> Anything less than 100% FULL automation is MORE dangerous than manual driving, because the "driver" will almost certainly lack any situational awareness.
With enough reliable bandwidth a decent workaround is to have the system fall back to human control by someone other than the local driver. I'm imagining a Car Traffic Control Center where your onboard robot driver sees a situation it doesn't understand and throws control to a remote driver wearing a VR rig with your car's video feeds as input. The remote human driver assesses the situation, steers you carefully past the weird obstacle/issue then returns control to your robot.
A system where robots drive automatically, say, 95% of the time while human remote drivers handle special cases 5% of the time still seems like a big improvement over the status quo - there's a market for that.
Throwing a remote driver into a dangerous situation with no context sounds like a terrible solution to me. See also: Cpt Dubois from AF447. Doing that deliberately and repeatedly just multiplies the chances of catastrophic error.
And the VR driver job would be so stressful that there may not be many takers. Who would take responsibility if they made a bad call and caused a crash?
I can possibly see an On-Star-like backup VR driver role at some point when there's full self-driving and there needs to be some sort of backup of last resort when a car with no human in it freaks out. (Or if there's just a child, etc.)
But there has to be an assumption that this is a rare event and that it takes place in a context where a VR driver has time to establish some situational awareness. (Oh, and in a lot of situations, there is no "just pull over option." I've gotten into some bad weather situations but there are often only sub-optimal options at that point. Pulling over can also be dangerous or may not even be an option.
The solution would need some massive breakthroughs in reducing latency...and time travel. "We need a decision within 6 seconds...4...2...hey human, watch the inevitable crash!" (This already happened btw)
> Throwing a remote driver into a dangerous situation with no context sounds like a terrible solution to me.
We might be thinking of different situations. I'm mostly imagining a car or truck that does great on the freeway but poorly on surface streets or poorly on particular KINDS of surface streets or even particular KINDS of weather...and we KNOW this and can recognize those situations. The remote driver typically jumps in BEFORE the part that is actually dangerous.
This isn't a new problem - consider a big ship that delegates harbor navigation decisions to a harbormaster and/or tugboat, or a big plane that delegates final runway approach decisions or parking at the gate decisions to a control tower and/or local guy driving a tow vehicle or waving directional flags. You could slice the world up into "regions we can reliably navigate without help" versus "regions where we still need a little help", with the latter group shrinking over time as technology advances and maps get better and edge cases are better handled.
The initial product offering might be for long-haul truckers - the truck drives itself for hours on separated freeways and then throws to a handler when it needs to navigate unfamiliar local surface streets for a delivery. But once you've GOT that sort of infrastructure - basically a map with geofenced areas where remote drivers step in - it's a logical next step to make the help areas dynamic and mark slowdowns or detours due to an accident or a landslide or a cow on the road for similar handling.
95% of that job would not be stressful. I'd be more worried about it being boring...but then, so is normal in-person driving.
Did you mean to imply we are consuming crude oil "orders of magnitude faster than [reserves are] produced"? Because that isn't true - the amount of oil "known reserves" is how much we've bothered to find and figure out to tap thus far, but whenever it seems like we might be running out we just go find and figure out how to produce more such that total known reserves are approximately stable-to-mildly-increasing.
Does a similar plot exist for helium? My impression is that helium reserves are low because the world hasn't been trying very hard to increase the amount we capture as a proportion of the amount we could capture.
> If you're a "right" leaning person you probably want a smaller government that spends less and we never get that. For every reduction in law hundreds are added.
Actually, under Trump government finally did get smaller. Maybe not cheaper just yet but we absolutely DO have fewer laws today - a LOT fewer. Trump promised to repeal two laws for every new one and he basically did do that.
One way to measure the amount of regulation is by counting the number of pages in the Federal Register. In 2016 that metric hit an all-time high of over 95,000. Under Trump, it dropped to and has remained below 70,000.
"Under Trump, there has also been a substantial reduction in the number of rules and regulations published within all those Federal Register pages.
The Federal Register closed out 2018 with 3,367 final rules in all. The only lower count was 3,281 under Trump a year ago, which was the lowest count since records began being kept in the mid-1970s."
Nope! In recent decades the violent crime rate has dropped in the US faster than the population has increased so the total number of crimes is actually fewer today than it was in 1990, even as a raw non-population-adjusted number.
My own theory is that as bad events get rarer they cross some threshold that makes them become more newsworthy when they do happen, so that we hear about them more, and salience bias - the fact that examples quickly come to mind - make us think it's happening more. This applies as much to hurricanes and mass shootings and "hate crimes" and violent crime in general as it did to shark attacks in the mythic "summer of the shark". Once the media has an existing narrative they can hang a story on (eg "it's just like Columbine!") they find it easy to report more stories like that, until eventually we all get sick of that topic and move on to something else.
