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BeAfraid wrote:
I see this is an area in which you have no expertise (yet it is the area central to my studies, and my eventual PhD).

Yeah, I've only flown airplanes with autopilots, I couldn't possibly have any knowledge of the subject. And that electrical engineering degree (including a class in controls, which is essentially the math behind autopilots) is clearly not relevant either. /sarcasm

PS: it's very obvious that by "eventual PhD" you mean "I'm taking some undergraduate classes, and it would be really cool to get a PhD someday", at most. You've managed to hit virtually every "I'm bragging about credentials I don't have" red flag in the book, and it's just hilarious to watch.

Airplanes tend to have pilots still because catastrophic failure of the autopilot is a catastrophic failure and death for every individual on the aircraft.

Exactly. The autopilot is less reliable than the pilot, despite all of the crashes that have been caused by pilot error. We only trust the autopilot to handle the boring routine stuff and make life a bit easier for the pilots, it still requires constant supervision and has to be shut off if anything interesting happens. And when we do that we put the lives of those passengers in the hands of the human pilots who do things like ignore the signs of dangerous ice accumulation and then kill everyone because they're too stupid to respond correctly to the stall warning. Or, to consider a more recent disaster, they just decide that life sucks and fly the plane into a mountain.

Conclusion: the human driver/pilot/etc isn't going anywhere in the foreseeable future, even if their only job is to watch the computer and make sure it doesn't screw up.

Catastrophic failure of autopilots on trains happens all the time, and on trains in many urban centers, which have no drivers, the train just stops until someone reboots it.

There's a huge difference between cars/planes and trains: the tracks. A train is stuck on a single path where all of the other vehicles on that path are controlled by the same system and kept at a significant distance from each other. If something goes wrong you don't have to worry about losing control of the train, getting hit by another train, etc. You just have the train stop itself and send a "train has stopped" message to the system. You simply can not do that with a car/bus/etc because those vehicles aren't physically locked into specific paths and have roads full of other vehicles to worry about.

Conclusion: unless you'd like to give up the freedom of driving wherever you want and replace all of our roads with the equivalent of single-route train tracks driving a car/bus/etc is going to have problems that don't exist with trains, and solving the easier problem does not guarantee a solution to the harder problem any time soon.

Also, the possible causes for catastrophic failure of an autopilot is negligible for a car compared to an aircraft (my brother has designed autopilot systems for Boeing).

If you think there are "negligible" potential causes of failure for an auto-driving car then you clearly know nothing about the engineering problems involved. And don't forget that, unlike expensive airliners, cars have a budget that doesn't include multiple redundant copies of every component, extensive safety testing and licensing before any part or system is approved, etc. Even the kind of autopilot you put on a small single-engine airplane can cost as much as a new car. Have fun trying to ensure an acceptable level of safety with a much smaller budget!

PS: don't bother telling me about how the price will magically come down. Prices are that high because of the cost of complying with the FAA's rules, the only way to get rid of that cost is to give up the safety guarantees that it pays for.

If an autopilot on a car were to fail as often as an autopilot in an aircraft (for the same reasons) it would be around ten thousand years (given statistical averages) before we saw the first failure for cause.

Lol, no. This is just laughably wrong. Autopilots are nowhere near as reliable as you seem to think they are, the failures just usually aren't very interesting because the human pilot says "that's not supposed to be happening", disconnects the autopilot, and flies the plane by hand.

As for the legal and medical applications.

Too late. THAT has already begun to happen.

It has begun to replace low-end jobs where "go fetch this document from the courthouse" is a primary responsibility. It will not replace doctors or lawyers in the foreseeable future, for the same reason that we still put human pilots on airplanes. Even very low failure rates are unacceptable in those professions, and it will be a very long time before we are willing to trust computers. It doesn't matter if the computer is capable of doing the job, if the law says "a human lawyer has to do this" then the human lawyer will continue to have a job.

P.S. As for your inability to understand current work and projected extrapolation of application:

I see you're back to your "copy/paste a wall of text from a scientific source to cover up the fact that you don't have the credentials you claim to have" strategy. Do you understand the difference between a promising research paper and a finished product? You seem to have a lot of trouble with understanding the engineering challenges required to turn that research into reality. And your ridiculous scifi plot that you're "working on" is still very early in that first stage, if it exists at all.

What gets me most is the hostility.

