[ennui2]

You may have been in tech before you took the red pill but since then you've totally lost touch out in the land of redwoods and schmokin' weed. So no, not impressed. Wake me when you write the next Amazon Echo on your rusty 8088.

[ennui2]

what technology, what computer processor/system do you envision that has the capacity to see and navigate down a street in the rain and snow? Or at night? Or beyond the single map (ie off grid) that Google created several years ago?

All these companies would not be blowing this much money if they thought it couldn't be done. The sensor packages in cars is becoming a commoditized part. Tesla gets it from MobilEye. These suppliers are becoming the ATI or nVidia for automation, carving out a niche where they can do the R&D once and then act as an OEM supplier. The secret sauce is mostly in the software which will lean heavily on cloud services, similar to how GoogleMaps or Waze works. This all relates back to IoT (internet of things).

This kind of stuff does not emerge fully formed out of the womb. The different parts kind of converge together until it reaches maturity, just as it did for smart phones and tablets.

[Tanada]

While I believe it is possible AI might at some point in the next decade make some sort of break through allowing true autopilot systems for vehicles that doesn't mean there will be either overnight acceptance, nor fleet wide adoption. Heck a cruise control to maintain a set speed was invented in the 1970's, yet many models of cars and light trucks built even today do not have such a device.

Or you can take the top down approach and require all vehicle models to install real autopilots on even the lowest economy level models. For that example look at air bags, first tested in the 1970's in luxury models mandated for front seat passengers in all car models in 1998. Now in 2016 the number of pre-1998 models still in regular use is a small percentage of the total passenger vehicle fleet, but the change over took the better part of 20 years, and it was not without its troubles along the way.

What I suspect to happen goes more like this, the federal expressway system will institute clear lane marker systems that will allow thoroughly sensor equipped models to stay in their own lane and maintain a safe distance from all the other vehicles on the expressway. But for rural roads or even city streets where local governments are lax on even fixing potholes? Just not a practical possibility.

[ennui2]

The folks who lost lots of money on 17th century tulips also considered themselves brilliant.

Useless anecdote from hundreds of years ago that is not analogous. There are actually very few if any cases where the modern tech industry decided to all go down a dead-end. They know what they're doing.

I am just a doomer lol

Exactly. Followed quantum computer development lately?


" the federal expressway system will institute clear lane marker systems that will allow thoroughly sensor equipped models to stay in their own lane and maintain a safe distance from all the other vehicles on the expressway. "

Exactly. The sweet-spot for automation is for cars to form a sort of virtual-train on the freeway. It doesn't HAVE to be concerned about kids running in front of them for that application.

[ennui2]

Meanwhile, out in the real-world rather than the endless rhetorical battles between those with huge axes to grind...

http://electrek.co/2016/07/21/tesla-aut ... strian-dc/

[Outcast_Searcher]

Meanwhile, out in the real-world rather than the endless rhetorical battles between those with huge axes to grind...

http://electrek.co/2016/07/21/tesla-aut ... strian-dc/

Well, that's nice, but this stuff is pretty hit-and-miss.

I watched a Youtube video (in the days following the fatal Tesla Autopilot crash announcement) showing a set of tests where a friend deliberately stepped into the street in front of a Tesla S going 18 mph with Autopilot engaged, the minimum speed Autopilot can be engaged. (Both the driver and the pedestrian had mapped out what each would do if the car failed to react in time).

In two tests in a row, the car beeped and flashed a light on the dash, but kept bearing down on the pedestrian. At the last minute the driver swerved and the pedestrian leaped out of the way to avoid the pedestrian being hit.

This was after the Tesla had flawlessly avoided hitting the same pedestrian multiple times in "Summon" mode (less dramatic at 1 mph) in the same video. Although, in one glancing sideswipe type of test in the Summon Mode section of the video, the car did try to run the driver's side rear view mirror into the pedestrian, and would have succeeded if the driver hadn't braked hard at the last split-second..

...

All this has promise, but it is still VERY MUCH hit or miss at this point -- not a good game to play when lives are at stake.

[ennui2]

Sorry, PStarr, this is gonna happen one way or another. So warm up your keyboard so you can rant and rave about the FORD killing machine.

http://www.theverge.com/2016/8/16/12504 ... aring-2021

Doesn't have quite the same satisfaction as nut-busting a techno-optimist like Musk, huh?

CHEERS

[vox_mundi]

33 Corporations Working On Autonomous Vehicles

... Companies leading the charge on the driverless car race say they will be safer and more efficient than cars driven by humans.

One automotive firm, Volvo, has pledged to make all of its new cars "deathproof" by 2020, according to CNN.

Ford promises driverless cars by 2021

PALO ALTO, Calif. – Ford Motor Co. said Tuesday it plans to deploy a fully autonomous and driverless ride-hailing car by 2021.

CEO Mark Fields set the target at Ford’s Research and Innovation facility here, which will double its staff to 300 and grow its footprint by 150,000 square feet by year’s end to respond to the challenge.