I wasn't referring to the US as a whole, but just instances where I've seen this happen. Most recently it was just in the past few weeks right here on HN that someone said crime had risen in Seattle and someone else said it had fallen, and it turned out the discrepancy was due to population adjustment.
But I'd expect there's a fair bit of the effect you're saying too.
I wonder if this article was inspired by a Blink Health press release? The article positions them as the obvious one to switch to if you still want automatic ordering/delivery and don't want to bother with in-person coupons or a doctor's visit: According to the article:
> "Blink Health, a drug-discount startup that pitches low prices on generic drugs, recently added a men’s health telemedicine offering that undercuts Hims and Roman, charging $6.95 for 10 sildenafil pills and $8.95 for a month’s supply of finasteride."
Except...I just went through their order form for finasteride and noticed that in addition to the charge for the pills there is also a 9.95/month "subscription fee", making the full price (after a first-month discount) "$18.90 per month with auto-refill."
Which is still a BIT cheaper than the other services, but not THAT much cheaper.
The framing of this article is weird. Keeps.com charges $25/month for finasteride; if we look that up on GoodRx it is ONE THIRD the regular retail price at CVS or Target or Rite-Aid or Walgreens. True, it's more than the secret with-special-coupon price nobody knows about, but since most people do pay the original overinflated retail price, those who patronize these services are saving money. They're perhaps not saving the most money they possibly could if they checked the GoodRx rankings every month, printed out those special coupons and stood in line...but that sounds like a lot of work.
An American getting struck by lightning might be on the order of a one-in-a-million annual risk, but it's still a really bad thing if it happens TO YOU, so it's sensible we minimize our risk by choosing not to go out on golf courses during thunderstorms or choosing to install lightning rods on church towers. (The low mathematical risk already prices in the fact that we take such measures - the risk level would be much higher if we didn't!)
Getting falsely accused of sexual impropriety may be a low risk (whatever the base rate might be), but it's still really bad if it happens TO YOU so it's sensible that we minimize our personal risk with relatively low-cost policies such as the Pence Rule. (Once again, the low risk already prices in the fact that some take some such measures - the risk would be much higher if they didn't.)
Terrorist attack basically doesn't ever happen (statistically speaking) while our attempts to prevent it via mechanisms like the TSA are absurdly costly to the point of sheer idiocy, but cheaper simpler policies like "don't swim where there have been recent shark sightings", "don't carry metal golf clubs around in a thunderstorm" and "don't put yourself at undue risk of false gossip or malicious attack" seem basically sensible and proportionate to the risk being addressed.
Somebody with poor eyesight and slow reaction speed is an unsafe driver but doesn't need any particular help loading/unloading from a car. A driver who can help unload is a fine thing, but having somebody drive just so they can help unload seems like a ridiculous waste of resources. A car is ready whenever you need it; a car-and-driver might not be. And yes, you could schedule a car-and-driver to be available at a particular time...but you could similarly schedule somebody to be available to load/unload at the destination.
My guess is that a lot of the 17 are just adding color or confirming individual parts that don't add up to the whole. For instance, they must have had at least one source who told them about the factory with chinese-speaking workers that orders chinese pastries instead of donuts and has separate meetings/announcements for people who don't speak English. Those details help sell the article - and help create an impression that innocuous immigrant workers who enjoy delicious bright yellow pastries are some kind of nefarious 5th column - but do absolutely nothing to establish the central claim. If they had 3 sources on the donuts-and-meetings thing and include those in the 17 that only leaves 14 for the important stuff, and so on. Dial in far enough and I bet there's only one or two dubious sources for the big picture, while everyone else is in their own little information silos not knowing anything but their own part.
The entire article reads like a blog post. It obviously wasn't written by a news writer or edited by a news editor - there are grammar issues and tonal issues and sourcing issues.
Does the BBC now have something like the Fortune "Contributor's Network" - a group of random bloggers who get to write under their domain as if they were BBC writers, weakening the brand but bringing in more click revenue? That'd be my guess as to what's happening here.
Regarding just the first sentence example:
> In this case, there are 86 lead authors from 39 countries, of which 39% are female.
The sentence structure suggests it's the countries rather than the authors who are female. The clause is misplaced and "of which" applies to things not people ("of whom" would have been better). Basically the writer wanted to cram in a bit of extra information, couldn't figure out where or how to do so gracefully and grammatically, yet stuck it in anyway.
Blame falling standards in UK education, and the fact that bright kids don't go into the media any more. A 2:2 in media studies from an ex-poly and this is what you get.
With enough reliable bandwidth a decent workaround is to have the system fall back to human control by someone other than the local driver. I'm imagining a Car Traffic Control Center where your onboard robot driver sees a situation it doesn't understand and throws control to a remote driver wearing a VR rig with your car's video feeds as input. The remote human driver assesses the situation, steers you carefully past the weird obstacle/issue then returns control to your robot.
A system where robots drive automatically, say, 95% of the time while human remote drivers handle special cases 5% of the time still seems like a big improvement over the status quo - there's a market for that.