Why don't you just have a look at the work Sebastian Thrun is doing at Google on Self-Driving cars, and how that work has already lead to self-driving cars used by VW, BMW, Audi, Volvo (predominantly, along with VW, who were the main sponsors), and which Google has been using for nearly a decade in their Street-View photography system (where current law has been all that stands between having those vehicles remain totally unoccupied while they do their jobs).

Go google their accident reports.

As for my academic background, I am a student at UCLA, where I have one year remaining on a Cybernetics and Cog Sci degree (Concentrations in Neurosystems and Computation, respectively); I had to take some time off because of a decline in health (I had my legs nearly burnt off in 1998, and I have other injuries from the Cold War that have begun to degrade), but I am currently talking to several Labs at USC, Stanford, Berkeley, CMU, UCLA (it might be nice to stay here, even though it would mean a shift in focus), and UCSD about Graduate Work.

But good luck with that attitude.

MB


Automatically Appended Next Post:
And, if you do not wish to take my word for it, how about Google's Director of Engineering?

Everything I have mentioned has been detailed by people like him, Sebastian Thrun at Stanford, Cynthia Breazeal at MIT (as well as her boss), Theodore Berger at USC, Craig Venter at his various companies (Synthetic Genomics, Human Longevity Inc., Venter Institute), the UCLA California Nanosystems Institute, Google's Calico Venture, and many more.

ALL of these things are easily googled, and supported by a large body of research.

That you can fly an airplane just speaks to your inability to generalize from that case.

You do not seem to get that cars do not have to worry about Bird Strikes, Wind Sheer, Microbursts, Meteorlogical conditions, cloud types and patterns (indicating possible turbulent air patterns of specific types), or with the complexities of transitioning from land to air travel and back (take-off and landing). Nor with the fact that a mechanical problem in an or raft in flight can be catastrophic, while a mechanical problem on a car creates a traffic jam.

And, yes, cars do run on tracks. They are called "Roads," which function under a set of rules not much different than a train, only having lateral conditions to worry about in addition to longitudinal.

And if a car suffers a catastrophic malfunction while on one, YES, they just STOP. Pulling off to the side of the road is not some great computational challenge. It is simply a lane-change, as has already been solved by Thrun et al. During the DARPA Urban Challenge, and subsequent road tests of self-driving cars while accompanied by human passenger sitting in the Driver's seat.

MB


Automatically Appended Next Post:
I doubt this will do any good, since you seem intent upon committing an ad hominem fallacy on anything I say (dismissing claims because you want to label me a "liar" rather than examining the claims on their own merits - seemingly unable to use Google at the same time).

But Business Insider tends to think Self-Driving cars are something coming in the next few years:

http://www.businessinsider.com/report-10-million-self-driving-cars-will-be-on-the-road-by-2020-2015-5

Elon Musk already has a self-driving Tesla ready for sale by this Summer (he is waiting on changes to California Law), or "now:

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/20/business/elon-musk-says-self-driving-tesla-cars-will-be-in-the-us-by-summer.html?_r=0

Fortune magazine considers Self-Driving/Autonomous vehicles to be a sizable investment opportunity. With changes in the law (already happening in California and NY) we will see economic pressure force taxi companies to adopt them (which will require changes to legislation, but it isn't anything different than the California Laws coming to allow Amazon to use delivery drones):

http://fortune.com/tag/self-driving-car/

You know what else these "walls of text" as you call them are?

Evidence of my point.

Sure, you can cover your eyes and scream "Liar, liar, pants on Fire!" As loudly as you wish. But it will not change the facts that I have presented, while all you have done is to cry "Foul!" And try to change the subject to calling my credibility into question based upon a statement you clearly did not, and so not, understand.

MB

BeAfraid wrote:
Why don't you just have a look at the work Sebastian Thrun is doing at Google on Self-Driving cars, and how that work has already lead to self-driving cars used by VW, BMW, Audi, Volvo (predominantly, along with VW, who were the main sponsors), and which Google has been using for nearly a decade in their Street-View photography system (where current law has been all that stands between having those vehicles remain totally unoccupied while they do their jobs).

Sigh. Do you understand the difference between "this is a promising technology" and "this is ready to entirely replace human drivers"? Currently self-driving cars are in the development stage, a lot of work has been done but nothing is ready for real-world use yet. And once there's a finished product it will be a long time before we will allow self-driving cars to operate without any human supervision at all, which means your nightmare future of "all the poor bus drivers will be unemployed" is a long way off.

