"Inequality of outcomes" is essentially what we don't have. These days, as capital has become even more important, your likely outcome is relatively easy to calculate. In many major cities today it is almost better to be wealthy and unemployed, than successful and wealthless. This state of things is somewhat expected of Europe, but lesser so of the US, or at least not of Americans.
Sure, but those aren't the people struggling. People with successful careers and property in the Bay Area have probably seen both their salary and property value double in the last ten years. Which is pretty hard to beat anywhere else.
I think he is mostly correct though. "If you have a good resume and live 30 minutes outside even a small town, but you also have to drive everywhere" isn't really comparable to the "standard deal" in a city.
I think it is hard to not say that part of Silicon Valleys success is because of diversity and that part of the diversity is as simple as "gender, race and sexual orientation". I isn't a political correct things to say but Japanese, Korean and to some extent Chinese people are generally better organized, harder working and smarter than Americans. But they are also to a large extent also culturally isolated. Which makes their societies full of social rules. We can certainly question how much of a meritocracy the US is, but it certainly is to a large extent compared to the mentioned countries.
It isn't even that diversity itself being new perspectives, it is that non-diversity excludes people. And in highly uncertain activities it is all about how many people you can bring to the starting line. Success is its own filter, if you put a largely arbitrary filter in front you end up with a corresponding decrease in success. Which create a situation similar to the social rules in Asian countries.
If there will be any regret in Silicon Valley in 50 years I don't think it is going to be whatever the current political issue is, but that it didn't acquire a larger share of the global tech market. And that is certainly a factor of competition, equality, diversity and other things that give more people the chance to do just that.
While I hope the technology succeeds I don't think it is going to be as big of a change as people think. If you are upper middle class in a large city where labour is cheap, like in some Asian countries, driving is already close to free. And while that is somewhat nice from a quality of life perspective, it also means that rush hour traffic is horrible and sitting in a car isn't much more fun just because it is cheap. Basically a car is still a car.
"“Our experiments show that with as few as 5 percent of vehicles being automated and carefully controlled, we can eliminate stop-and-go waves caused by human driving behavior,” Daniel Work, assistant professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and a lead researcher in the study, said in a statement."
Per the article:
> “Before we carried out these experiments, I did not know how straightforward it could be to positively affect the flow of traffic,” Jonathan Sprinkle, the Litton Industries John M. Leonis Distinguished Associate Professor in Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Arizona, said in a statement. “I assumed we would need sophisticated control techniques, but what we showed was that controllers which are staples of undergraduate control theory will do the trick.”
If it really is that simple shouldn't it be possible to put this into an app that if 1/20 drivers had installed would also solve the problem?
An app can't convey near the granularity of control to the driver compared to what a fully automated solution could do, and you run the risk of making the situation worse due to the driver splitting focus between paying attention to the road and following the app instructions.
To some extent we already have "the app" (google maps) and I wouldn't be surprised if it's running for close to 1/20 of drivers actively in traffic, and a whole lot more passively collecting and reporting location info that is trivial to map to major roads. To that argument Waymo somewhat belongs to Maps (or Maps to Waymo if you'd like).
> An app can't convey near the granularity of control to the driver compared to what a fully automated solution could do
Yes I agree, however it might not require that level of granularity, that's what I was wondering given that the researchers were surprised by it working as easily as it did in their experiment. Since, That's why I am wondering, maybe it's something a human could be taught or directed to do by an app.
Open questions to me: Is central coordination required which observes the current state of the system and doles out specific instructions depending on that? If it's simpler is possible to craft a simple set of heuristics we could be taught to follow that would make things better if enough people knew them and followed them? Could they perhaps be implemented with simple road signaling targeting know problem area where jams frequently occur?
I'm pretty sure central coordination is not required for at least some significant benefit.
If you drive at the average travel speed steadily instead of filling gaps in front of you as soon as they open, that smooths traffic out for the car behind you as well. Traffic waves of stops and starts can still form back a bit behind you, but it's unlikely to happen immediately behind you. If even a small fraction of drivers drove like this, there would be much less opportunity for spontaneous jams to form.
I saw an impressive video demonstrating this a few years ago, but just spent a few minutes failing to find it. It showed a guy driving at the average speed of the car in front, so that the gap opened and closed as traffic in front slowed down, sped up, stopped, etc. There are articles about doing this, and animations, but what made this a compelling video was where it was filmed: a long straight concave-up road full of cars that was coming down a hill, so you could look out the back and see an long line of cars moving smoothly and not jammed, while in front there was a long line of cars stopping and starting chaotically.
Uber went from zero to essentially killing off taxis, despite the fact that "a car is a car".
Primarily because they don't pay as much for their fleet as a taxi service does.
What's coming next is going to be that, except you don't have to pay your drivers anything because you don't have drivers!
(yes, there will be huge technical overhead of running this system and maintaining the cars/hardware, but over time this will become mass produced, and become cheap).
"Uber went from zero to essentially killing off taxis, despite the fact that "a car is a car".
Primarily because they don't pay as much for their fleet as a taxi service does."
