Ford Self-Driving Car By 2021 For Fleet Use
2021 for taxi-style usage in selected areas. This is level 4 automation: no human driver will be needed to take over. But the car won ' t be able to go everywhere. Likely that means the cars will be restricted to very well mapped areas without challenging conditions. Ford says the higher cost of the computer and sensing equipment restricts its use to fleets which rack up very high mileage per vehicle per year. The car will be a more expensive piece of capital equipment that requires very high usage rates to pay the cost of capital. I find the 2021 launch date to be a little surprising since Ford seems late to the party. On...
Source: FuturePundit - August 16, 2016 Category: Research Authors: Randall Parker Source Type: blogs
Global AI Key To Everyone Feeling Unoffended?
Some people have become incredibly sensitive about perceived slights. I think that ' s an unhealthy situation. But might societies segment very heavily along dividing lines of views about life? AI might make it possible. Imagine no matter where you went you only ran into people who agreed with you or at least were fairly supportive. A global artificial intelligence could make that a reality. If a global AI understood the preferences, moral reactions, and beliefs of everyone on the planet it could intervene to greatly reduce the incidence of people with conflicting views from ever coming into contact with each other. A glob...
Source: FuturePundit - August 6, 2016 Category: Research Authors: Randall Parker Source Type: blogs
Massive Layoffs When Trucks Become Autonomous
1.8 million people in the United States drive heavy trucks for a living and are at risk of losing their jobs when trucks become autonomous. That number is from the BLS category heavy and tractor-trailer trucking with 1.8 million employees. A separate category Delivery Truck Drivers and Driver/Sales Workers has 1.3 million workers. The heavy duty truckers are more at risk than the local delivery drivers because it is easier to automate long haul driving on interstates than to automate driving on more complex (cross traffic, pedestrians, parked cars, etc) local roads. Plus, delivery drivers have to run up to houses and busin...
Source: FuturePundit - August 6, 2016 Category: Research Authors: Randall Parker Source Type: blogs
High Minimum Wage And The Decline Of Stores
The incentive to automate will be enormous for $15 per hour minimum wage. Of America s nearly 16 million retail workers, the biggest group 4.6 million are salespeople. Their average wage is $10.47 an hour. After that, the country has another 3.4 million cashiers, and their average wage is $9.28 an hour. Only a quarter of salespeople earn more than $14 and only 10 percent earn more than $19. The figures are worse for cashiers. But in the race to automate there will be a clear winner: Amazon. Why: Amazon can automate more easily than can physical stores. It is analogous to why long haul trucking can be automated b...
Source: FuturePundit - August 6, 2016 Category: Research Authors: Randall Parker Source Type: blogs
Moon Visits Cause Heart Attacks
Astronauts who left Earth ' s orbit get more heart and circulatory diseases. TALLAHASSEE, Fla. -- Members of the successful Apollo space program are experiencing higher rates of cardiovascular problems that are thought to be caused by their exposure to deep space radiation, according to a Florida State University researcher. In a new paper in Scientific Reports, FSU Dean of the College of Human Sciences and Professor Michael Delp explains that the men who traveled into deep space as part of the lunar missions were exposed to levels of galactic cosmic radiation that have not been experienced by any other astronauts or cosmo...
Source: FuturePundit - July 30, 2016 Category: Research Authors: Randall Parker Source Type: blogs
Automation Of Professional Occupations Coming?
Robots have been automating blue collar occupations such as manufacturing. But some heavily cerebral occupations have been immune to automation. But that ' s starting to change. Robots are going to automate some professional occupations They list manual dexterity as one of the human skills that robots have a hard time with. But it really depends on setting and risks. A robotic fruit picker has easier safety requirements than a robotic nurse. A robotic fruit picker also has an enormously shorter list of tasks than does a robotic nurse. Highly routine professional tasks are more prone to automation. A substantial chunk of ac...
Source: FuturePundit - July 30, 2016 Category: Research Authors: Randall Parker Source Type: blogs
How To Use Early Stage Autonomous Vehicles?
Andreessen Horowitz VC partner Chris Dixon on early stage autonomous vehicles. "Its much easier to solve self-driving when the weathers good, for example, than when its snowy, dark or rainy. And its easier on highways and in suburbs," says Dixon. "So you can imagine pushing a button on your Uber or Lyft app, and depending on the situation and location, an autonomous car comes or a person comes."Early stage autonomous vehicles won't be able to handle cities. But they could take over some driving tasks. How to use their more limited capabilities? What this makes me think: We need a way for highway-capable autonomous ...
Source: FuturePundit - July 17, 2016 Category: Research Authors: Randall Parker Source Type: blogs
Augmented People? Mass Unemployment? Our Robotic Future
Tim O'Reilly says Dont Replace People. Augment Them. If we let machines put us out of work, it will be because of a failure of imagination and the will to make a better future! That sure sounds nice. But imaginations driven to find ways to automate and cut costs will do whatever cuts costs and boosts profits the most. If they can totally eliminate human labor and doing so will be cheaper then that's what companies will do. Really, from the perspective of managers of capital, why not? If you can make materials enter a factory and a car or home appliance come out on the other side with no human in the factory then why not?...