Currently, Ford is testing around a dozen self-driving Ford Fusion Hybrids on California, Michigan and Arizona roads. Its goal is to introduce cars with no steering wheels or pedals.

Other automakers are also targeting a similar delivery date, with BMW and Volvo separately announcing last month that they would have a self-driving car by 2021. Some 33 companies are developing autonomous car tech, from Audi to Volkswagen, according to CB Insights.

Ford plans to have 30 Fusions testing its autonomous car tech by the end of this year, and nearly 100 in 2017.

“We’re aiming for Level 4 automation with this vehicle,” said Ford CTO Raj Nair, referring to the Society of Automotive Engineers standard, where Level 1 is a human-guided vehicle and 5 requires no human input regardless of the environment.

How an autonomous Ford hybrid manages to drive in the snow

Ford motor company, along with all the other major car manufacturers, has been working on self-driving cars, but unlike others, such as Google, Ford has begun demonstrating an autonomous vehicle that is capable of driving in the snow, where lane lines and other identifiable markers become hidden by the blanket of flakes. In a recent press release, Ford outlines how it works and offers a video of its test vehicle successfully finding its way around a snow covered private roadway.

The most important tool in the modified Fusion hybrid is a Light Detection And Ranging (LiDAR) sensor, it is used to create virtual maps of terrain—during non-snow conditions it captures the roadways of course, but also signs, trees, buildings and other landmarks, collecting data amounting to 600 gigabytes per hour. Then, when the car is moving in snow conditions, it is joined by a host of other sensors (radar, cameras, etc.) collecting data regarding current location and conditions.

Radar is unaffected by blinding oncoming headlights

GM begins autonomous car tests in Scottsdale, Arizona

General Motors and its autonomous technology company Cruise Automation are testing self-driving cars on the streets of Scottsdale, Arizona.

Testing of self-driving electric Chevrolet Bolts began in Arizona about two weeks ago. It's the second city for GM's real-world tests. Autonomous Bolts with Cruise Automation software have been driving around San Francisco since May 20.

GM spokesman Kevin Kelly says the company is considering other cities for tests but wasn't ready to announce locations.

Delphi wants to deploy self-driving cars in 2022

Auto electronics supplier Delphi Corp. will start testing self-driving vehicles in Singapore next year with a goal of putting them into public use sometime in 2022.

Testing will be limited to six vehicles with human backup drivers inside One North, a large mixed-use residential and industrial park on the west side of the island city-state. It will include on-demand transportation of people and goods and will be linked electronically to the area's infrastructure, the company said.

Delphi may be behind Cambridge, Massachusetts-based autonomous car software developer nuTonomy, which began testing vehicles in One North in April and hopes to launch a commercial autonomous vehicle service in 2018. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology spinoff said Monday that it was picked by the Singapore Land Transport Authority to begin trials of on-demand self-driving vehicles.

Delphi was picked by the authority for the tests after an autonomous Audi made a trip across the U.S. in 2015, according to the company. The testing was announced Monday in Singapore.

Two other test sites in the U.S. and Europe will be revealed later. By 2022, Delphi hopes to have autonomous pods hauling goods and people without pedals, steering wheels or human backup drivers.

Nvidia GPU-powered autonomous car teaches itself to see and steer

During the past nine months, an Nvidia engineering team built a self-driving car with one camera, one Drive-PX embedded computer and only 72 hours of training data. Nvidia published an academic preprint of the results of the DAVE2 project entitled End to End Learning for Self-Driving Cars on arXiv.org hosted by the Cornell Research Library.

The Nvidia project called DAVE2 is named after a 10-year-old Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) project known as DARPA Autonomous Vehicle (DAVE). Although neural networks and autonomous vehicles seem like a just-invented-now technology, researchers such as Google’s Geoffrey Hinton, Facebook’s Yann Lecune and the University of Montreal’s Yoshua Bengio have collaboratively researched this branch of artificial intelligence for more than two decades. And the DARPA DAVE project application of neural network-based autonomous vehicles was preceded by the ALVINN project developed at Carnegie Mellon in 1989. What has changed is GPUs have made building on their research economically feasible.

[ennui2]

So PStarr? How does it feel to be wrong on the internet? Maybe think twice about sharing your opinions about technology when you turned your back on it around the time the 286 came out? You're a little out of touch, dude. Stick with dead-walrus selfies.

[vox_mundi]

Uber to use autonomous cars to haul people in next few weeks

Uber spent years amassing an army of 1 million drivers around the world. Now its CEO says it wants to “wean” customers off of those very drivers.

Beginning this month, the ride-sharing company will begin deploying self-driving cars — equipped with cameras, lasers and GPS systems — to pick up passengers in downtown Pittsburgh, Bloomberg Businessweek reports. The custom Volvo SUVs will offer free introductory rides and, at least for now, be supervised by engineers in the driver’s seat.

The high-tech ride-hailing company said Thursday that an unspecified number of autonomous Ford Fusions with human backup drivers will pick up passengers just like normal Uber vehicles. Riders will be able to opt in if they want a self-driving car, and rides will be free to those willing to do it, spokesman Matt Kallman said.

