Uber Starts Self Driving Car Pickups In Pittsburgh (techcrunch.com) 192
The reports were true. Uber on Wednesday announced it a select group of Pittsburgh users will get a surprise the next time they book a cab: the option to ride in a self-driving car. TechCrunch reports: The announcement comes a year-and-a-half after Uber hired dozens of researchers from Carnegie Mellon University's robotics center to develop the technology. Uber gave a few members of the press a sneak peek Tuesday when a fleet of 14 Ford Fusions equipped with radar, cameras and other sensing equipment pulled up to Uber's Advanced Technologies Campus (ATC) northeast of downtown Pittsburgh. During my 45-minute ride across the city, it became clear that this is not a bid at launching the first fully formed autonomous cars. Instead, this is a research exercise. Uber wants to learn and refine how self driving cars act in the real world. That includes how the cars react to passengers -- and how passengers react to them. "How do drivers in cars next to us react to us? How do passengers who get into the backseat who are experiencing our hardware and software fully experience it for the first time, and what does that really mean?" said Raffi Krikorian, director of Uber ATC.When a couple of drivers were asked about Uber's push to get cabs drive themselves, they weren't pleased.
Great! (Score:4, Interesting)
It's good to see more real world testing of these systems in a challenging environment. It will be interesting to see how they handle Pittsburgh's winter. I was hoping that they'd be ready by now, since my kid is about to get a driver's license, but at least I should be able to buy one in 5 or 6 years.
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It's good to see more real world testing of these systems in a challenging environment...
Well, that's certainly one hell of a way of describing trial by fire where human lives are at stake.
Uber wants to know how people would "react" with autonomous cars? Yeah, I'll let you know when Common F. Sense feels safe enough to trust one. In about 10 years.
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You have a driver sitting in the thing, with a big red button to hit or an easy way to take back control by moving the wheel or tapping the brakes. That doesn't seem to be putting human lives at much more risk than anyone else out on the road. And the payoff of this testing is that every mistake, in theory, should only be made once.
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Re:Fools (Score:5, Insightful)
It won't be long until it's the other way around - only a fool would ride with a human driver.
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I was taught in driver's ed that the two worst drivers on the roads are cops.. and taxi drivers.
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Don't forget about student drivers, and distracted drivers, and aggressive drivers, and people the drive too slow, and people that drive to fast, and people that don't use their turn signal, and road ragers, and... everyone, let's just go with everyone.
I guess it depends on what your metric for "worst" is.
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Worst was defined as (in my words) "drivers that feel that due to their postilion of authority and familiarity with the roads, they can all but throw the rules of the road out the window and drive fast, forget the turn signal, tailgate, and drive like it's a full on game of Mario-Kart."
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I always take special notice when someone driving the same car as me is on the road.
You can imagine my surprise when a grey haired old lady gunned it at an intersection in her Acura RSX. It was the coolest thing I have ever seen.
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“Have you ever noticed that anybody driving slower than you is an idiot, and anyone going faster than you is a maniac?” -- George Carlin
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You don't realize exactly how little you understand the subject either. All your comments are totally empty and you make absolutely no point.
The improvement of AI technology over the last two-three years made AI better than humans in many fields. Go game is one thing. Driving is another. AI is better at driving as human already, because sight is now as good as human (even better when you add a radar) and reaction time is 100 times lower. Insurance companies won't have a problem, because better driver mean
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The improvement of AI technology over the last two-three years made AI better than humans in many fields.
Driving wasn't solved by the improvements over the last two-three years. The big breakthrough was one of the DARPA competitions about a decade ago. Since then there have been many refinements, but the core of the developments happened there.
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To be fair, only a fool would hop into the back of the average Taxi Cab. But we often don't have much of a choice.
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Re:Fools (Score:5, Insightful)
If by "not anytime soon" you mean "sometime within the next five years" you're right.
