#self driving car ai

[phoenixbizz]

Explore how AI-powered autonomous vehicles and mobile apps are reshaping innovation, enhancing safety, efficiency, and user experiences in transportation.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

The “3,000,000 truck drivers” who were supposedly at risk from self-driving tech are a mirage. The US Standard Occupational Survey conflates “truck drivers” with “driver/sales workers.” “Trucker” also includes delivery drivers and anyone else operating a heavy-goods vehicle.

The truckers who were supposedly at risk from self-driving cars were long-haul freight drivers, a minuscule minority among truck drivers. The theory was that we could replace 16-wheelers with autonomous vehicles who traveled the interstates in their own dedicated, walled-off lanes, communicating vehicle to vehicle to maintain following distance. The technical term for this arrangement is “a shitty train.”

What’s more, long-haul drivers do a bunch of tasks that self-driving systems couldn’t replace: “checking vehicles, following safety procedures, inspecting loads, maintaining logs, and securing cargo.”

But again, even if you could replace all the long-haul truckers with robots, it wouldn’t justify the sky-high valuations that self-driving car companies attained during the bubble. Long-haul truckers are among the most exploited, lowest paid workers in America. Transferring their wages to their bosses would only attain a modest increase in profits, even as it immiserated some of America’s worst-treated workers.

But the twin lies of self-driving truck — that these were on the horizon, and that they would replace 3,000,000 workers — were lucrative lies. They were the story that drove billions in investment and sky-high valuations for any company with “self-driving” in its name.

For the founders and investors who cashed out before the bubble popped, the fact that none of this was true wasn’t important. For them, the goal of successful self-driving cars was secondary. The primary objective was to convince so many people that self-driving cars were inevitable that anyone involved in the process could become a centimillionaire or even a billionaire.

- Google's AI Hype Circle: We have to do Bard because everyone else is doing AI; everyone else is doing AI because we're doing Bard.

[netscapenavigator-official]

Since y'all liked that post about Tesla removing the gear selectors in their cars, did you also know that Elon Musk is promising v12.0 of Autopilot Full Self Driving will be "much better" than previous versions. He's claiming it will be the first version without the "Beta" label and will be basically as good or better than a human driver. To show this off, he took to Twitter Live and streamed a 45-minute drive from Twitter HQ to Mark Zuckerburg's house. Live doxxing aside, the best part of this live stream was

A: When the vehicle came to a stop at a red light, waited a few seconds, and then attempted to run the red light while traffic was actively going through the intersection, causing Musk to slam on the brakes and deactivate the system.

B: When the vehicle got caught in a Yellow Light and was taking way longer than necessary to stop, prompting a verbal "I hope it stops," panic from Musk.

Full Self Driving my ass.

[humanoidhistory]

From Now You Can Read About Robots by Harry Stanton, illustrated by Tony Gibbons, 1985.

[proudfreakmetarusonikku]

watching tech bros try and do tech bro shit with ai is fucking maddening it’s like when you watch a let’s play and the youtuber ignores blatant hints and gets stuck and decides the game is bad and starts screaming at it but you can’t click off bc it’s not irl. like it should not be this hard to find a genuine use for a pattern recognition machine. there are jobs where having computers to help with that can help! but they seem focused on finding the least useful ways to use it (such as chat bots and image generation) and can’t even do that competently and ethically. like i don’t even think image and text generating ai is necessarily bad i could see it having a niche usage in art projects or just being a harmless thing to dick around with but not only are there massive ethical issues with that now (of which the plagiarism isn’t even the most pressing- haphazardly stealing everything on the internet means illegal content can very easily get into the database without anyone knowing) the tech bros aren’t even using them for the niche cases where it’d be more useful to have procedurally generated art or text than hand drawn (like, for example, those games that centre around you talking to ai could be interesting in a way that’s difficult to do without similar procedurally generative technology if the ethical issues of such a thing actually had some sorting out, but using it for generating, like, normal dialogue will be jarringly bad) and don’t even know how it works (it’s not in any way sentient or knowledgable it’s just very good at pattern recognition. ai makes shit up bc it doesn’t have a way to distinguish false or true data it’s not sentient it just knows what facts look like and spits out something relatively similar) which means it’s not being used for actually useful or at least harmless manners and is being used to produce downright dangerous substandard products that, and i cannot repeat this enough, can actually kill people. like i've seen attempts at ai therapists like. please do not. actually use them for their FUCKING FUNCTION i swear to god.