Uber (and possibly other similar companies) is a huge charity for passengers funded with investment money. It's definitely premature to declare they've demonstrated or accomplished anything before they operate on a sustainable basis. I do think using a credit card an app is far superior to the way taxi businesses are traditionally run, regardless of price, but I also don't see why traditional taxis can't adopt the mechanism eventually. At some point, the bubble will burst and capital will be scarcer for a while, and things will realign.
However, I think you should consider how autonomous vehicles enable better utilization of existing cars on the road. If you own a car, what % of the time is it sitting in your driveway idle?
Rather consider how with autonomous driving, when paired with services like Uber/Lyft enable a car to be active 80-95% of the time - driving folks around. This means that your cost “of the trip” can be significantly less once you factor how his affects vehicular depreciation.
Peak demand at rush hour determines the number of vehicles necessary to achieve a given level of service. Self driving vehicles don't change the underlying mathematics of the job scheduling problem.
The goal I think is a complete ban on human driving on public roads. With that in place, maybe we can make significant improvements in traffic. I agree that the last mile will always be a problem though.
While self-driving cars are cool, I’d imagine self-driving subways would be easier. In New York, the f train in Queens hits a standstill because of problems in the d line. The air train at JFK has no driver. Why can’t we do this for MTA?
While we are at it, transit in the city should be entirely tax funded. N
We also need self-driving buses. The buses in Queens sometimes don’t show up for over half an hour and three show up at the same time. Why?
>While self-driving cars are cool, I’d imagine self-driving subways would be easier. In New York, the f train in Queens hits a standstill because of problems in the d line. The air train at JFK has no driver. Why can’t we do this for MTA?
Technical debt. The system is 100 years old and MTA can't contain its contractors. At the current pace work to install communications-based train control (CBTC) on every line (it's on the L) will cost $20 billion and conclude in 175 years.
Oh, and rules require having two drivers on the self-driving train anyway, who occasionally have to drive to keep proficient.
The 3 buses can go faster through their route if they move together as on average each one has to stop less times. It's possibly a case of a misguided metric (average route time or delay) driving behavior to undesirable local optima.
That is what I am considering when I say that it is already close to free. Those city, at least for those people, essentially already have self-driving cars because it is so relatively cheap to be driven.
Optimistically, self-driving vehicles may allow the west to finally discover the joys of share taxis, which would increase people/vehicle and (hopefully) decrease congestion.
Autonomous vehicles will make deliveries become almost free. This in turn will make food delivery explode, to the point of kitchen becoming an option in houses.
In general, owning stuff won't be as important as before because you'll be able to simply borrow anything you need.
Sure, I just don't think that is as much of a paradigm shift as gradual improvement over time. It is not self-driving so much as the deployment of self-driving that will make that change if that makes sense. If everyone drove XC90s on barrier separated roads with automatic traffic cameras that enforced things like speed and distance between cars, we would also be much safer. But it would still be largely the same thing as today.
The idea is that with autonomous driving nobody needs to own a car and traffic jams are severely reduced because robots don’t drive like assholes (or at least by design shouldn’t...)
Not having to own a car to travel by car will of course increase driving, or being driven really. A situation where there is only self-driving cars is probably decades away at he minimum. And that doesn't really solve inherent throughput or speed issues.
Even if self-driving cars are 50% of the fleet, these cars drive better and can collectively work around traffic jams, so even human-driven cars benefit from automation.
Your visible marginal cost (i.e. mostly your fuel) may be low but the vast bulk of car costs are proportional to mileage--especially in areas where salt in various forms (winter roads, marine) isn't an issue.
It doesn't really matter if it's lower than the fixed costs, it matters whether it's lower than these hypothetical rented cars, and most likely, it is.
And mostly because they can drive when you're not in it. I'd be very curious to see city simulations where people just get off 200m from their job and wave their car goodbye as they can park somewhere else smoothly.
Australia is probably the best second passport for EU citizens, since that makes you eligible for E-3 visa to the US as well as the APEC card to China and Russia.
I must say that the whole situation is very disappointing. While western companies have been folding, China has a very active smartphone ecosystem with multiple manufacturers of phones and many different providers of services, including app stores. Wasn't it supposed to be the other way around?
I think you are twisting the definitions pretty hard. Android isn't open for anyone who also wants access to the dominant app store. If you want that and sign that agreement you can no longer effectively enjoy the right you have under e.g. the GPL and distribute devices with modified versions of the code. As I understand this is legal under the GPL, but certainly very shady towards the developers who made the code available with the intention for it be used openly, rather than being leveraged by Google for their anti-competitive means. Also those practices is preventing other developers, who has as much right to the code under the license, from using those manufacturers. This is a clear attempt of trying to use their dominant position to control the market and shut out the competition from those manufacturers, not just controlling the manufacturers themselves which would be bad enough in the first place. And that is exactly why they are being and should be fined.
Your question is if something will happen to him? Well, it apparently already did. That was it. He got forced out of his job, probably lost his social standing and is now leaving the country. After spending nine(?) years in China he is, in the eyes of the Chinese, trash talking China and glorifying the US to get back with his countrymen. It is all pretty much in line with how Chinese nationalist rhetoric says that "arrogant foreigners" behave. So it isn't really something that challenges China's narrative.