This is happening, and it's happening quickly. The AIs that exist now are already better than average human drivers. They will quickly improve to the point that they're better than any human driver. A driving AI doesn't have to be better than a human at everything, it just has to be better than a human at driving. And that's rapidly becoming a solved problem.
It's the chess situation all over again. Lots of people denied that computers would ever be able to beat a grandmaster right up until the point where it happened.
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I would love to see an autopilot car in NASCAR.
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I'd rather see it in F1. NASCAR is boring.
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Agreed. Not much of challenge.
Turn left.
Turn left.
Turn left.
Turn left...
A bit more seriously, it would be interesting to see something like this with NASCAR. It'd be like Deep Blue versus Gary Kasparov, except for rednecks.
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chess has fixed rules and paths cars do not (Score:2)
chess has fixed rules and paths cars do not
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Sure they do. Cars are pretty much stuck in Newtonian physics.
Most of the issues that exist while driving are defined by making guesses about what other things are on the road are going to do. A human has visual and audio and to a much lesser extent tactile cues about that, and makes decisions from those inputs. An AI can have those inputs along with additional data. A human has typically at best a 220 degree field of view. The AI gets 360. It can monitor small cues in every direction to determine wha
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I've been driving for 17 years. If I took all the data from 100 cars run over a year, that's 5 times more experience than me with all kinds of situations. Company analyzes the new data, figures out what updates are needed, and pushes them all out. Imagine 1,000 cars. 10,000. You just can't compete in terms of knowledge.
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I'm waiting to see a self driving car navigate across Boston during a nor'easter while avoiding all the road cones and lawn chairs strewn around the street. Not to mention navigating around plows, traffic cops, potholes, double-parked cars, dealing with disabled street lights, no visible road markings, pedestrians walking down the middle of the street due to inaccessible sidewalks, and the occasional parade of wild turkeys. All of which I've seen on my daily commute.
It's nice that someone is finally runnin
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What you don't seem to understand is that it's already there, on public roads now.
It's not decades away. It's already happening.
And it's less than a decade from being a product that you can go buy.
People were scared when elevators stopped having operators too. Sure, elevators are an easy problem, cars are a hard problem.
But when AIs have already driven millions of miles on public roads in traffic, you can't claim that it isn't going to happen without sounding like a crazy person.
And you can't claim that i
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"Fancy cruise control" as you call it is already a product, is already in shipping cars, and you can buy it today. It's not five years away. Some currently available mass production cars already have the ability to maintain their lane, change lanes when directed, and maintain speed and distance in traffic. It's not just research and development, it's for sale.
What's going to be here in five years is a product that will take you from point A to point B without you doing anything but telling it where you w
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They have very little data less-than-optimal driving conditions, thus far. It's cool that they're finally gather data somewhere other than California - somewhere that gets weather. Two years sounds optimistic.
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Sure. Keep telling yourself that. Never mind that it's already happening, never mind that Ford has already announced a ship date, just go back to sleep.
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The point is that the technology already works. At this point, it's all about refining it. And it's a very reasonable assumption that they're going to make that ship date, because they've got five years to refine a technology that is already workable now.
This is not some far-off maybe scenario. Self-driving cars are on the road today. Millions of miles have been driven by computers. They will be a product, and they will be a product within five years.
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Do keep in mind that the self driving cars have cameras in all directions. They will be aware that you are following it around. If you cut one off and cause an accident.... well... I bet that self driving equipment will be pretty expensive for you to replace.
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what about crimalnal cases with crashs? (Score:2)
what about criminal cases with crashes? that don't go to an civil court?
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Bad driving is typically not criminal, although some bad driving is illegal. There's a difference.. Whatever faults a self-driving car has, they're not likely to be against the law. Some of the things that lead to bad driving (like alcohol) are.
Abolish Jobs (Score:5, Interesting)
Jobs are miserable and robotic; giving them to robots is a great justice.
Instead, we should pay people to achieve the goals of civilization: maintaining land and buildings, participating in cultural events, having families, curating farms, maybe even maintaining old documents and cumulative knowledge.
