Even that has been tinged with controversy after several fatal crashes (which the company blamed on misuse of the technology).
Perhaps no company experienced the turbulence of driverless car development more fitfully than Uber. After poaching 40 robotics experts from Carnegie Mellon University and acquiring a self-driving truck start-up for $680 million in stock, the ride-hailing company settled a lawsuit from Waymo, which was followed by a guilty plea from a former executive accused of stealing intellectual property. A pedestrian in Arizona was also killed in a crash with one of its driverless cars. In the end, Uber essentially paid Aurora to acquire its self-driving unit.
But for the most deep-pocketed companies, the science, they hope, continues to advance one improved ride at a time. In October, Waymo reached a notable milestone: It launched the world’s first “fully autonomous” taxi service. In the suburbs of Phoenix, Ariz., anyone can now ride in a minivan with no driver behind the wheel. But that does not mean the company will immediately deploy its technology in other parts of the country.
A parking lot full of Uber self-driving Volvos in Pittsburgh before the company pulled out of the effort.Credit...
can't we do something with a little more haste than this to save our planet?
kudos on Mars but can't we do something with a little more haste than that to save our planet?
you know we still can before we have to start living underground.
In terms of using fossils fuels, there's no path to willfully using significantly less. Even electrics, they take quite a bit of fossil fuels to manufacture and dispose of. Beyond that, you'd have to convince people to consume less energy(cars and home) by choice, but expense is the only thing that will make that happen. Someday, energy use will be for the wealthy, and the idea of a regular person commuting an hour to do some inane task in an office building, will seem hilarious.
Something that I hope will change is the need for people to "cheat" in their work/life by having to commute. By "cheat", I mean, that's essentially what commuters have to do when there is no work in their area that suits them, or there are no homes priced affordably near their work, so they have to use travel as a mechanism to take what works from one area, then what works from another area. That's not a good thing, economically speaking, especially when it's not an anomaly. It's a sign of a broken community that is unable to provide a sustainable work/life cycle.
Something that I hope will change is the need for people to "cheat" in their work/life by having to commute. By "cheat", I mean, that's essentially what commuters have to do when there is no work in their area that suits them, or there are no homes priced affordably near their work, so they have to use travel as a mechanism to take what works from one area, then what works from another area. That's not a good thing, economically speaking, especially when it's not an anomaly. It's a sign of a broken community that is unable to provide a sustainable work/life cycle.
hanimmal
Well-Known Member
We have so many opportunities to become more efficient as a society.
CunningCanuk
Well-Known Member
Problem is the American brain. We'll use ten times the energy just to spite someone politely asking us to use less.
We haven't even begun to think about reconciling freedom with the hard stops that are in our future.
hanimmal
Well-Known Member
Hard stops?
Basically when the environment starts telling us that there is a "no" in our immediate future. We don't take "no" very well. It won't be instantaneous and there will be a period of "what do you mean I can't have all the energy I want forever?!?". Every resource is finite, yet we treat these resources like a right. History tells us there will probably be a war in there somewhere too.
CunningCanuk
Well-Known Member
Time to double up on the Prozac.
Progress is being made and it will continue. Eventually clean, renewable energy will become more efficient than burning fossil fuels. Technological advances in batteries along with a better understanding of the environmental impact will help.
The man made global warming deniers are dying off and the physical evidence of it is becoming more obvious. You’re right though, time is running out. Too bad Congress won’t pass Biden’s infrastructure bill as it is. A bold attempt to correct the course and create a strong economy based on renewable energy.
The way we do renewable now is worse than if we were just using fossil fuels. We're still in the experimental phase to see what could maybe be done, for the purpose of furthering the technology and that's great, but make no mistake, the fossil fuel industry loves the renewable sector right now, because they're making a killing on it. We won't see a transition in our lifetimes, but we probably will see significant pain from the lack of transition in our lifetime.
CunningCanuk
Well-Known Member
Probably not in our lifetime, I agree. Hopefully my children’s future will be better than the Mad Max world you’re prophesying.
Bagginski
Well-Known Member
When I was a kid, nothing was open all night except the police and the hospitalI live in a city......I remember when you could see more than 8 stars at night...
Bagginski
Well-Known Member
Also refers to “dem Elon” and “der Elon” further down…and *WHY* was WvB investing ~400 pages in designing a *government* for *MARS*???? That is quite literally NOT ROCKET SCIENCE