As for proof, I've said it before, but I'll say it again: autopilots conclusively disprove your claims about how close we are to self-driving cars taking over human jobs. A modern autopilot is perfectly capable of flying the entire trip without any human intervention, including taxiing to the gate after landing. However, we still don't trust those systems to operate without human supervision, and so every airline flight carries two highly-trained pilots that have final responsibility for everything (including shutting off the autopilot if there is any doubt that it is working properly). There will almost certainly be a similar situation with cars, where the technology is able to handle routine driving but will not be allowed to do so legally.

Finally, remember that the current state of autopilots is one where a "cheap" low-end autopilot (capable of little more than holding the plane straight and level while the pilot messes with the radio) will cost you $10,000. Good luck meeting the same safety standards that aren't even considered good enough to allow unsupervised operation when your maximum budget is a lot smaller.

As for my academic background, I am a student at UCLA, where I have one year remaining on a Cybernetics and Cog Sci degree (Concentrations in Neurosystems and Computation, respectively); I had to take some time off because of a decline in health (I had my legs nearly burnt off in 1998, and I have other injuries from the Cold War that have begun to degrade), but I am currently talking to several Labs at USC, Stanford, Berkeley, CMU, UCLA (it might be nice to stay here, even though it would mean a shift in focus), and UCSD about Graduate Work.

So, like I said, you're an undergraduate student with some dreams about how cool it would be to do higher-level stuff. There's nothing wrong with being in that position, you don't need to make up false credentials to brag about to make yourself look more important.

Everything I have mentioned has been detailed by people like him, Sebastian Thrun at Stanford, Cynthia Breazeal at MIT (as well as her boss), Theodore Berger at USC, Craig Venter at his various companies (Synthetic Genomics, Human Longevity Inc., Venter Institute), the UCLA California Nanosystems Institute, Google's Calico Venture, and many more.

Do you understand what an appeal to authority fallacy is? Because you've just committed a pretty blatant one.

You do not seem to get that cars do not have to worry about Bird Strikes, Wind Sheer, Microbursts, Meteorlogical conditions, cloud types and patterns (indicating possible turbulent air patterns of specific types), or with the complexities of transitioning from land to air travel and back (take-off and landing). Nor with the fact that a mechanical problem in an or raft in flight can be catastrophic, while a mechanical problem on a car creates a traffic jam.

Bird strikes and deer strikes are very similar problems, and cars certainly have to worry about a deer suddenly jumping in front of them and causing a crash.

Wind shear/microbursts/etc have close equivalents in things like ice on the road. If an autopilot can't be trusted to handle wind shear then it's extremely unlikely that a self-driving car will be trusted to handle an unexpected patch of ice on the road.

Landing is actually one of the easiest parts of an autopilot, at least in routine operations, since airports have this nice little thing called ILS. The airport has radio beacons that guide the plane down with extremely high precision, beyond what GPS is capable of. Cars don't have any similar equivalent.

Finally, no, mechanical problems with cars don't necessarily just cause traffic jams. If your brakes fail at 65mph you're going to have a lot more to worry about than whether your morning commute takes a bit longer than usual.

And, yes, cars do run on tracks. They are called "Roads," which function under a set of rules not much different than a train, only having lateral conditions to worry about in addition to longitudinal.

There is a huge difference between railroad tracks that physically lock the train into its path and a road that is simply an arbitrary line saying "drive here" without any physical barriers to keep a vehicle within its lane. A malfunctioning train "autopilot" can't cause a sudden left turn and kill everyone, a malfunctioning self-driving car can decide to cross the center line and have a fatal head-on collision.

And if a car suffers a catastrophic malfunction while on one, YES, they just STOP. Pulling off to the side of the road is not some great computational challenge. It is simply a lane-change, as has already been solved by Thrun et al. During the DARPA Urban Challenge, and subsequent road tests of self-driving cars while accompanied by human passenger sitting in the Driver's seat.

Oh really? A self-driving car can just pull over if it recognizes that it has a problem, and solving any malfunction is as simple as making a lane change? What if the catastrophic failure is a problem in the image recognition software that causes the car to fail to recognize the warning lights at a railroad crossing and drive into the path of an oncoming train? I guess it will just calmly change lanes and wait for someone to reboot the computer once it has been smashed into a ball of wreckage and everyone in the car is dead?