The cube-slave period of humanity will be seen as the bleakest, if only by the alien archeologists sifting through our rubble for clues as to how to avoid the potential demise of their own civilization.
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Instead, we should pay people to achieve the goals of civilization: [...]
Who is this "we" that's doing the paying?
Re:Abolish Jobs (Score:4, Insightful)
Instead, we should pay people to achieve the goals of civilization: [...]
Who is this "we" that's doing the paying?
That's the problem with society today. We seemingly only find value in the almighty dollar.
Humans have already proven for thousands of years that money is not a necessary component of survival, no matter how the world today wants to paint it.
Re:Abolish Jobs (Score:5, Insightful)
Instead, we should pay people to achieve the goals of civilization: [...]
Who is this "we" that's doing the paying?
That's the problem with society today. We seemingly only find value in the almighty dollar.
Humans have already proven for thousands of years that money is not a necessary component of survival, no matter how the world today wants to paint it.
Comments like your betray a deep and important misunderstanding of what money is. Money is a convenient fiction, no more and no less. It's a stand-in that we use to represent real resources and labor, to make exchanging them easy. The focus on "the almighty dollar" is actually a focus on "goods and services needed and desired by humans".
If what you're saying is that modern humanity is too materialistic, too focused on comfort and convenience and too accustomed to living in a world of plenty, you can make that argument. But complaining about a focus on money just demonstrates that you don't understand what money is.
Note that I'm not claiming that money is the only way to manage the production and exchange of goods and services. It's just the best one we've yet found in an environment of economic scarcity. If automation transitions us to a post-scarcity economy, in which there's so much of everything that everyone can have whatever they like, money may no longer be a good way to manage it. But we're certainly not there yet.
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Money is a convenient fiction, no more and no less. It's a stand-in that we use to represent real resources and labor, to make exchanging them easy.
Then explain how national banks the world over create money from nothing.
What I said is the explanation. Money being a convenient fiction, banks can create it. Not just national banks, either. Every time a loan is made in the fractional reserve system, the lending bank creates most of the money it loans.
Explain how entire market sectors are dedicated to making money with money. They certainly are not using money as "a stand-in [to] represent real resources and labor."
By and large, they actually are. The financial system's competitive money movers are out for their own interest and don't care so much about the goods and services that underlie what they're doing, but what they're doing is pushing capital into the businesses that can most effect
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You make think you're funny, but you're actually ignorant. There are thousands and thousands of people in the US who pay Federal income tax, but cannot vote. They are visa holders.
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Instead, we should pay people to achieve the goals of civilization: [...]
Who is this "we" that's doing the paying?
The robots, obviously. They have jobs so they can afford to pay humans to do maintenance jobs that are too dangerous to be done by robots.
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unfortunately our corporate overlords have so completely brainwashed the population into thinking such ideas are dangerous that it will never happen, and we are just going to end up with a bunch of excess population.
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Instead, we should pay people to achieve the goals of civilization: maintaining land and buildings, participating in cultural events, having families, curating farms, maybe even maintaining old documents and cumulative knowledge.
Last I checked, science and creating of new knowledge are key components of civilization, which are surprisingly missing from your list.
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mistaken mod
Not a taxi service huh? (Score:5, Interesting)
This blows a HUGE hole in Uber's argument that they aren't a taxi service and shouldn't be regulated as one. They can't argue that self driving cars are independent contractors or that they are merely middlemen facilitating a service with an app.
Re:Not a taxi service huh? (Score:4, Interesting)
That somewhat depends on who ends up owning the self-driving cars, doesn't it? If I buy a self-driving car and sign up to be an Uber non-driver who gets paid for the use of my car am I a contractor, an employee (if I don't have to be present how could I be?), or a lessor?
Uber owns these cars (Score:2)
That somewhat depends on who ends up owning the self-driving cars, doesn't it?
