Bloomberg (October 6)
“Even after $100 billion, self-driving cars are going nowhere. They were supposed to be the future,” but “the losses get bigger.” Several decades in, there remain few actual self-driving vehicles, mostly “confined to a handful of places in the Sun Belt, because they still can’t handle weather patterns trickier than Partly Cloudy. State-of-the-art robot cars also struggle with construction, animals, traffic cones, crossing guards, and … left turns.”
Tags: $100 billion, Animals, Construction, Crossing guards, Going nowhere, Left turns, Losses, Self-driving cars, Sun Belt, Traffic cones, Weather
Reuters (May 12)
“South Korea was the first country to launch a fifth-generation mobile network in 2019, heralding a warp-speed technological transformation to self-driving cars and smart cities. Three years on, the giddy promises are unfulfilled.” It has achieved one of the highest rates of adoption, around 45% with speed about five times faster. Until demand catches up, however, telecoms will remain unwilling “to invest in the fancier technology that would ramp speeds by 20 times over 4G technology…. To make the quantum leap to the highest-speed 5G will require the roll-out of essential services that need such fast connections.”
Tags: 5G, Adoption, Demand, Invest, Mobile network, Promises, Roll-out, Self-driving cars, Smart cities, South Korea, Speed, Technology Quantum leap, Telecoms, Transformation, Unfulfilled, Warp-speed
The Economist (September 4)
“By the age of seven months, most children have learned that objects still exist even when they are out of sight.” Understanding object permanence “is a normal developmental milestone, as well as a basic tenet of reality. It is also something that self-driving cars do not have. And that is a problem.” Though autonomous vehicles “are getting better,” they still are unable to “understand the world in the way that a human being does. For a self-driving car, a bicycle that is momentarily hidden by a passing van is a bicycle that has ceased to exist.”
Tags: Autonomous vehicles, Bicycle, Children, Developmental milestone, Hidden, Human, Object permanence, Reality, Self-driving cars, Seven months
Financial Times (July 23)
“Computer algorithms encoded with human values will increasingly determine the jobs we land, the romantic matches we make, the bank loans we receive and the people we kill, intentionally with military drones or accidentally with self-driving cars.” The way those human values are embedded “will be one of the most important forces shaping our century. Yet no one has agreed what those values should be” and the “debate now risks becoming entangled in geo-technological rivalry between the US and China.”
Tags: Algorithms, China, Computer, Debate, Drones, Encoded, Geo-technological rivalry, Human values, Jobs, Loans, Self-driving cars, U.S.
