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 ...
I can assure you that in 10-20 years driverless cars will be more than feasible. They will be common. And safer than cars driven by people.
One of the highest ranking execs at Uber is Hussein sycophant David Plouffe.
Use Lyft.
I’m curious what you base this on.
The Google project - which to date has not yet demonstrated autonomous driving yet?
Tesla’s self driving mode?
Knight Rider?
You’ve made a fairly bold claim - on what basis?
The rate of innovation in technology is exponential, not linear. Obviously none of us can see the future , but there are no known technological limitations to a self driving car. It’s all about how its coded, and working out the bugs. I stand by my statement.
No. The future of self driving cars might be, but Uber being ready for the next tech wave isn’t. The future is coming whether you’re ready or not. Be ready.
Gee technology putting people out of work. I wonder what we did the 179 times in the past 120 years that this happened.
GPS to know where it is (already in most cars). Traction control to handle snow (already in most cars). Cameras for lane control (going in more and more cars). It’s amazing how close to self driving your car already is. Little bit more data processing on the cameras with a longer range, a bit of LIDAR and boom, be a passenger in your own car during your commute.
Let me repeat my statement: To date, there has been no successful demonstration of a self driving car.
Here is a link to a story about how Google’s car works:
http://www.alphr.com/cars/7038/how-do-googles-self-driving-cars-work
And here is the money quote:
“Any test begins by sending out a driver in a conventionally driven car to map the route and road conditions,” Google software engineer Sebastian Thrun explained in a blog post. “By mapping features such as lane markers and traffic signs, the software in the car becomes familiar with the environment and its characteristics in advance.”
I hope you can appreciate what that statement means. It means that the ‘self driving’ car has an incredibly limited ability to process data and make decisions ‘on-board’, and it relies on pre-mapping and pre-planning by a team of people, much like a space mission.
So exponential, linear, it does not matter - because right now the number of autonomous trips made by an automobile stands at zero. We haven’t even hit the starting gate.
yeahhh, that is a long way from an autonomous self-sufficient capability!!
Stop calling them “driverless” or “self-driving”. They are not. They sometimes, in some conditions, keep the car going on the road. They don’t drive.
“I would never travel in a driverless car.....could get hacked....you could end up somewhere not of your own choosing.”
Happens with human drivers too.
My wife’s favourite aunt & uncle took a taxi from a Pakistani airport. Ended up in nowhere, surrounded with armed men obviously intending to kill them. They were released upon hearing General ______ would be looking for him, with obvious consequences, if not at a meeting next morning.
Driverless cars and “smart” guns are in the same category—before I want a “smart” gun, I want to see the whole Secret Service equipped exclusively with them. If Uber’s CEO thinks driverless cars are so great, then let him have his kids driven around exclusively in them.
BTW I’m typing this on a Kindle with autospell on. I’ve had to go back repeatedly to correct errors it made.
You say that it will be 50 years before we see a driverless car. I say in 50 years, it will be an oddity to see a human driving a car. I tend to agree with another poster here who says that someday soon, human drivers will be perceived as "too dangerous" to be permitted on public roadways.
I love the independence of taking a car on the open road but like any driver, I sometimes get sleepy, fatigued or distracted. Having the car drive me does not scare me and I will still have my independence as I'll control where that car goes.
Not that I plan to be an early adopter! I'll let others work out the bugs first.
We are In the early years. The very early years. But it’s coming. The technology is there. It’s amusing that so many seem afraid of it.
When a driver less car kills someone the company should be sued.
It is a terrorist dream come true. Call a cab, load it was remote-controlled explosives, even a warm body if necessary, and program a destination. What could go wrong?
Think about what you just said. We already trust our lives on the highways and it's very dangerous out there.
Are you aware that 57,000 American die each year in auto accidents? And another 2.35 million Americans each year are either injured or disabled in car accidents. It's even worse when you look at it globally.
Yet despite the grim statistics, we trust our lives with automobiles every day. We have learned to tolerate nearly 60,000 people getting killed every year in automobiles (in the U.S. alone).
Nobody is talking of banning the automobile despite the butcher's bill presented to us year after year.
No doubt there will be fatalities with driverless cars. But that won't stop it from happening.
Your first question invalidates your second. Because no technology works perfectly yet we ALL trust our lives with technology every day. Do you have electricity in your house? Smoke alarms? Oven, microwave or otherwise? Use vehicles to travel? No technology is perfect, all of those things can and have malfunctioned in a way that causes death. And yet you’re not living the life of a stone aged caveman.
Right because real life human cabbies NEVER let people load a bunch of stuff into the vehicle which could possibly be rigged to explode on command when it reaches a certain destination.
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