California Issues Permits To Cruise, Waymo For Autonomous Vehicle Service (reuters.com) 21
The California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) on Monday issued permits to self-driving units of General Motors and Alphabet to allow for passenger service in autonomous vehicles with safety drivers present. Reuters reports: CPUC said the GM unit Cruise and Alphabet's Waymo are under Drivered Deployment permits authorized to collect fares from passengers and may offer shared rides. Prior to the announcement Cruise and Waymo had been permitted to provide passenger service only on a testing basis with no fare collection permitted.
Starting Monday, Cruise is allowed to provide the "Drivered Deployment" service on some public roads in San Francisco between the hours of 10 p.m. and 6 a.m. at speeds of up to 30 miles per hour, while Waymo can offer service in parts of San Francisco and San Mateo counties at speeds of up to 65 miles per hour, CPUC said. Neither company is allowed to operate during heavy fog or heavy rain. [...] Waymo said it has tens of thousands of riders on a waitlst in California after it launched a tester program in August. "We'll begin offering paid trips through the program in the coming weeks," the company said.
Starting Monday, Cruise is allowed to provide the "Drivered Deployment" service on some public roads in San Francisco between the hours of 10 p.m. and 6 a.m. at speeds of up to 30 miles per hour, while Waymo can offer service in parts of San Francisco and San Mateo counties at speeds of up to 65 miles per hour, CPUC said. Neither company is allowed to operate during heavy fog or heavy rain. [...] Waymo said it has tens of thousands of riders on a waitlst in California after it launched a tester program in August. "We'll begin offering paid trips through the program in the coming weeks," the company said.
Headline (Score:2)
In CA, you need a permit to cruise?
We're not going to have taxi or Uber drivers (Score:2)
Automation is coming for a ton of jobs and we don't have anything on the horizon to replace them. Companies do
Re: (Score:2)
Automation is coming for a ton of jobs, and we don't have anything on the horizon to replace them.
Nonsense. The industrial revolution began 300 years ago, and automation has been eliminating jobs ever since. There is nothing to suggest that "This time is different." Eliminating taxi jobs is no different than eliminating the jobs of switchboard operators, bank tellers, or scullery maids.
We know exactly what the new jobs will be: The money not spent on driver wages ends up in someone else's pocket, either the customer or the shareholder. So what does that person spend that money on? Providing that n
Re: (Score:2)
Ah, the old classic back-and-forth. "It'll automate people out of jobs". "Doesn't matter, the Industrial Revolution automated people out of certain jobs and now we're better off".
I don't know for sure, no one knows for sure, but my gut tells me that the OP is correct to be worried.
It's all well and good to point at the Industrial Revolution, but that took place in the 18th/19th century. Things just might play out differently in the 21st century. The difference is, we are now in danger of *running out o
Re: (Score:2)
Thing is, the competitive forces of capitalism are going to find a way to automate people out of their jobs whether anyone likes it or not.
If you don't, your competitor will.
Re: (Score:2)
You don't explain why "This time is different".
Techo-pessimists have been predicting that automation will lead to poverty for centuries, when in fact, prosperity has soared.
The few lags in rising prosperity have occurred when increases in automation stalled, such as the Western World since the 1980s. Manufacturing had been automated in earlier decades and services were proving much harder to automate. AI fixes that.
Re: (Score:2)
You don't explain why "This time is different".
Techo-pessimists have been predicting that automation will lead to poverty for centuries, when in fact, prosperity has soared.
But not equally, and only because the rate of automation has historically been fairly limited, replacing people at a rate that can be compensated for by job growth in other areas. Automation at this point is getting ahead, and that's the reason for concern.
Think about the industries that use manual labor in large quantities right now. Manufacturing (~14M US jobs) is rapidly adapting to use fewer people with each passing year. Transportation is likely to go entirely self-driving in the next decade (3.6M U
Re: We're not going to have taxi or Uber drivers (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
I had to laugh at "micro-metered" because it already describes the atmosphere of the modern workplace. At one of my recent "gigs", at a reputable private clinic, I had an argument with a supervisor who felt I had "overbilled the clinic by 15 minutes" because I was seen coming back a few minutes late from "lunch". (I use the quotes because "lunch" consisted of a trip to the corner deli to get a sandwich I could eat at my desk). I let the supervisor know that I thought her nickel-and-diming was absurd and
Re: We're not going to have taxi or Uber drivers (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
You know whats worse than wide spread automation? Gig work wide spread automation. Read the first couple of chapters of Ubik by Philip K Dick and you will see what I mean. The sad part is that a dystopian nightmare like that is highly plausible the way the industry is motiving toward micro-metered services of everyday tasks.
Don't worry. A rather large percentage of the gig economy is likely to collapse in the fairly near term, because nearly all non-creative gig jobs can be mostly or entirely automated today, but are just slightly too expensive to automate en masse. Those folks are basically all temp workers, just waiting for the cost of automation to come down a bit, and for reliability to improve a bit.
Re: We're not going to have taxi or Uber drivers (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Driving-related jobs seem to be on their way out, although it'll take another 20 years or so.
May even be a bit longer, but it will definitely happen. Of course some people will retain these jobs, but it will be a fraction of what we have now.
Typists and transcriptionists have been on their way out for a while.
High-end: No. The 95% others are doomed.
Voice work-- things like recording audiobooks
Here, I do not think so. People with real skills will probably have a safe job in this role as long as books get written. But these are not many jobs. People doing more generic voice acting are doomed, I agree.
I fully expect that in the next 50 years we will have affordable "general purpose" robots-- they probably won't have strong AI (I hope), but they'll be sophisticated at basic tasks like motor control and image processing, enough to be able to do most of the tasks that an average human can do.
And that is the real thing. This is about replacing average and below average (in skills, dedication, reliability
Re: (Score:2)
Not this time. Software does not need production effort. As soon as it works it scales to multiple instances like nothing ever before.
Re: (Score:2)
Automation is coming for a ton of jobs and we don't have anything on the horizon to replace them.
It is. And not only low-end ones. The thing that is different this time is that most of the R&D effort is in software and hence can be scaled to large numbers very cheaply. All other such changes before required mostly hardware investments for scaling and hardware needs to be built and maintained, which created a lot of jobs in exchange. Not going to happen this time. One additional problem is that industrial automation equipment has gotten very durable and, due to software, fault-tolerant. The other on
San Jose Self-Driving Incompetence (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
An accident happened in San Jose last month: https://www.notebookcheck.net/... [notebookcheck.net]
And when you you think was the last time an accident happened in San Jose with hairless monkey steering the car? 5 minutes ago?
Maybe it was Eve's fault? (Score:2)
scary for motorcyclists (Score:2)
Although the vendors claim to have done some testing, there are too many variables in motorcycle configuration for them to have done comprehensive testing. Not every rider is aboard a full-size Harley-Davidson 'Glide or Road King. 300 cc sport bikes are popular, but those are available up 1300 cc, and the visual/lidar footprint of them varies; then there are the variety of "cruisers" from the smaller Suzukis to the big H-Ds and others. Throw in the some with sidecars, "classic" three-wheelers (two in the
Re: (Score:2)
For now, I'll stay out of the licensed areas until there is some real-world data. I don't need some half-assed, built-to-budget (in)expert system deciding that it can use the space I'm in for its next action.
My (limited) understanding is that regular human drivers are notorious for not noticing motorcycles and killing their riders. The bar might not be very high to have the "autonomous vehicles" do better than the average human, even if their software erroneously thinks motorcycles are trees, they sill might not hit them as frequently has human drivers do.