With this pilot program Uber is testing a rudimentary version of its final vision for self-driving cars: to replace its one million plus human drivers.

"When there's no other dude in the car, the cost of taking an Uber anywhere becomes cheaper than owning a vehicle. So the magic there is, you basically bring the cost below the cost of ownership for everybody, and then car ownership goes away," Kalanick said at the Code Conference in 2014, shortly after Google unveiled its self-driving car prototype.

The announcement was one of three made by Uber that accelerate the company's quest to provide autonomous taxis to the public worldwide. It's also the latest tie-up between Silicon Valley, ride-hailing firms and major automakers.

The San Francisco company announced a $300 million deal for Volvo to provide SUVs to Uber for autonomous vehicle research. Eventually the Volvo SUVs will be part of the self-driving fleet in Pittsburgh. Volvo will develop base vehicles for research and both companies will develop autonomous vehicles on their own.

Uber also announced that it is acquiring a self-driving startup called Otto that has developed technology allowing big rigs to drive themselves.

... In the long run, prices will fall so low that the per-mile cost of travel, even for long trips in rural areas, will be cheaper in a driverless Uber than in a private car. “That could be seen as a threat,” says Volvo Cars CEO Hakan Samuelsson. “We see it as an opportunity.”

[ennui2]

Stop labeling discussion "stalking" If you don't want to interact with people, stop posting and be happy hiding out in the THC-infused haven of your redwood curtain.

The articles are PR pieces filled with nothing.

How could you possibly think otherwise?

For example, all autonomous technologies take place in a pre-mapped environments.

So, you expect autonomous driving to emerge out of the womb fully perfected?

Think of the computing experience when you were coding against IBM PCs in the 80s vs. today. How wise would those who doubted that computers would improve back then seem in retrospect?

That's basically what you're doing now, claiming that we have reached the end of technological progress and all of this R&D is a hopeless folly that will lead nowhere. What exactly has happened in high-tech that would lead you to believe this? The answer is there's nothing. Even the end of Moore's law isn't a given if things like light-based or quantum-computing takes off.

But no, you are going to "call" this one in advance. It's over.

And why, exactly, should we take your word for it? What credentials do you have in this field other than being a luddite doomer? The answer is none.

And yet when I call you on your ignorance and your bias you fall back into petty insults like "stalker" and just keep shrugging things off.

This is why people like Cid fingered you as the pigeon chess player. You're not here to debate. You're here to pontificate and do your George Carlin act, lather, rinse, and repeat.

It's not funny and it's not informative. Pretty much the definition of troll, and yet you're the one who tends to dish out troll labels to people.

I call it as I see it. You're a troll.

[yellowcanoe]

Autopilot functionality has been provided on larger aircraft for at least the last 50 years and it greatly reduces the workload of the flight crew. However, we still get crashes where the autopilot has for some reason partially or completely stopped flying the plane and the flight crew fail to step in and correctly fly the aircraft manually. A self driving car is a much more complex concept than an aircraft autopilot so I would expect it will be far more common for the self driving system to give up and pass control off to the human driver. How well is that going to work out? Remember that your average car driver doesn't have the level of training and experience that a commercial pilot is going to have. Airline pilots also do simulator training on various types of problem situations because that is where it is most important for the flight crew to be able to quickly identify what is wrong and take the correct actions to fly the plane manually.

[StarvingLion]

All this tech crap (Energy Transition, personal "computing" devices to "store" "cash", autopilot vehicles, automation,etc) is for the billionaires to fucking kill 8+ billion people otherwise everyone will die due to ecological and materials shortages collapse.

The energy transition (solar, wind, batteries, hvdc, auto pilot vehicles, automated supply chain, etc) makes perfect sense for the ultra rich. Its highly redundant, requires few specialised operating staff, not easily sabotaged, automated, etc. No wonder they hate nuclear and its associated labor...too many smart people along for the ride to disrupt the plan. The energy transition is not about saving the 8 billion+ people in the oil based system from collapse, but instead for the rich to survive the ecological and materials shortage collapse by killing them off with a minimum of collateral damage.

Think of it as building a worldwide reverse Hitlers bunker where the mission is for about 50 million billionaires+ to slowly pull the economic plug on 8 billion and watch them die off.. without killing themselves off in the process. The winners are in the bunkers this time around.

When some go nuts and try to tear it down, its too hard to do.

[StarvingLion]

The Internet of Things is a 8 BILLION PEOPLE DEATH CAMP with no ovens or smokestacks.

85% of new money last year went into 10 tech stocks. The tech communists steal everything and the dumbass fanbois worship them like gods.

You don't have to drive a car, you don't have to do industrial labor, you don't have to go to the store to buy something, you don't have to understand the monetary system, you don't have to understand industrial engineering, you don't have to do anything BECAUSE THE TECH BILLIONAIRES LOVE YOU.

Its a massive disenfranchisement system.

What kind of retard thinks they are empowering themselves putting solar panels on their roofs? Or AutoPilot? The entire point of AI autonomous is TO GET RID OF YOU (DEATH).