[r0semultiverse]

I refuse to hop in a Zoox car in my entire life if I can avoid it. I refuse to hop into any self-driving robo taxi (or robotaxi) that uses AI to keep it’s passengers “safe.” If this is actually a service they are legally allowed to provide publicly, there’s about to be a whole bunch of new laws made in hopefully very little time! Now you know me, obviously fuck the law, many laws are unjust, but sometimes we need some regulations to keep up with the shit that rich Silicon Valley tech bros “put out” while claiming it’s allegedly their own work. These rich bastards are dangerous! Now I’ll pass along the questions that my partner & I jokingly pondered. If something happens that the AI & detection systems doesn’t know how to handle, will us as the passengers be held legally responsible say if a child gets punted into the air by the self driving car & we can’t do anything to stop it? What if we’re asleep assuming the car is safe & it runs over a legally endangered animal? What if we’re on our phones & these self-driving robot cars cleave someone in half? What if it crashes into someone’s private property? Are we held responsible in any of these cases or is the big rich guy’s company? If it’s anything like Tesla, you should get your kids or pets out of the road when you see a Zoox car coming, it could allegedly cause some mortalities. Two more things. What’s stopping someone from hijacking, hacking, or planting a virus on these self-driving taxi services? What if one of them gets hijacked to take someone to a human trafficker meetup spot? Will the company be held responsible at all? The gifs below pretty much summarizes my feelings.

[artbypeople]

Yesterday, Eddy Burback posted a thoughtful and earnest video about AI. Similar to Drew Gooden’s take; he approached the subject with a profound sense of humanity and humor that inspired me to share this with you all here.

AI is here. What now? (September 2024) Eddy Burback

https://youtu.be/IZ4HOCld5nY?si=bT4G3mcitzNJp6NB

[agentumbls]

What if AI makes the self driving cars racist

[classicalliberalleague]

They're coming soon. :)

[carsthatnevermadeitetc]

Jidu ROBO-02 Concept, 2023. Fledgling autonomous EV marque Jidu have revealed a second model in concept form. Few details have been disclosed about the robotic saloon, it's SUV sibling model the ROBO-01 is equipped with two Nvidia Orin X chips that deliver up to 508 TOPS of computing power. These help control 31 different sensors, including 2 LiDARs, 5 millimeter-wave radars, 12 ultrasonic radars, and 12 high-definition cameras. Like 01 the 02 does without door handles, instead the doors can be opened using voice command or bluetooth.

[wigoutlet]

[solarpunkpresentspodcast]

A Self-Driving Auto Dystopia

Bad solarpunk me, but true child of the western US, I like to drive.  And I don’t mean to the grocery store, but to beautiful places, especially ones I’ve never been to before.  What could be better than the freedom of the open road and all the wonders my car can take me to see? 

Yet, having lived nearly half my life now in Europe, I've spent a lot of time on buses, streetcars, and subways, and know the joy of travel by train.  You can’t get everywhere on public transportation, but—admittedly more ideally than in actual practice, since they tend to be running late and (especially with the trains) are so often so crammed with people, there’s barely even anyplace left to stand—you can kick back in your seat, go sweetly to sleep, and wake up in a whole new place (hopefully one that comes before your stop, not after). 

Add those two things together—all of the freedom without the hassle of having to do the driving yourself—and you get utopian dreams of self-driving cars.  We wouldn’t even need to own one.  In fact, owning one wouldn’t even make any sense, when we could just hail one through our phone or our watch or the chip in our brain, or wherever it is that the technology has gotten us to by then.  Up it would roll and in we would go, buckle up, and we’d be off in peace, quiet, comfort, and security.  The most strenuous thing we’d have to do is figure out how best to pass the time between us and our destination, especially if we’re not feeling sleepy.

I’m no futurist, but I think I have that all pretty much right. It’s not hard, really.  It would be just like being a passenger in a car, except with a more sociable seating layout and without the stress of our best friend’s impatient husband’s road ragey driving.  Except that last week reality came crashing like a drunken dystopian moose into my sweet dreams of self-driving cars.  

I don’t know why it wasn’t front page news.  It barely even got mentioned by the news sites I peruse, and only on some of them at that.  Never mind the autos of the future, the cars of today are already a privacy nightmare.  As in, if your biggest fear of a self–driving car future is of the hacker who takes over and crashes the car you’re riding in, guess again.  Our biggest fear should be of the car companies themselves and the future they're aiming to create for us. And the present they've already got us corralled in.

Here's the news you probably didn’t catch: On September 6, 2023, the Mozilla Foundation released a study of privacy and security issues in cars. All 25 major brands of automobile that they surveyed failed to pass muster, making cars, as they point out, by far the worst case they have ever examined.  In short, your car knows everything about you that your smartphone does (because you’ve let them talk to each other) about who you are, where you live, where you go, where you shop, what you buy, who you associate with, who you’re having an affair with, what music you’re listening to, what your sexuality is, and what genetic tests you’ve taken.  Plus, your car collects data about how you drive—how fast, how often, how far, how aggressively, etc.  The car companies feed all these data into an algorithm, crank the wheel, and out pops answers (accurate or not) about how smart you are, what abilities you have, and what interests you.  The vast majority of the car companies sell their data on you to other companies and some would be happy to pass it on to the government after nothing more formal than an informal request (i.e., they see no need to require a warrant before handing over the information they’ve got on you).  Meanwhile, only two of the brands surveyed (Renault and Dacia) give car owners the right to have their personal data deleted.  To make matters worse, it doesn’t even appear that the personal data the car companies hold about you from your car is stored securely.