Source: FuturePundit - July 17, 2016 Category: Research Authors: Randall Parker Source Type: blogs
Hard To Measure Safety Of Autonomous Vehicles
Tesla's response to a recent fatal crash of Model S operating on Autopilot: We learned yesterday evening that NHTSA is opening a preliminary evaluation into the performance of Autopilot during a recent fatal crash that occurred in a Model S. This is the first known fatality in just over 130 million miles where Autopilot was activated. Among all vehicles in the US, there is a fatality every 94 million miles. Worldwide, there is a fatality approximately every 60 million miles. From the above figures are you thinking that Tesla Autopilot is safer than the average driver? That was my initial (admittedly dumb) reaction. But the...
Source: FuturePundit - July 3, 2016 Category: Research Authors: Randall Parker Source Type: blogs
Robot Burgers Coming To San Francisco
Momentum Machines looks like it is gearing up for first deployment of its robotic burger maker at a South of Market San Francisco restaurant. As I've previously stated, robots will take over restaurant cooking before they take over truck driving. The reason: A restaurant back room is a far more controlled environment than an open highway or city street. A cooking robot does not have to deal with as much complexity. The political movement for higher minimum wages is accelerating the move to automate restaurants. Robotic pizza, robotic tacos, robotic coffee: it is all coming. One of the coolest consequences: full automation ...
Source: FuturePundit - July 1, 2016 Category: Research Authors: Randall Parker Source Type: blogs
What Is The Likelihood Of Human Extinction?
How could they possibly know? A typical person is more than five times as likely to die in an extinction event as in a car crash, says a new report. We obviously have a much better measure of our risks of dying in a car crash than in an extinction event. Since 1985 motor vehicle death rates in America have dropped by more than half. Cars have gotten a lot safer with better airbags, crumple zone design, and computers that assist driving. The death rate in cars will drop by an order of magnitude or more when autonomous driving technologies hit the market. Improvements in aircraft technologies have similarly made air trav...
Source: FuturePundit - June 25, 2016 Category: Research Authors: Randall Parker Source Type: blogs
Robotic Pizza And Delivery While It Cooks
In Mountain View California (i.e. Silicon Valley) start-up Zume is building pizza-making robots with the added twist of delivery trucks with pizza ovens. That way the pizza is really fresh when delivered. That's a pretty cool idea. Pizza making seems a lot easier to automate than burger making. Stacking up the layers on a burger seems harder because burger toppings are more precariously placed than pizza toppings. But think about what the possibilities in 10 years when all these food making robots are perfected. A single restaurant could have multiple kinds of robots and make a wider range of foods than a typical fast food...
Source: FuturePundit - June 24, 2016 Category: Research Authors: Randall Parker Source Type: blogs
VC Funding Of Space Tech Soars
Once upon a time NASA was on the cutting edge of space technology development. That's so 20th century. Venture capitalists and entrepreneurs are on the cutting edge now: VCs Invested More in Space Startups Last Year Than in the Previous 15 Years Combined. Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and VCs are moving the needle today. This is very good news. Since the Apollo program NASA has had no big success with rockets. The Space Shuttle was a bad design. Other stuff was just slow incremental improvements. Rockets that land themselves and satellites that collect enormous amounts of data for an assortment of commercial applications are chan...
Source: FuturePundit - June 11, 2016 Category: Research Authors: Randall Parker Source Type: blogs
US $15 Minimum Wage Would Cost Wal-Mart $5 Billion Per Year
Less than Wal-Mart's $14+ billion per year net income. I am fascinated by the minimum wage debate in the United States due to the impact that higher wage costs have on incentives to automate. If Wal-Mart starts paying $5 billion extra per year in minimum wage costs it still has another $9+ billion to spend on automation projects. One could get a lot done with just $1 billion per year. With 2.2 million employees Wal-Mart is the biggest private employer in the United States, bigger than the next 4 combined. The retail trade is over 14.8 billion employees. If we roughly extrapolate from the Wal-Mart numbers retail would see a...
Source: FuturePundit - June 10, 2016 Category: Research Authors: Randall Parker Source Type: blogs
Who Should Get Autonomous Vehicles First? Teen Males
See U.S. Auto Regulator Says Self-Driving Cars Must Be Twice as Safe. If high prices of the self-driving cars select for highly successful initial owners then the cars might not lower accidents rates much even if the car computers are twice as safe as the average driver. To get the maximum benefit from self-driving cars we need the most dangerous drivers to switch to them. First of all, teenagers are very dangerous. Also, males are more than twice as dangerous as females. In the United States, teenagers drive less than all but the oldest people, but their numbers of crashes and crash deaths are disproportionately high. 1 I...
Source: FuturePundit - June 8, 2016 Category: Research Authors: Randall Parker Source Type: blogs
