They have a lot of sensors, software that has maps loaded, plus software that can recognize new obstacles in the road or moving into the path.
Posted on 08/21/2016 10:17:53 AM PDT by MinorityRepublican
Uber has generated thousands of jobs since launching in 2009. But that trend could be shifting.
The company is feverishly investing in self-driving technology, putting the economic futures of drivers around the world in question.
Uber announced Thursday that it will soon offer rides in self-driving cars in Pittsburgh, a significant step toward rides without a human driver.
Uber also announced Thursday that it acquired highly-regarded self-driving truck startup Otto. Uber is ramping up efforts that began last year when it hired scores of robotics experts from Carnegie Mellon University.
(Excerpt) Read more at money.cnn.com ...
“We hope you enjoyed the ride.”
No but it will be a pedestrian killer just wait
Uber seems to have disregarded what made it successful in the first place.
They created a platform for the individual’s economic freedom - for the driver to work on his own schedule and terms, with zero opportunity cost and zero capital (assuming he already owns a car). And for the consumer as well - maximum choice, maximum flexibility, lower cost with zero investment. The two sides come together and make deals for mutual benefit - the ultimate free-market triumph.
Now Uber is replacing the supplier with a massively huge, fixed capital investment, and meanwhile, will present consumer and unfamiliar choice - although presumably still lower cost, and choice
Seems to be a big deviation from the strategy that made them rich. It worked for Amazon, but will it work for Uber?
Vision wrote: “Who should be sued from the first death via a driver less car?”
The driver in the car that crashed into the driver
less car.
Who should be sued from the first death via a driver less car?
...
Over 30,000 people die each year in transportation accidents in the US. If the accident and fatality rates go down and driverless is cheaper, then that’s what people will choose.
Lawyers will always find somebody to sue, usually the owner of the property involved.
current laws require a licensed human driver IN the car.
How soon before UBER pays off the politicians to make driverless mandatory?
(I don't think much of driverless cars today, but if it can be made to happen, no one should stand in the way.)
ML/NJ
For now
It is funny to see the knee-jerk reaction some have to the concept of self-driving cars.
It is like people saying they would never get on a flying contraption made of metal.
The reality is that not only will self-driving cars happen, eventually human drivers will be considered to be too unsafe to be legal.
Once self-driving cars become common and safe, it will also become cheaper to use services like Uber to completely replace owning cars.
If you owned a company and there was a way to reduce the payroll to just one person (yourself), would you do it? In Capitalism, expenses are a necessary evil. And the cost of employees is an expense. So I would say yes, driver-less cars and trucks will put a lot of people out of work.
No job killer.
Buy your own small fleet of self driving cars.
Lease to Uber, Lyft, other software companies.
Bingo! Instead of driving, you are now a manager/mechanic.
Uber/Lyft are just dispatchers. It is Govt monopoly banning competing dispatchers that will kill your job.
Michael Hastings knows.
The responses to this thread are very interesting. Who knew so many Freepers were Luddites.
I keep picturing that cat on the round vacuum for self-driving
They are just thinking one step ahead in case uber drivers unionize.
Those are all very good questions.
Lets back up 30 years, when the concept of a self driving car included some sort of wire embedded in the roadway. It was a neat idea, but not practical.
Now lets look at today. Google claims its cars have driven a gazillion miles with no accidents, is safer than a human driver, etc. But what has Google really done? First, a platoon of 4-5 cars goes down the road and uses video and LIDAR scans to scan the road. Then a team of people on computers do LIDAR Extraction and reduce the size of the point clouds to something manageable. This extracted data is then loaded into a ‘self driving car’ as a map. The self driving car is also equipped with LIDAR, and compares what it sees to what is in the map. Without this process, the ‘self driving car’ would not even recognize that a traffic signal is at an intersection, would not expect it, and would not be looking to determine what color it is...which means if a new signal goes up, look out.
So, what makes this any different than a car being guided by a wire embedded in the pavement?
Absolutely nothing.
Add to it the obvious problems of rain hurting visibility, snow covering landmarks and lines, freezing rain covering lenses, etc...and frankly UBER drivers have nothing to worry about. There will not be driverless cars in the next 50 years.
So what’s going on...why the push? Well, the embedded cable idea - its been adapted to factory floors and guides robots quite well. The technology was developed in the name of automobiles, and may have even gotten DOT grant money, but was always meant for the factory floor.
What Google is doing will work on the factory floor too. But its also good for other industries. An example is the rail industry. A part of the Positive Train Control (PTC) mandate includes near continuous monitoring of the track for anything that may ‘foul’ it - such as a sign post that gets tipped over and becomes too close to the track. A railroad that fails to identify and correct this in a timely manner will be ‘penalized’...and that penalty will be doled out in a slower speed allowed in a certain railroad subdivision for a specified period of time - easily enforced through PTC. So the railroads need something that can build a 3 dimensional map of their entire system, and then rapidly scan the system often, in order to recognize anything that has changed in the map...exactly what Google is doing with their cars.
Other examples would be earthmovers in a quarry, farming, strip mining, construction.
Google will certainly utilize the technology they are developing, but they won’t be utilizing it on our roads and highways.
They have a lot of sensors, software that has maps loaded, plus software that can recognize new obstacles in the road or moving into the path.
Please see my post 37.
Luddites destroyed factories that were proven technologies.
Driverless cars are not at all a proven technology.
Saying I’m a Luddite because I don’t think driverless cars are technically feasible is like calling me a Luddite for not believing in the tooth fairy.
As soon as somebody develops and deploys an actual driverless car, then you can call people like me Luddites.
Would you let a self driving car take you for a ride?
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