But Business Insider tends to think Self-Driving cars are something coming in the next few years:

http://www.businessinsider.com/report-10-million-self-driving-cars-will-be-on-the-road-by-2020-2015-5

No, you just didn't bother to read your own sources:

Because of regulatory and insurance questions, user-operated fully autonomous cars will come to market within the next five years, while driverless cars will remain a long ways off.

When the article talks about "self-driving" cars it is referring to the equivalent of planes with an autopilot: the car drives itself, but only under the direct supervision of a human driver. Looks like that poor bus driver still has a job.

Elon Musk already has a self-driving Tesla ready for sale by this Summer (he is waiting on changes to California Law), or "now:

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/20/business/elon-musk-says-self-driving-tesla-cars-will-be-in-the-us-by-summer.html?_r=0

Did you notice how most of the article says "the car can drive itself, but it isn't legal to do so and we're hoping that someday maybe we can get the laws changed"? And, again, this is still the "autopilot with a human supervising" kind of self-driving, not unsupervised operation that would threaten human jobs.

You know what else these "walls of text" as you call them are?

Evidence of my point.

No, they're walls of text. You post huge sections of scientific articles that are barely related to the thread, probably because you hope that most people won't understand what the article is talking about and will assume that you're offering really impressive knowledge. Remember how you quoted half the textbook on genetics to justify your pet theories about transgender issues when "how genes work" had nothing to do with the subject of the discussion? Remember how your "explanation" of how lightsabers could "work" managed to use pretty much every term in theoretical physics? Now you're doing it again with this thread.

Someone who has a useful point and genuinely understands a subject is able to discuss it on a level that the average person can follow. Someone who doesn't understand the subject but wants to appear important has to resort to obscuring their points with fancy words.

 Peregrine wrote:

BeAfraid wrote:
Why don't you just have a look at the work Sebastian Thrun is doing at Google on Self-Driving cars, and how that work has already lead to self-driving cars used by VW, BMW, Audi, Volvo (predominantly, along with VW, who were the main sponsors), and which Google has been using for nearly a decade in their Street-View photography system (where current law has been all that stands between having those vehicles remain totally unoccupied while they do their jobs).

Sigh. Do you understand the difference between "this is a promising technology" and "this is ready to entirely replace human drivers"? Currently self-driving cars are in the development stage, a lot of work has been done but nothing is ready for real-world use yet. And once there's a finished product it will be a long time before we will allow self-driving cars to operate without any human supervision at all, which means your nightmare future of "all the poor bus drivers will be unemployed" is a long way off.

Even if we manage to fully automate driving, Washington drivers will still suck. California drivers will still not know how to drive in the rain, and thus be terrible drivers

Uh-huh....

MB

Edit: Not worth it.

I think it would be a good idea for all invovled here to refresh themselves on the rules here - especially Rule #1.

Having said that - I also highly doubt that we'll be seeing significant numbers of automated cars in America in 4 years.

Automated cars aren't something that will show up for a very very long time.

Simply because a smart car isn't compatible with all the cars just driven around by regular humans. You would literally have to have every road mapped, have GPS equally available, and enable every car to communicate with every other car on the road to prevent collisions.

Without having every vehicle hooked up to a network, this smart car wouldn't be able to tell the location of cars that weren't really close. Say within 50 ft or so. Thats not far enough for safe operations. You need to be able to see up to a mile ahead of you to safely drive at freeway speeds. Plus the danger of a false alarm causing breaking would lead to many more accidents than it would prevent.

So unless you got the entire road network mapped out and instantly transitioned every vehicle on the road to a smart car it wouldn't work.

 Grey Templar wrote:
Automated cars aren't something that will show up for a very very long time.

I disagree. Commercialization of the concept is the real key to adoption and the first major fleet replacement contract was announced in Australia http://www.theage.com.au/it-pro/business-it/forget-selfdriving-google-cars-australia-has-selfdriving-trucks-20141020-118o47.html

I am dead certain from a variety of sources that negotiations and discussions are in place for self driving big rigs. As the fleets convert, insurance companies will then forcibly drive the chance. The smart car is safer and more predictable, thus they are less likely to pay out.

 KalashnikovMarine wrote:
I disagree. Commercialization of the concept is the real key to adoption and the first major fleet replacement contract was announced in Australia http://www.theage.com.au/it-pro/business-it/forget-selfdriving-google-cars-australia-has-selfdriving-trucks-20141020-118o47.html

That is a very, very different situation. Trucks driving within a mine are in a controlled low-traffic environment, cars on normal roads aren't. There's a long way to go before self-driving cars can be trusted outside of those controlled environments and threaten the mass unemployment BeAfraid is predicting.

