How do we resolve the observable tension here with the fact that self-driving cars are operating right now, relatively successfully, in ten or so major American cities?
Not a billion dollar business yet, maybe, but 300 cars generating five or six figures revenue per year each isn't far off.
(And I say this as someone who is skeptical that totally autonomous cars worldwide will ever be a thing, but you can get to £10Bn far, far before that point. Become the dominant mode of transport in just ONE major American city and you're most of the way there).
> How do we resolve the observable tension here with the fact that self-driving cars are operating right now, relatively successfully, in ten or so major American cities?
Because geo fenced driving in a few select cities with very favourable conditions is not what was promised. That's the crux. They promised us that we have self drive anywhere at anytime at the press of a button.
> Not a billion dollar business yet, maybe, but 300 cars generating five or six figures revenue per year each isn't far off.
I'm not sure how you get to 6 figures revenue. Assuming the car makes $100 per hour for 24x7 52 weeks a year we still fall short of 1 million. But let's assume you're right $300M revenue (not profit, are they even operating at a plus even disregarding R&D costs?) on investment of >10 billion (probably more like 100), seems like the definition of hype.
> (And I say this as someone who is skeptical that totally autonomous cars worldwide will ever be a thing, but you can get to £10Bn far, far before that point. Become the dominant mode of transport in just ONE major American city and you're most of the way there).
What I don't understand with this argument, how are you proposing they become the dominant mode of transport. These services are competing with taxis, what do they offer over taxis that people suddenly switch on mass to self driving taxis? They need to become cost competitive (and convenience competitive) with driving your own car, which would significantly drive down revenue. Secondly if robotaxi companies take over transport, why would the public continue to build their infrastructure and not demand that these robotaxi companies start to finance the infrastructure they exclusively use?
I got to six figures by assuming that a human taxi driver makes maybe $30-40k at a guess, and an autonomous car can work 24/7. 6 figures is $100k minimum.
So yeah, right now they'd have to be at ten cities x 300 cars each to hit 300M revenue, but there's still plenty of room for growth. Or should be, assuming the Waymo model isn't maxed out supporting the current handful of cities.
But I'm not convinced they have to hit cost parity with personal cars, because the huge advantage is you can work and drive (or be driven). If NYC and LA rush-hour congestion time becomes productive time, there's your billions.
I drive but prefer to take transit for this reason - some of my colleagues are able to join work calls effectively while driving, but for whatever reason my brain doesn't allow that. Just paying attention to calls is enough, you want me to pay attention to the road AND the call?
I can see that for the factory floor, but there's no particular reason for "it" to be "humanoid".
It's basically a robot arm with mobility at that point, and if you need more than one, just have more than one robot wheel into place. There's no particular reason to have two arms.. one, or three, or five are all sensible numbers. Heck, a chassis supporting a variable number of arms and other appendages (sensors and so on) is plausible, and the control system looks more like an ant-colony mind than a human one.
Which is a long-winded way of saying, there's no particular reason to link embodiment and cognition at the individual arm level in a factory scenario.
On the factory floor, all the tasks that were a good fit for "a robot arm bolted down to the floor next to the assembly line" are already performed by robot arms bolted down to the floor next to the assembly line.
What remains is all the weird and awkward automation-resistant tasks where "just get a human to do it" is still easier and cheaper than redesigning everything to maybe get old school automation to handle them.
This is the kind of niche humanoid robots are currently aiming at. It's no coincidence that at least 3 companies trying to develop humanoid robots have ties to vehicle manufacturers.
Makes sense - but I'm still not clear on why it would need to be humanoid in form-factor or indeed self-contained/autonomous and not a more flexible, mobile, multipurpose robot-arm-like-thing?
Like is there any particular reason for it to be about 6' tall with exactly two 3' long, three-jointed arms rather than any of the other possible permutations for those things?
You want robots that can do tasks humans can do but robot arms can't - which has a way of driving the design decisions. The more you move towards "flexible, mobile, multipurpose", the more you move towards the humanoid frames.
Just look up how vehicle interior assembly is performed now. Look at all the things that are still done by humans - all the different assembly stations, all the loading and unloading, all the installation operations, all the panels and wiring harnesses and plugs and bolts.
Then try to come up with a robot frame that would do all of it - every single operation that's currently done by a human - while being significantly less complex than a humanoid frame.
The design space constraints would choke the life out of you.
Drive according to western standards. If you've never driven outside of those, then it's hard to imagine. No one follows the laws. Lanes are entirely made up, no one follows the lines on the road. If you're not agressive to the point of someone in LA about to shoot you, you won't get in.
I ride Waymos and I believe they can be made to work in Rome et al, but honestly, I doubt most human drivers can drive in eg Mumbai.
I'm familiar with Indian traffic. Those events are more frequent in some places, but they happen everywhere. In any case, it's not what the OP is talking about. They were talking about cities improving conditions to make things easier for AVs. LA wasn't Mumbai before Waymo and it still isn't after.
The problem with respect to what? The end-goal of self-driving cars (and humanoid robots) is to work in the environments created for humans. Otherwise we can just put down rails across all cities and call it a tram, or design purpose-built robots for all tasks.
Edit: Stated more explicitly: the human world is the way it is because of many reasons and can't always be changed naively (it's not like nobody in Cairo has thought about improving the traffic situation, or architects haven't thought about the ease of cleaning different flooring material). Robots which are general purpose with respect to their human-like capabilities must necessarily also accept a world in which humans live.
The end goal of is to make them work in reasonable environments. If it works fine in 90% of cities but doesn't work in Cairo, then fuck Cairo, no driverless cars for them.
