Uber starts self-driving car pickups in Pittsburgh

Re:Uber starts self-driving car pickups in Pittsburgh by zanny on Wednesday September 14, 2016 @05:38PM (#12501417)

Because then you keep kicking the problem down the road. Groups with cash treasure troves can reap data, and certain actors will never release the data, and in practice you won't see many organizations negotiating such data because it is valuable but its value is highly volatile based on what comes of the R&D. I cannot imagine almost any department willingly just selling it under current conditions, or else they may face the reality they effectively sold the necessary work to get the first fully automated system to market for what becomes pennies on what the reaper of that gold mine receives.

Because this data is a matter of survival, where you can easily forecast at least several million vehicular fatalities in the next decade worldwide, it becomes relevant that the various states (I'm extending this globally since several European car companies are also engaged in automation development) it is paramount it be made accessible in the same way we seem to be finally having the epiphany that should have happened at least two decades ago that scientific research should be made openly available.

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Re:Uber starts self-driving car pickups in Pittsburgh by sangnoir on Wednesday September 14, 2016 @06:03PM (#12501584)

> Groups with cash treasure troves can reap data, and certain actors will never release the data, and in practice you won't see many organizations negotiating such data

You make it sound like it is such a travesty or a great injustice, and I cannot for the life of me figure out why. Generating this data is not rocket science; it is fairly well-documented, the components are commodities and the process repeatable, one of the big challenges is that it is capital-intensive to scale. If the data is valuable as you postulate, raising the required capital should be easy, capitalism has been solving this problem for centuries.

> Because this data is a matter of survival, where you can easily forecast at least several million vehicular fatalities in the next decade worldwide,

No, it really isn't a matter of survival (at nation-state level you've elevated the discussion to). There are things that kill more people than vehicular accidents, so if your angle is "saving lives", then world governments really need to step-up their health game and meaningfully fight heart disease and cancer; hell, maybe they could even buy all the pharmaceutical research data and open that up to the public while there are at it (good luck getting a good price from GSK, Pfizer et al).

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