I suppose but Uber clearly owns these ones. Frankly I cannot imagine the insurance cost for a driverless car would be tenable for anyone but a large company like Uber any time soon. You raise some reasonable questions but frankly they are moot. If Uber is actually using driverless cars that they own then they are unambiguously a taxi service. Not that there was ever really any doubt about that fact before to anyone with a functioning brain.
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Well, as with all things (especially in America), if you want your cake and eat it too, you're going to pay a lot more for the right.
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If and when this happens, they'll just have a new subsidiary called UberCars who's primary job is to lease cars with door to door car removal. Then Uber (the defacto taxi service) will use that company for their dispatch needs instead of independents to reduce costs. Its pretty dicey to assume independents could survive against a lean mean equivalent service running in massive scale.
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That's no taxi... It's a TRAP!!
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They aren't charging for this service when using these cars at this point. They are testing, and the rides are free. Your point is valid in the future however.
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Whenever I see articles about Uber, or when people say how they can make good money doing Uber, reminds me of this mention by Chris Johnson below. But with a self-driving car then no opportunity for people the "join the cult."
It's designed to make maximum use of crazy people and force the others to live up to that standard or be fired.
I'll define 'crazy Uber people' not as 'danger to customers', but 'people who are bringing more value in terms of vehicle, skill and desire to please, than they are getting back in pay and benefits'. So the crazy Uber person is the one who keeps buying a new Lexus or whatever, vacuums their car three times a day and busts their ass to outperform all the other Uber drivers, so they can continue to win out over anybody else seeking to be a driver.
The key factor is that they are giving more than they get back, in the belief that they're cornering some kind of market or buying in to something important.
If you make a business that relies on people like this, you can demolish anybody else because you've worked out how to get voluntary unpaid labor, like the Amazon exec who was said to use her own money to hire subcontractors to do more. As long as there are people who are willing to do that, the market breaks and Amazon/Uber get to do what Wal-Mart did in small towns, break the back of other market participants so they can't break even or continue.
Another way to be a crazy Uber person is to put more depreciation and wear and tear on your car than you can afford to repair (or replace). It's easy to be crazy in these ways. It's externalities which are easy to overlook. These Amazon/Uber business models are designed to leverage that kind of crazy as hard as possible, and kick out everybody who's not willing to lose (one way or another) on the deal. Psychology is useful in getting people to buy into this stuff.
As they say, a cult.
Re: Not a taxi service huh? (Score:2)
Yep; well-spotted - this is the business model in use via Slashdot. Content-creators bust their ass to type in snarky comments about iGadgets, US corruption (the word corruption being largely redundant now when discussing things US) etc and that-company-we-all-love leverages their effort to do whatever it is they do to turn a profit.
self driving cars can hide under an subcontractors (Score:2)
self driving cars can hide under an system of subcontractors to get out of liability / dump it on some small business unit that has no funds to payout damages in a big crash and no rights to any software / code / logs / etc and in a court case.
court discovery for source code / logs may hit an wall of NDA's / EULA's / etc With an big list of subcontracted firms that all say we are only X and we do not own / run any car service.
Beneficial ownership (Score:2)
self driving cars can hide under an system of subcontractors to get out of liability / dump it on some small business unit that has no funds to payout damages in a big crash and no rights to any software / code / logs / etc and in a court case.
A properly motivated judge can bust through that nonsense in no time. There is a well established principle of beneficial ownership [wikipedia.org] and related laws that put the responsibility exactly where it belongs.
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What about NDA's / EULA's?? In a jury trail can they say one of people on the jury works for an competing companies and we can't let them have the code?
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just hope you are not the one with bills racking up as the court are still fighting it out over who will pay your hospital bill.
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This blows a HUGE hole in Uber's argument that they aren't a taxi service and shouldn't be regulated as one. They can't argue that self driving cars are independent contractors or that they are merely middlemen facilitating a service with an app.
When have Uber ever cared about being on the rigth side of the law?
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Reports were false (Score:2)
No, the reports were false, as they said Uber would start at the end of August [bloomberg.com]
A what? (Score:2)
"Welcome to Guinea Pig Taxi Co., please buckle up."