 Grey Templar wrote:
Automated cars aren't something that will show up for a very very long time.

Simply because a smart car isn't compatible with all the cars just driven around by regular humans. You would literally have to have every road mapped, have GPS equally available, and enable every car to communicate with every other car on the road to prevent collisions.

While I agree that widespread smart cars are a long way off, but you’re completely wrong about why, and completely wrong about how smart cars operate. They don’t rely just on GPS, they use radar and other technologies to assess their surroundings and respond. They don’t need other cars to have linked in GPS.

 Peregrine wrote:
That is a very, very different situation. Trucks driving within a mine are in a controlled low-traffic environment, cars on normal roads aren't. There's a long way to go before self-driving cars can be trusted outside of those controlled environments and threaten the mass unemployment BeAfraid is predicting.

Yep. Right now a lot of those trucks are actually driven remotely, either from back at camp or even from back in the city. There’s a lack of vision and response time inherent in that set up, but given there’s few other vehicles at the mine, it isn’t much of an issue. So having smart cars in that environment isn’t a huge proof that they’re ready to take on inner city driving.

 Grey Templar wrote:
Automated cars aren't something that will show up for a very very long time.

Simply because a smart car isn't compatible with all the cars just driven around by regular humans. You would literally have to have every road mapped, have GPS equally available, and enable every car to communicate with every other car on the road to prevent collisions.

Without having every vehicle hooked up to a network, this smart car wouldn't be able to tell the location of cars that weren't really close. Say within 50 ft or so. Thats not far enough for safe operations. You need to be able to see up to a mile ahead of you to safely drive at freeway speeds. Plus the danger of a false alarm causing breaking would lead to many more accidents than it would prevent.

So unless you got the entire road network mapped out and instantly transitioned every vehicle on the road to a smart car it wouldn't work.

Google has been running self-driving cars on the world's roads for over ten years now.

The statistics they have show that human intervention has been nearly non-existent (especially in highly developed countries).

Google's Self-driving, fully autonomous cars went on the road in Mountain View this week.

VW, Audi, Volvo, and Tesla have Self-Driving cars in production, and are just waiting upon states to alter their legislation to allow them (California already has).

You do NOT need to have every road mapped out.

This is what the DARPA Grand Challenge proved, and then the subsequent Urban Challenge.

I have already posted links to these.

Neither do you NEED to have every car hooked up to a network. The cars currently being produced are AUTONOMOUS. They work purely on Optical, and visual processing systems (although the visual transduction systems are often LIDAR, RADAR, or Ultrasound).

This stuff is EASILY Google-able to observe the State of the Art, and the Mainstream technologies in production RIGHT NOW.

MB


Automatically Appended Next Post:
From someone who has already ridden in one of Google's new Self-Driving cars:



http://theoatmeal.com/blog/google_self_driving_car

As I already said, these cars have been on the road for months, and this week marks the first time they have been operated without a proxy driver to take over in case of a problem.

From having a long relationship with Sebastian Thrun and Ray Kurzweil (Google's Director of Engineering), they BOTH have made it clear that self-driving cars (EVEN in a crowded urban area) are much safer than human drivers.

And the most self-driving cars on the road, the safer they will be.

They are like a vaccine, in that once a critical mass is reached, you get a sort of "herd immunity."

MB

BeAfraid wrote:
The statistics they have show that human intervention has been nearly non-existent (especially in highly developed countries).

Human intervention with autopilots is also nearly non-existent. That "nearly" is very important.

Also, I notice that once again you ignored the "it's not done" part of your own source. Those remaining problems are the hard ones, and it will be a while before they're solved with a level of reliability that makes self-driving cars safe to use and they demonstrate that record long enough for us to change the laws. For example:

Despite the advantages over a human being in certain scenarios, however, these cars still aren't ready for the real world. They can't drive in the snow or heavy rain, and there's a variety of complex situations they do not process well, such as passing through a construction zone.

It took two years for Google, CMU, Stanford, MIT, Harvard, etc. to go from a closed course (The Grand Challenge) to an Urban Environment (The Urban Challenge), and then six months from that before Google was using self-driving cars for their Street View (nearly ten years ago).

