Re:A Waymo One Rider’s Experiences Highlight Autonomous Ride...
by dreamcompiler on Monday January 28, 2019 @02:18AM
(#19015780)
Likewise flying cars. They have existed for several years; I saw one fly in 2013. But they cost at least $250,000, or (for newer electric models) they have ridiculously short runtimes. These drawbacks weren't part of the plan in bubbly 1960s predictions, and they're not going to be quickly overcome.
Re:A Waymo One Rider’s Experiences Highlight Autonomous Ride...
by njarboe on Monday January 28, 2019 @01:09AM
(#19015594)
In the 1970's we saw the rise of "safety first" as a philosophy for life. By the 1990 most people believed it. Safety first as a prime directive leads to doing nothing in the end. Almost none of previous tech advancements from controlling fire a million years ago to nuclear weapons could have happened following "safety first". I can't think of any new inventions (except recreational ones like wing suits, and a some medical devices and drugs) since the 1970's that can kill people when used. A huge number of things we use heavily would never be invented today. Steam engines, cars, trains, electricity, natural gas in homes, etc. Millions died as these inventions were improved and still kill millions today. The inventor of new things were only allowed to put "use at your own risk" on software, so that is where all the new stuff has happened in the last 50 years. That era is now ending as cyberwarfare, ransomware, "fake new" become serious problems and super AGI is popularized as a possibility.
Sure, S curves exist for all technologies, but now the only tech allowed to even start are ones that are thought to be powerless (ie., next to useless). We wanted flying cars but got 140 characters.
The takeaway from the history of 20th century technology is that a given field plateaus much more quickly than the optimists expect, sometimes short of what’s needed to be truly useful. Something simple like voice recognition has been an area of intense research for 30-40 years. And it’s still not useful for all but the simplest things. I have 10 Siri reminders from the last couple of days. 4 are so badly mangled I can’t figure out what I meant to remind myself. Barring some fundamental advance, we’re not going to be talking to our computers as a primary input.
The same thing with other technologies. We broke the sound barrier, but never developed the tech to make supersonic travel cost effective. We put a man on the moon, but have yet to develop the tech to colonize off world bodies. Transistor speed and density have plateaued. After years of doubling CPU clock speeds every year, Intel crawled from 3 GHz to 5 GHz over 15 years. (If CPU speeds improved so slowly back in the day, we’d be using 200 MHz Pentium Pros today.)