And, well, a lot of people _can't_ have their own speed bubble.
Most of us, for quite a bit of our lives - when we're under 18 for a start, and over 75ish it isn't really a good idea (yes, I know, no viable alternatives for a lot of people right now, but it's still a bad idea). Whenever we've had a drink. There's a dozen or more medical conditions which can snatch your right to drive away with the stroke of a doctor's pen, and that's before we consider all the common meds which come with a don't drive advisory warning.
And then there's all the other times where it'd sure be nice not to have to. When we're tired, or stressed, or sick, or weather conditions make things dicey. Or when I just wanted to read that book, magazine, blog article, or watch that movie. Or we've got to be someplace with the kids but they actually need our undivided attention.
The point is, even if you drive and like driving, it's just basically civilised to have other affordable options. Even if they're a bit slower or come with other compromises, they should, y'know, exist. And sometimes allowing them to exist comes at a price of making driving your own speed-bubble at the times when you can and want to a little less convenient or more expensive.
Until you're the only adult in the car, driving along the motorway, and one of the kids in the back starts crying / gets car sick / needs the toilet when you're 15km from the next services. Granted, train toilets with a toddler aren't much fun either.
Don't need a crazy expensive stroller though. A sling when they're small and light, and once they get big and heavy, they're large enough to go in a more basic foldable stroller. The childcare products industry is honestly awful at scamming new or expecting parents into buying shit they don't need.
Singles - I agree. Even doubles, there are reasonable ones.
Find a good cheap triple or higher stroller. Then you're looking at used car prices.
And I agree - a train is nice with a family, because once you're in, you're in.
But a train is more like a plane than a car; it's the subway that's closest to short commuting trips, and they rarely have bathrooms and often subway stops don't have them, either.
(Sometimes the temptation to get an RV with a toilet is high, mind you.)
-10deg winters are certainly going to put a stop to much walking or biking, regardless of whether that's Celsius or Fahrenheit.
Not much of Europe ever gets that low though. Edinburgh occasionally overnight, but it's rarely below about -4c / 24f during commute hours. Berlin mostly the same, Stockholm's maybe the only big European capital that gets to "walking for an hour stands a serious chance of killing you" temperatures for days at a time.
Central Paris is denser than Manhattan. At some point the bottleneck is not the amount of people you can cram into a m2 of land, but the underlying infrastructures.
Yes, this will be the road racer guys (it is mostly guys) screwing up while descending an Alp or Pyrenee. Split-second safety margins and if you get it wrong on a 60kph descent - or someone else gets it wrong, or you suffer a mechanical failure - you're likely dead.
A city is a much more dangerous environment. You have bollards, stupid pedestrians who keep on trying to circulate on YOUR sidewalk, potholes, dogs, and so on.
It's really not, because speeds are so much lower - and injury is, by and large, related to kinetic energy which is the _square_ of speed.
OK, cycling at 50km/h in a city is dangerous and stupid (if you're even physically capable of doing so, which few are?). 30km/h in suburbs / 20km/h in the centre is mostly fine, and 10 for busy complicated spaces.
30km/h is slow enough to prevent the vast majority of crashes being fatal, and 20km/h will avoid most serious injuries.
Kinetic power is lower, that said you can still hurt yourself pretty bad depending on how you fall. A wrist doesn't need a lot of force to break, nor a skull needs to fall from high to cause trauma. A cyclist on a sidewalk going at 20km/h can cripple a child for life (not that the cyclist cares, but just for the example).
I broke my wrist by falling from my bike when I was younger, almost while stopped (my wheel got blocked in a tram rail).
And yet if you look at the public health statistics for the things _actually_ crippling children for life, "other people on bikes" are a very long way down the list - at least in most places; I don't know if Paris has a specific problem there. You can hurt yourself pretty bad in the home, after all - the major causes here seem to be cars and dogs.
(Before we even consider that - at population level and in developed Western countries - lack of physical activity, and an environment which actively suppresses it through sheer indifference if not outright hostility - is likely inflicting a far greater burden on childrens' health and wellbeing than trauma).
The statistics are low because many places banned cyclists from sidewalks? Purely speed-wise, being hit by a car at 50kmh while riding a bike at 25kmh is similar to being hit by a cyclist going at 25kmh while being static on a sidewalk. Why are cyclists concerned about cars but I should just think "trust the stats bro" when the 5th cyclist going at full speed came past me on a narrow sidewalk? France banned shared e-scooters after many scathing accidents, including deaths and people being crippled. I remember a professional pianist who get her hand broken this way and had to stop her career.[0]
But I guess she's just a statistic, right? Pedestrians, out of the way!
I don't disagree that commuting by bicycle can be hazardous, but the major risks to cyclist safety are cars, trucks and other cyclists (mainly e-bikes). Pedestrians, potholes, bollards, etc. are no worse than an inconvenience most of the time. You just don't build up enough speed to cause that much damage in a busy city due to a fall or colliding with a pedestrian. OTOH, even the mildest collision between a bike and a car is generally a Bad Time for the cyclist.
Source: me, who commutes by bike daily through a capital city.
The problem arises when cyclists want to use the space reserved for pedestrians (sidewalks), or ignore red lights, when pedestrians use the crosswalk. I am not against bicycle lanes, when it is doable, but cyclists should go on the road when there is none. And have insurance + numbered bikes if electrical.
And social policy. You have too many people wandering around in a psychological state one negative interaction away from an incident that could easily escalate to murder.
Such people exist in every country, yes, but fewer in most places.
Best bit of career advice I ever got, back in the 90s: "Get really good at the help system".
(At the time, it was MSDN DVDs).