It will not be more than a few more years to get the details worked out for the other issues remaining.

As for the issues with autopilots in airplanes, you keep missing a rather significant point.

A failure to intervene in an aircraft with the autopilot failing means the death of everyone onboard.

The necessity to intervene with a car failing usually amounts (given the data on the speeds at which intervention occurred) to a fender bender, and in worst cases is not always fatal to the occupants (as is falling from 30,000 feet at 500mph - or faster).

A failure to intervene with a self-driving car results in the car stopping where it is, creating a traffic jam, as most are programmed. Accidents only occur when another vehicle moves into them, and they are unable to avoid them.

You still don't sound like you have actually done any real research on this issue. You know, Googling the issue, and reading the various popular and technical accounts of the technology. I would expect a pilot to be able to understand the technical aspects that do not descend into the actual algorithms used.

Nor do you sound like you are at all familiar with the problems of technological unemployment and how our reality at this point is vastly different than in the past due to the rapid pace of AI development. Google's Director of Engineering - the inventor of the flatbed OCR Scanner, the "Reading for the Blind" devices (which began as a refrigerator sized device, and are now a cell-phone app), as well as many musical instruments (his father was a classical composer) - has estimated that a functional human equivalent AI is no more than 10 years away. And that significantly greater than human roughly 15.

What jobs will humans be doing when a machine can do any job a human could do?

MB


Automatically Appended Next Post:
You also keep missing the point that Self-Driving cars ARE LEGAL in many states, already:


http://www.cnn.com/2012/09/25/tech/innovation/self-driving-car-california/


MB

Peregrine - you are wrong in this case. The tech to remove all human beings from transportation is already here.

What do self driving cars have to do with: "Worried about the Population Bomb, Global Warming, Poverty, and the Future of Mankind?"

The future of mankind is an escalation of current trends: wars over resources.

 kronk wrote:

The future of mankind is an escalation of current trends: wars over resources.

Ironically... that works for why we will probably never have self driving cars AND future wars over resources

 kronk wrote:
What do self driving cars have to do with: "Worried about the Population Bomb, Global Warming, Poverty, and the Future of Mankind?"

The future of mankind is an escalation of current trends: wars over resources.

BeAfraid's claim is that self-driving cars (and similar technology everywhere else) will make bus drivers/taxi drivers/etc unemployed, AI will make lawyers obsolete, etc, until there is massive unemployment and society as we know it is destroyed.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

BeAfraid wrote:
It took two years for Google, CMU, Stanford, MIT, Harvard, etc. to go from a closed course (The Grand Challenge) to an Urban Environment (The Urban Challenge), and then six months from that before Google was using self-driving cars for their Street View (nearly ten years ago).

It will not be more than a few more years to get the details worked out for the other issues remaining.

Autopilots have been able to handle the easy cases for a long time, yet we still have human pilots.

Also, you have a pretty fundamental misunderstanding of how the engineering process works. There are always easy parts of the problem to solve, and they always get solved fairly quickly. It's the hard parts that take a lot of time and money to overcome. Over and over again the optimists and scifi writers say "it's almost here", and over and over again it takes much longer to solve the hard problems. Self-driving cars are still struggling with rare and obscure situations like "driving in the rain", so I think your "within a few years" estimate is hilariously optimistic.

The necessity to intervene with a car failing usually amounts (given the data on the speeds at which intervention occurred) to a fender bender, and in worst cases is not always fatal to the occupants (as is falling from 30,000 feet at 500mph - or faster).

And, again, that "usually" is very important. This is another part of engineering that you don't seem to understand: you don't plan for the optimistic version of potential failures, you assume the worst and then make sure it can't happen. In the case of self-driving cars that means things like crossing the center line into a head-on collision at 55mph or driving onto railroad tracks into the path of a train. Self-driving cars have a lot of potential to kill their passengers if something goes wrong, and you can't just assume that all of your failures will be the fender-bender kind.

has estimated that a functional human equivalent AI is no more than 10 years away. And that significantly greater than human roughly 15.

Lol.

No, really, that's all there is to say about that. Anyone who tells you that human-equivalent AI is coming within 10 years at most is either a scifi author or someone trying to sell you shares in an AI company.