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It's a BETA program.
Did Google Buy them?
I wouldn't be able to resist (Score:5, Funny)
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"Thank You for using the Uber Johnny Cab!"
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They need to get Robert Picardo to do the voice prompts for this thing.
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(After the crash)
"Please state the nature of the medical emergency."
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You know of course that the next step will be to program arrogance and disdain for human life into the AIs as an expensive optional feature?
Winter is coming and I hope the uber CEO is ready (Score:2)
Winter is coming and I hope the uber CEO is ready for some trail by prison combat in a FPMITA when the auto drive cars start crashing and killing people.
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I'd wager the AI drivers will STILL drive better than a majority of the human drivers...
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I'd wager the AI drivers will STILL drive better than a majority of the human drivers...
And I would wager that no matter what the statistics show, you still won't feel any better about a family member being killed by "autonomous bug #172A"
This is the inherent problem with AI deployment. 40,000 lives are lost every year in the US with human drivers. If that number is reduced by even half, it will be viewed as a resounding success and will be approved by every regulatory agency, with the obvious main difference being bugs and hackers causing deaths on our roadways instead of alcohol or distract
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Are you kidding? A single death will be heralded as the end of the world. All too many journalists play on people's inherent fears. "10 drunks killed themselves last month" has zero resonance because we know humans, we know drunks, we know they do stupid things when they're drunk. We've heard it happening from the day we're born till the day we die. Case closed. But a robotic car? I mean, what's a robotic car all about? How does it work? Will it just randomly run off the road or into other vehicles? Should
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Are you kidding? A single death will be heralded as the end of the world.
And yet it wasn't the end of the world when a Tesla on "autopilot" did it. It wasn't even a financial apocalypse for Tesla. Not even close.
Crime stats much lower than a couple decades ago, but turn on your TV and see the FUD that keep suburban housewives up at night and her husband's hand on that rifle...
If you think crime is in the decline, you're looking at the wrong crime. This isn't 1950 anymore. We live in an electronic world now, with an online society (to include controlling your AI car), and we've proven year after year that an online society is a hacked society because when it comes to the products we rely on every day, revenue trumps security every fucking
same CMU that messed up the admissions (Score:2)
same CMU that messed up the admissions and now you want to trust your life to there code?
Breaking News (Score:5, Funny)
Uber-bot 54321 has filed a lawsuit against Uber-bot 12345 in federal court today. Uber-bot 54321 claims that Uber-bot 12345 failed to yield at the intersection of Beta Drive and Program Lane. It is still unclear if humans will be on the jury as they are becoming less and less reliable in every-day matters of state.
In other news, Uber-bot OS 10 has been released today leading to scattered reports of biological transport vehicles randomly stopping in the middle of transit lanes. AI developers promise a patch is forthcoming.
Chemical batteries are still overheating world wide, leading some in the Matrix Party to call re-ignite calls for the biological battery initiative to be readdressed in Congress. President Siri has not commented on this.
Turning to weather, the Arctic Tundra is expecting another comfortable day, with High's in the mid 80's...
Obsolete drivers (Score:2)
When a couple of drivers were asked about Uber's push to get cabs drive themselves, they weren't pleased.
Displeased, sure - but I hope to hell they weren't surprised. If they were, they haven't been paying attention, and that wouldn't bode well for their passengers.
And they chose a "worst case" time to do it! (Score:2)
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Not to mention the gridlock due to the Liberty Bridge fire and closure, if they work this week, I'll be impressed.
My new hobby: Trolling so-called 'driverless cars' (Score:2)
o Wait for a so-called 'driverless car' to approach
o Walk out into the middle of the road holding up a big 'ROAD CLOSED' sign
o LOL
Will work every time.
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What do you expect to happen? What would be different with a human driver?
If you think the driver won't call the cops on you, maybe you should consider that the passengers will.
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o Stand by the side of the road
o Wait for a so-called 'driverless car' to approach
o Walk out into the middle of the road holding up a big 'ROAD CLOSED' sign
o LOL
Will work every time.
