The robots are coming

[MahrinSkel]

In "Oh shit, they're actually coming" news:

https://www.defenseone.com/technology/2019/11/secdef-china-exporting-killer-robots-mideast/161100/

tldr; China selling actual kill-bots. Saudi Arabia and Pakistan are the buyers.

--Dave

[Samwise]

Argo AI rolling out robotaxis in Miami and Austin.

[Khaldun]

I would absolutely not get in one of those things at present unless it was on streets with no other cars.

[Hawkbit]

Just watched it California Stop at least twice, which seems like something the wrong cop might throw a fit about.

[Khaldun]

No Black person to shoot (unless passengers) so probably not.

[Samwise]

"It may be a computer, but it's got the confidence of a white person."

[Trippy]

That's Cruise in SF. It's been available for the public to ride for a few months now. One of their cars also blocked a fire truck responding to call. Waymo also has driverless cars cruising around in SF but those are still being tested and only employees* can ride in them.

* Not sure if that's just Waymo employees or all Alphabet and subsidary employees

[schild]

That's Cruise in SF. It's been available for the public to ride for a few months now. One of their cars also blocked a fire truck responding to call. Waymo also has driverless cars cruising around in SF but those are still being tested and only employees* can ride in them.

* Not sure if that's just Waymo employees or all Alphabet and subsidary employees

All of the driverless cars in Austin are downtown and on the east side around me.

Worst city in america for this. Our roads suck and everything is under construction. Cars are basically handicapped.

[Samwise]

People seen this DALL-E shit?

Since it's not available for the public to play with yet I'm a little skeptical that the proof-of-concept images on that site are generated by the AI without a fair amount of human assistance, but even if it needs handholding, it's pretty cool.

[Sky]

I've heard the images they're touting have been highly curating every step of the process to get the best results, which makes sense.

That said, it's a glorified collage maker as far as I can tell. I'm sure some of these will sell for NFT millions at some point.

[Zetor]

Most of the time you'd get something closer to GANfield. #justMLthings

[schild]

People seen this DALL-E shit?

Since it's not available for the public to play with yet I'm a little skeptical that the proof-of-concept images on that site are generated by the AI without a fair amount of human assistance, but even if it needs handholding, it's pretty cool.

https://huggingface.co/spaces/dalle-mini/dalle-mini

It's been the entire discord server for two days now. Well this and Midjourney.

[Teleku]

[Samwise]

I got access to the real DALL-E and fed it the same prompt as a comparison point, lol.

[Samwise]

This is my favorite thing I've gotten it to make so far: Emperor Norton playing the banjo.  It's like if Matt Berry played him in an episode of Drunk History.

[Khaldun]

That's pretty amazing.

[schild]

Dalle mini fuckin sucks but dalle is better than mid journeys consumer facing shit.

Samwise not being in discord is just disappointment at this point.

[Sky]

Ok zoomer

Anyway, yeah that 'painting' is better than 80% of what I see in exhibits and definitely better than my work 

Speaking of robots, apparently Amazon wants to map your homes with iRobots now. People love the surveillance state, yo. If the anti-authoritarians of yore knew how the public was not only willing, but willing to pay for it themselves...

[Samwise]

I saw an article about that; fears about it being a play by Amazon to map your home seem a little silly to me since those robots don't have access to any data that your indoor security cameras and/or Alexa haven't already had for years.  Anyone who's bought into the "smart home" thing has already invited so many vampires over the threshold that one more doesn't matter at this point.  And I'm sure there will always be non-cloud-connected alternatives for people who want 90% of the convenience with 0% of the privacy invasion.

[Zetor]

Yeah, that already happened with Strava in 2017-2018 where the 'anonymized' fitness heatmap of the world revealed detailed maps of military bases and troop movements, could be used to identify individual soldiers by name, etc (and also identify where individual Strava users lived). Privacy is such a 20th century concept.  

