One of my in-laws has what I consider the coolest job in the world. He's an explosives engineer. He does contract work, testing bombs and heat shields for things like the DOD and NASA. Talked to him after the funeral, their newest contract is with Space-X, figuring out some kind of shield for space particles and the random crap that flies around out there, as a way to protect their satelites and eventually spacecraft on Mars missions and the like. Apparently this is a lot further along than the media realizes. He said those guys are awesome to work with. When you're trying something no one else has tried before, and you don't have all the red tape of government, you have the immediate resources to get them accomplished a lot better in a lot shorter time.
Most companies need to go and spew PR shit to get financing and traction... Elon has just been building shit first, selling it second. His goal is not to make money, it's to get to Mars. To make us an interstellar species. As a result, the PR is lagging the development he's doing, which is a shift from the norm. They're like the new version of the Rutan brothers... back when they were designing fighters, they had new processes and manufacturing materials that allowed them to make changes in days, not months. "Oh, we need a new shape to the wing? Get me the chain saw..."... they'd then cut it up to the shape they wanted, re-apply the composite over the styrofoam filling, and then go for a test flight. In the Air Force world, that would be an 8 month process full of red tape. Same goes for aircraft mechanics in the Arctic. Ice Pilots had a couple of episodes where a military aircraft came in needing repairs, so they rented out a shop to some Air Force mechanics. The Buffalo Airways mechanics laughed their asses off... a 6 week Air Force process should take them 4 days. In one case, the AF guys couldn't even get the job done, and the BA guys came in and basically said, "turn your head", and fixed it for them. It's really interesting to see the various processes that go into making shit... software or space craft... and how they transition from being something that was necessary to something that becomes needlessly bloated and picks up a life of its own.
Did I hear him wrong, or in that video from SXSW you posted, did he say he expects to land something on Mars by 2019?
Who makes up the rest of his think tank that are of note? Every top inventor/smartypants usually had a “team” I mean, this doesn’t ALL come from the mind of Musk (right?). Heck, Edison took all the invention credit from his team and told them all to go fuck themselves.
First auto-driving car death when a self-driving Uber car hit and killed a pedestrian. I wonder what the legal implications are from this? Can't charge a robot with manslaughter. No word yet on if it was a hit and run.
I was surprised to hear they had cars out already. Was the car just registered to a legal entity? All sorts of shit to iron out legally. Its like Ian Malcolm was right. Something something didn’t ever stop to think if you should.
...or if was an idiot pedestrian who did something rash. The sooner we know, the sooner it will cue whoever will want to make a big deal out of it.
My money's on the pedestrian doing something rash or even giving them the benefit of the doubt, the pedestrian did something unusual enough that the car couldn't figure out what it was dealing with. Self driving cars struggle with cyclists because depending on the moment, (and this is a gross oversimplification) a cyclist can appear more car-like and instantaneously appears more pedestrian-like.
I was wrong... here's an update... not Uber's fault, according to the cops: http://fortune.com/2018/03/19/uber-self-driving-car-crash/
This speaks to a greater issue revolving around AI and how it is programmed. Sam Harris has talked a lot about this and it is interesting. When you are programming a vehicle to be self driving, you have to create a sort of morality system in the software with respect to who the car is going to protect. The people inside or the people outside.
For anyone who doesn’t read that, relevant info is that the person was roughly 100 yards from a crosswalk, at night, and went from a center median into the lane. There was also a person behind the wheel of the vehicle even though it was in auto mode and even they couldn’t react in time to prevent the collision. This will be a nothing-to-see-here-move-along thing real quick. I hope.
Except you have every "journalist" and nay-sayer on the edge of their seat just waiting for a major fuck-up so that they can point and say, "SEEE!!! SEEEE!!! TOLD YOU!!!!". Never mind the millions of miles already run fully autonomously... we have lost the ability to look at things with any sense of relativity. "One death per x million miles? OK, that's worth it..."... said no "journalist" ever. I can't wait for this one-in-a-million negative shit to stop being news.
So we go to mars, there’s a certain amount of accepted civilian casualties to get there. And they’ll be heroes for it. If we all have autonomous cars, any civilian casualty is proof that the technology is a failure. Yet almost 3300 people die every day in vehicle related crashes, and car crashes are the #1 leading cause of death in the US among healthy people. Source. .... ok. Makes sense.
I'd love for some engineering group to come out on behalf of the automated car. Or claim that the automated car's culture is being appropriated.
Never mind the fifty thousand people killed every year in good old-fashioned reckless driving crashes.
Let the Uber-blaming begin! Opperator of self-driving car was a felon. Of course, it's fox news. And she went to prison for attempted robbery. And that means she's incompetent to opperate a vehicle.
Yea, over on a cycling forum I follow folks are outraged that the sheriff speculated that the "vulnerable cyclist" is possibly at fault for making the poor choice that cost her her life by choosing to step into traffic on an unlit section of road when a lighted crosswalk was 100yrds away. They're arguing that in addition to the driver being at fault, the road design is poorly designed and should be considered entrapment