That's a pretty bad present. But even before I got to the end of the Mozilla Foundation’s report, I got hit by a horribly dystopian vision of the future of self-driving cars as created by the car companies.  We won’t just hail a car, get in, buckle up, and off we go in peace, harmony, comfort, ease, and privacy.  Instead, the experience will be as ruined as the internet (itself also once a non–capitalistic utopian dream of a level playing field and the free flow of information between people).  We’ll have to lock ourselves into a subscription service that, thinking it knows everything about each of us, will bombard us with personalized advertisements repeatedly throughout our journeys.  It’s like what Amazon, Google, and the company formerly known as Twitter are also trying to do... be the behemoth that makes all the money because they’re the one stop shop we’re locked into for everything from banking to shopping to healthcare to entertainment.  That subscription service to the self–driving cars that behave like they know everything about each of us won’t just be about what make and model of self-driving car we have access to and which driving style mode/level of passenger safety we can deploy, but which music streaming and entertainment services we’ll be able to access and, in the worst case, which brick–and–mortar stores the self–driving car will be willing to drive us to.  Prices per mile will clearly vary, not just for where we are and where we want to go and when we want to get there, but also for which route we take (shorter and fast will definitely cost a premium), and for who we are as a person (if they can get away with that kind of discrimination) and how desperately we need to get there (the greater the need it has calculated for us, the higher the price the service can charge; supply and demand, after all).  And, oh, I don’t even want to think about how hard they could make it for some of us to get driven to—or leave!—a march or demonstration.

In other words, if we just sit idly by and let the self–driving car future happen to us exactly as the car companies are creating it now, we’ll end up living in a self-driving auto dystopia... instead of merely the privacy nightmare most of us don’t realize we’re already mired in.  Worse, once self–driving cars become enormously safer than people–driven cars and it becomes illegal for a person to drive a car, we will have little choice but to participate in this system stacked so strongly against our own interests. 

Unless, of course, there is plentiful useful public transportation and/or regulations preventing such monopoly power and abuse of our privacy by car (or any other) companies.

Maybe it’s not very solarpunk to be shouting about this self–driving auto dystopia.  Solarpunk is all about envisioning futures we’d like to live in and I would most certainly not like to live in a future like that one.  But solarpunk also shouldn’t stick its head in the sand.  We are traveling fast down the road toward the self–driving auto dystopia of my nightmares and its worth facing that fact... so that we can start working to prevent that outcome. 

Super easy step one would be to sign the petition at the bottom of the page on the Mozilla Foundation article. 

Step two could be to clamor for an expansion of your local public transportation network by showing up at local planning meetings and otherwise making your views clear to the local elected representatives who control how much of the budget flows toward buses, trains, streetcars, subways, light rail, and expanding those services. 

Step three would be to demand that our governments step up their protection of the privacy of citizens, like Europe is starting to do with things like GDPR.

Step four, I suppose, is running for actual office to work on all of these issues. 

Because it would be so much nicer to live in a world where the transportation we take isn’t spying on us so it can blast us with ads, lock us into subscription services, and, if we stray too far into the grey, turn us over to the police or give the government or hackers the information they need to blackmail us or entrap us.

[davidaugust]

I would not rely on this if you’re being pursued by an evil self-driving car, but it might be worth a shot 😈🚙😝

[gaykarstaagforever]

Oh great. Real smart, guys.

[actual-corpse]

Therac-25: *exists. Injures many*

Engineers of the past: aw damn. Better not put to much faith in software. It might override its safeguards and kill people! Thanks for the lesson Therac-25!!

Self aggrandizing software bitches: Self driving cars! Remove human error! No mechanical input!

Therac-25: wait. Have you learned NOTHING FROM ME?!

Self driving car enthusiast: We give the robot moral tests to make it choose between killing a baby and a grandma!

Any person with a lick of sense: Just.... Just drive off the road if you can... Bro!

Car bitch: THE CAR STAYS ON THE ROAD! THINK OF THE TROLLEY PROBLEM

Engineers: WE SOLVED THAT!

Another insulting name that I'm using in place of people like Elon Musk: YAY TECHNOLOGY! HUMANS ARE WEAK AND OBSOLETE I AM GOD!

[settlercolonialismisbad]

Adam Conover really hit the nail on the head with this video on AI. I worked for Microsoft four times. The last time I walked out because it was my job to manage process improvements and organizational politics made even the most modest improvements (such as using internal tools that were accessible for actual vision-impaired employees- get this, on the Accessibility team) completely impossible, so my job was pointless. 


https://youtu.be/ro130m-f_yk