You also keep missing the point that Self-Driving cars ARE LEGAL in many states, already:

http://www.cnn.com/2012/09/25/tech/innovation/self-driving-car-california/

They are not legal. Seriously, why do you keep ignoring the part where they're "legal" in the same way that autopilots are legal: you can let the vehicle drive/fly itself under human supervision, with the human driver/pilot ready to shut off the computer and take over control at any moment. That's not even remotely the same as self-driving cars being legal for unsupervised operation, which is what it will take to have your unemployment crisis.

I think I should have just left this at "uh-huh" earlier.

I feel like I am trying to explain how my refrigerator works to my cat.

MB

 kronk wrote:
What do self driving cars have to do with: "Worried about the Population Bomb, Global Warming, Poverty, and the Future of Mankind?"

The future of mankind is an escalation of current trends: wars over resources.

There is an overtone of the end to man kind with these kinds of issues. The truth is the most important issue is human beings being unemployable due to machines.

BeAfraid wrote:
I think I should have just left this at "uh-huh" earlier.

I feel like I am trying to explain how my refrigerator works to my cat.

MB

Well, none of us are PhD candidates like you are, MB.

Thats why cat lovers are evil.

Dogs can tell you how a refrigerator works.

"Alpha dog opens metal food room with his mutated paws. Then alpha dog gives me steak treats. thats how refrigerators work!"

Keep it polite, please... lest we offend our feline overlords...

 Xenomancers wrote:

 kronk wrote:
What do self driving cars have to do with: "Worried about the Population Bomb, Global Warming, Poverty, and the Future of Mankind?"

The future of mankind is an escalation of current trends: wars over resources.

There is an overtone of the end to man kind with these kinds of issues. The truth is the most important issue is human beings being unemployable due to machines.

No. There's a simple fix there. If machines can do all the work, we need to reorganize our economy. Please see Star Trek for more information.

 KalashnikovMarine wrote:

 Xenomancers wrote:

 kronk wrote:
What do self driving cars have to do with: "Worried about the Population Bomb, Global Warming, Poverty, and the Future of Mankind?"

The future of mankind is an escalation of current trends: wars over resources.

There is an overtone of the end to man kind with these kinds of issues. The truth is the most important issue is human beings being unemployable due to machines.

No. There's a simple fix there. If machines can do all the work, we need to reorganize our economy. Please see Star Trek for more information.

This has pretty much been my point.

We can not continue to rely upon "Capitalism," or even upon economic theories BASED UPON Capital (like Communism, for instance) as a means to provide for the population.

Ideas are already being proposed (such as Jaques Frecoes' "Resource Based Economy," but it is not really workable either - it is like a Concept car at a car show in the 1970s. Cool as all hell, but would never work on an actual road), and eventually we will begin to see means of dealing with the economic issues.

When we get to the point of having what is essentially free labor, this will radically shift the meaning of "work" (which is primarily "Labor based" - where one's "work' is primarily a means of providing support for life/living) to something that just implies "Working Toward a Goal," without the need to consider "Can I afford this?"

This WILL result in a generation of older, wealthier people who HUGELY resent their loss of status. But worrying about them is essentially the same as worrying about the Luddites and Ned Ludd during the Industrial Revolution. They are worrying about what is essentially a non-thing.

It WOULD be nice to see a society where merit is garnered simply by accomplishments where there are no closed avenues due to economic hardship.

But most people have a horrifically difficult time with accepting these changes.

MB

 KalashnikovMarine wrote:

 Xenomancers wrote:

 kronk wrote:
What do self driving cars have to do with: "Worried about the Population Bomb, Global Warming, Poverty, and the Future of Mankind?"

The future of mankind is an escalation of current trends: wars over resources.

There is an overtone of the end to man kind with these kinds of issues. The truth is the most important issue is human beings being unemployable due to machines.

No. There's a simple fix there. If machines can do all the work, we need to reorganize our economy. Please see Star Trek for more information.

Except Star Trek had some hideous flaws in its economy and ideas of how a post-scarcity society would function.

It wasn't truly a post-scarcity society. Given that trade was still a very viable thing in the setting. And resources were still very much an important aspect. If anything, they had devolved to a barter system and gone backwards from an economic standpoint. Sure, food wasn't an issue. But the raw materials to feed the replicators was always a problem.

the Federation was a "post-scarcity society" only because they were pegged into being that, not because they actually had any capability to function as one. Nothing they had would enable such a ludicrous economy. In reality, replicators would end up being tightly controlled and their services being a hideously expensive one to purchase. As would the maintenance for the replicators. They'd also never see practical use for highly complex items anyway. It would be too damn expensive and complicated to make a replicator that could produce exact copies of any food you wanted, or indeed any complex object. No, when replicators show up they'll be nothing more than bulk matter reconstructors. They'll make one element into another for industrial use. Nothing beyond that will be economically feasible. It will simply be cheaper to make food and consumer goods the old fashioned way.