[Samwise]

Hell, if someone really wants to map your home using location data, they could use the accelerometers in the phone that you constantly have on your person as you move around your house.  You go places that your Roomba doesn't, and the data would provide insight into how you personally interact with your space, which would be a lot more valuable to advertisers trying to figure out things to sell you for your home than the Roomba-eye-view would.  How much time do you spend in the kitchen in a given day?  How much time do you spend on the couch in front of the TV?  A Roomba can't tell them that, but your phone sure could.  Imagine getting targeted ads for fiber supplements based on the average amount of time you spend on the toilet.

Realistically, though, that kind of thing is very far from being worth the hassle even though it's very close to doable.

[Sky]

I guess we use phones differently.

[Samwise]

Most people are using the wireless ones now that you carry around all the time, but if you still have a corded phone that lives on the wall in your kitchen then you're pretty safe.

[Sky]

 

I just set the phone down when I get home from work. I don't carry it around, it just sits there until I leave the house. It's a phone.

[Teleku]

The phone part of it is probably the least used feature on it for me.  And I think almost everybody else in the world.  So, yeah.....

[Count Nerfedalot]

How I use my phone: Camera. Calendar. Watch. Appointment Book. Address Book. Notebook. Auto Navigation & Trip Planning. GPS. Tracking Beacon. Recipe Book. Music Player. Map of anywhere in the world. Flashlight. Car Radio. Current and forecast Weather for anywhere in the world. Photo Album. Email. Calculator. Alarm Clock. News. Encyclopedia. Timer. NSA Listening Post. Documentation and schematics for pretty much any appliance or gadget I own. Plant Identifier. Spreadsheet. Database. Star Atlas. Simple games for killing time. Bank Teller for most anything not cash. Library. Movie Theater. Shopping. Cat Recording. Bill Paying. Chat & Messaging. Magnifying Glass. Bulletin Board. Exercise/Physical Therapy Coach. Photo Editor. Dictionary. Language Translator. Walkie Talkie. Intercom. Tape Recorder. Menus, ingredients and hours for most restaurants in the country and often place orders for pickup or delivery. Movie and Entertainment Schedules and Ticket Purchasing. Airplane Boarding Pass. Wallet. Scanner. Pedometer. Compass. Receipt Log.

oh, and occasional phone calls.

[Khaldun]

Yeah, phones are the least necessary except for when they're absolutely necessary. I struggle to think back to the era where you really had to worry about what you'd do if you broke down by the side of the road.

[Trippy]

Waymo report after 1 million "rider-only" miles.

Blog post: https://blog.waymo.com/2023/02/first-million-rider-only-miles-how.html

Research paper: https://storage.googleapis.com/waymo-uploads/files/documents/safety/Safety%20Performance%20of%20Waymo%20RO%20at%201M%20miles.pdf

[Samwise]

"55% of all events were a human driving into a stationary waymo" cracked me up because it's so believable.  I've been in one collision in my entire life so far, and it was some goober backing into me while traffic was stopped.

[Khaldun]

I'm going to stay wary on this just because there's so much evidence that Tesla hasn't been entirely forthcoming about their own data; there is so much money riding on autonomous driving working well that everybody's got an incentive to shave and manipulate the data, or to control the conditions of testing in ways that are hard to call out without complete access to the testing and development team.

The other reason I'm going to stay wary on this is that I think we're somewhere between 5-15 years before the people selling autonomous driving technology begin to push for it being mandatory in all new cars sold, to be followed by making it illegal to drive manually in many major road networks, on the argument that this will be on net safer. Which it might be, but the values on the other side of the equation won't get any attention at all in that conversation.

[NowhereMan]

I'm sure that info is heavily, heavily slanted/cherry-picked i.e. incidents happening when a Waymo vehicle was stationary would still cover where one had stopped unexpectedly or parked itself in an unusual place. Likewise I could see them classifying a mototrist taking evasive action as 'behaving dangerously' or violating highway rules. There have been a number of reports of Tesla's issues with their self-driving experiments and, frankly, these results sound so much in advance of all the issues most self-driving efforts have that it just sounds pretty fishy.

What I really don't understand (profit) is why all these efforts aren't going in to producing an automated public transport system with a wider selection of routes rather than an inefficient and pollution wise far worse option of a system of private taxis. I personally don't have an issue with having an automated driving solution if I was confident the tech was up to the challenge but I'm not sure we're going to be getting to that point in the next few years.