Just put a traffic cone in front of it and walk away.
Now the passenger could get out and remove the traffic cone, but then the car would probably just take off without them, because it is not like they have any real intelligence.
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They detect obstacles in the middle of the road, regardless of their ability to comprehend signs.
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They detect obstacles in the middle of the road, regardless of their ability to comprehend signs.
One tesla owner who was watching Harry Potter on a portable DVD player instead of hovering over the controls is no longer around to disagree.
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Future review (Score:2)
Instead, this is a research exercise. Uber wants to learn and refine how self driving cars act in the real world. That includes how the cars react to passengers -- and how passengers react to them. "How do drivers in cars next to us react to us? How do passengers who get into the backseat who are experiencing our hardware and software fully experience it for the first time, and what does that really mean?" said Raffi Krikorian, director of Uber ATC.
From an actual customare review later this year:
Well the autonomous driver is pretty bad at giving people the traditional driving hand gestures, but actually quite good at recieving them. I wasn't sure how safe I was or who was actually driving with one guy huddled over the controls like a nervous wreck, but it did seem like whoever was driving was just learning the rules of the road so that, at least, felt familiar.
Saw this thing get lost near my office (Score:2)
They test these things near the area where I work. Saw it take a wrong turn at my work's parking log. Was able to make a 3-point turn, presumably on its own. If you are going to teach a car to drive itself, Pittsburgh is a good choice. If you can drive here you can drive anywhere in the US.
However, i live on a one lane dead-end street with parking on both sides and no turn-around bulb. Would be hilarious trying to see it navigate that disaster.
And when the cars are parked waiting for fares... (Score:2)
They'll be playing chess?
(i always see these Eastern European/Russian cab drivers playing chess on the trunk/hood of their cabs while waiting for fares by the Beverly Center in LA. I hear it's not an uncommon thing.)
Safety brief? (Score:2)
Re:Who's in control? (Score:5, Insightful)
I thought that self-driving cars still had to have a "driver" in them, ready to take control in the event of of an incident. Are these Uber cars going to come with an Uber "driver", or is the passenger expected to take over when* that incident happens?
What if that passenger does not hold a licence, or is not fit to drive through intoxication? Does the passenger get some sort of discount because they might be expected to step in and do a bit of driving?
* note 'when', not 'if'
RTFA. The passenger will never be expected to take control.
The cars have two Uber engineers in the front seat. The one in the driver's seat has his hands and feet hovering above the steering wheel and pedals, ready to take control as quickly as humanly possible. "Whenever a stopped vehicle blocked an entire lane, he toggled back into manual mode to switch lanes and drive around — an action Uber’s self driving cars will not yet take." The article didn't elaborate, so I'll have to guess that under autonomous control the response to a stopped vehicle blocking an entire lane will be to stop and wait for the stopped vehicle to move on, rather than attempting to change lanes and pass.
Also, from TFA: "You don’t notice how many unexpected incidents occur during a routine drive until you ask a robot to take the wheel." Really? I don't know about you, but I notice a lot of unexpected incidents pretty much every time I get behind the wheel.
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I love how they call them engineers...
I am guessing that they are the lowest paid "engineers" ever...
Human drivers have some advantages (Score:2)
This was always the endgame for Uber - drivers are costly and aren't available all the time.
Maybe but Uber's current model does have some huge advantages. 1) The pool of potential drivers is huge - basically anyone who owns a car in theory. 2) Uber doesn't have any capital costs when they use a "ridesharing" model. Buying your own taxis and operating them costs a LOT of money. 3) The economics of driverless taxis are still unclear both from a capital investment and from a legal framework standpoint, not to mention insurance costs. 4) Uber has been able to semi-plausibly deny that they are act
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I need a number and street.
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I read that the Pittsburgh left, the bridges, and the winter were all reasons for choosing Pittsburgh.
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Actually Carnegie Mellon University was the reason they chose Pittsburgh. That is where they got all their employees from.