We'll never be able to walk up to a replicator and ask it for "Tea, Earl Grey. Hot" and have it appear in a glass mug. At best, we'll be able to walk up to one and tell it to change this 100 gram block of Iron into a 100 gram block of Zinc. Mining will simply transition from looking for specific elements to just needing mass to feed into the transformers to get the specific elements we need.

We'll never be able to walk up to a replicator and ask it for "Tea, Earl Grey. Hot" and have it appear in a glass mug. At best, we'll be able to walk up to one and tell it to change this 100 gram block of Iron into a 100 gram block of Zinc.

Ummm.... I'd just like to point out that it's infinitely easier to have a machine automatically make hot tea than it is to split atoms from one element into another.

 DarkLink wrote:

We'll never be able to walk up to a replicator and ask it for "Tea, Earl Grey. Hot" and have it appear in a glass mug. At best, we'll be able to walk up to one and tell it to change this 100 gram block of Iron into a 100 gram block of Zinc.

Ummm.... I'd just like to point out that it's infinitely easier to have a machine automatically make hot tea than it is to split atoms from one element into another.

Yes, when the tea actually physically exists already.

Not when the tea, water, cup, and saucer just seconds before were nothing more than hydrogen atoms.

The issue of replicators is dealt with by Eric Drexler (the father of Nanotechnology, working on Richard Feynman's There is Plenty of Room at the Bottom paper).

They will not likely work as in Star Trek, but will be more akin to 3D printers.

However, you will not need a 3D printer to create tea, or any other beverage. A chemistry set is all that will be needed there (I think Bruce Sterling dealt with that in his novel Holy Fire). Even though "just" a novel, it did portray a more accurate image of what an early post-scarcity society would look like, and it tends to have ALL of the problems that current economists worry about for the coming decade (the concentration of wealth into an Oligarchic Gerontocracy, with no actual "work" for others to acquire REAL CAPITAL).

Star Trek is much like Jaques Frescoe in that regard.

It is a stunning, and gripping portrayal of a society that snatches our attention, yet would not actually work IRL (Like the Concept Car example I used earlier).

In both cases, there are design elements we can use, or appropriate for an actual new economy.

But we need to be wary, and rather quick to establishing the Foundation for that new economy, because it could be trivial for the current Oligarchy to establish nearly total domination of future technologies, keeping them from making any sort of democratization possible.

MB

BeAfraid wrote:

 KalashnikovMarine wrote:

 Xenomancers wrote:

 kronk wrote:
What do self driving cars have to do with: "Worried about the Population Bomb, Global Warming, Poverty, and the Future of Mankind?"

The future of mankind is an escalation of current trends: wars over resources.

There is an overtone of the end to man kind with these kinds of issues. The truth is the most important issue is human beings being unemployable due to machines.

No. There's a simple fix there. If machines can do all the work, we need to reorganize our economy. Please see Star Trek for more information.

This has pretty much been my point.

We can not continue to rely upon "Capitalism," or even upon economic theories BASED UPON Capital (like Communism, for instance) as a means to provide for the population.

Ideas are already being proposed (such as Jaques Frecoes' "Resource Based Economy," but it is not really workable either - it is like a Concept car at a car show in the 1970s. Cool as all hell, but would never work on an actual road), and eventually we will begin to see means of dealing with the economic issues.

When we get to the point of having what is essentially free labor, this will radically shift the meaning of "work" (which is primarily "Labor based" - where one's "work' is primarily a means of providing support for life/living) to something that just implies "Working Toward a Goal," without the need to consider "Can I afford this?"

This WILL result in a generation of older, wealthier people who HUGELY resent their loss of status. But worrying about them is essentially the same as worrying about the Luddites and Ned Ludd during the Industrial Revolution. They are worrying about what is essentially a non-thing.

It WOULD be nice to see a society where merit is garnered simply by accomplishments where there are no closed avenues due to economic hardship.

But most people have a horrifically difficult time with accepting these changes.

MB

There will always be those in power who seek not to better mankind but to better themselves at the expense of others. A lot of people are going to have to die for a working post scarcity society to ever develop.