[Khaldun]

With Tesla, it's easy to see why: Musk has a profound ideological hatred for public transport. With the other people in the market, yeah, I don't quite see it.

There's a book called Aramis, Or the Love of Technology, by the recently deceased French intellectual Bruno Latour that is about a really interesting (if expensive and before its time) French prototype system that was basically an autonomous-driving approach to light rail--basically you'd build cheap light rail infrastructure all through the suburbs and you'd have little self-driving cars on rails that you could order via a telephone/early Internet system and as they moved towards denser areas with more connections, they'd link up and move on to the central spinal spokes of the system and then kick off to a higher speed for faster connection between suburbs and the center city. It failed because the tech just wasn't there but right now I think something like it is plausible--and you wouldn't need full autonomous AI able to adapt to every condition on our existing road infrastructure.

[Samwise]

There have been a number of reports of Tesla's issues with their self-driving experiments

Tesla deliberately hobbled themselves early in the game by deciding they were going to do everything with visual processing alone (which I think was an Elon edict rather than a decision made by somebody with any technical knowledge), and on top of that way over-promised their capabilities (again, Elon).  They don't belong in any conversation about self-driving tech at this point except to say "here's everything not to do".

What I really don't understand (profit) is why all these efforts aren't going in to producing an automated public transport system with a wider selection of routes rather than an inefficient and pollution wise far worse option of a system of private taxis.

I'm not sure if you actually needed an answer, but yeah, profit.  We don't invest in public transportation in this country, not in any serious way, and building a whole new system like what you're talking about would be a very serious investment.  If you put a lot of engineering effort into building an automated public transport system (limited utility anyway, because public transportation is already optimized to move a lot of people with a minimal number of operators), nobody's going to buy it.  If you can sell a luxury car that doesn't need a chauffeur, or run a taxi service that doesn't need to pay drivers, you will make billions, if not trillions.

(edit) It turns out Waymo published a detailed research paper that analyzed and described all of the incidents in their million miles of autonomous driving.  It'd be nice if they included the video footage for each incident as well so you could judge for yourself whether their reporting is accurate, but I'd imagine there are privacy/liability concerns involved with publicly shaming bad drivers, and I would also imagine that if they'd mischaracterized or omitted any severe incidents, there would be publicly available police reports and/or lawsuits to prove it.  So it seems reasonably safe to trust the facts that they're reporting, even if skeptical of any spin they might try to put on them.

The most severe collision involved the Waymo being stopped at a red light (which is pretty reasonable, right?) and being rear-ended at 25mph by a driver who was looking at their cell phone.

The second most severe collision was one where a slower-moving vehicle cut the Waymo off and immediately braked; the Waymo did the right thing and applied its brakes, but obviously if a stationary obstacle suddenly appears in front of you there's only so much the laws of physics allow.

Based on the raw numbers, and without even getting into at-fault details, it seems like Waymo is about twice as safe as the average human driver (2 crashes in a million miles, compared to about 4 for the average human).

[HaemishM]

If you can sell a luxury car that doesn't need a chauffeur, or run a taxi service that doesn't need to pay drivers, you will make billions, if not trillions.

The target market mindset for all of these self-driving things is clearly the rich asshole who disdains public transit because of having to mix with all the poors, and not the city planner who would love a more cost effective and efficient way to move citizens and relieve his traffic problems.

That goes back decades to the entire way we incentivize how our cities and towns were built. The cult of the automobile and the individual freedom it represents has absolutely destroyed any real commitment to public transit. We don't build for it, we build to put fucktons of cars on the road driving into urban centers only when they need to for work and never stopping until they return to their suburbs. With those parameters, self-driving cars for a passenger capacity of one totally makes sense as something to do.

To paraphrase that Blizzard dildo, "Don't you guys have cars?"

[Samwise]

The target market mindset for all of these self-driving things is clearly the rich asshole

Income inequality in the US is higher now than it was at the peak of the Roaring Twenties a hundred years ago, which makes rich assholes the most lucrative target market they have ever been.

Not saying it's a good state of affairs, but nobody should be asking "why would you make this instead of designing a public transit system that nobody will ever fund".  That question should just answer itself.