10TH MARCH 2019 - TRUST ME WITH YOUR LIFE - I'M A CARING, SHARING ROBOT! A.I. IS NOT READY TO DRIVE CARS.
A VEHICLE is driving slowly on the top floor of a multistorey car park. Footage from an on-board camera shows what the artificial intelligence system controlling it can see: ranks of cars to the left, and is that a person off to the right? Straight ahead there is something else. To any human observer, it is obviously a stop sign. But the AI can’t seem to make sense of it and keeps on driving.
YOUR CAR THINKS ONE OF THESE IS A POWER DRILL
This was only a stunt. Researchers had deliberately stuck pieces of black tape on the sign to study how it confused the machine mind. Yet this and several similar demonstrations are revealing something disturbing: AI can be hacked, and you don’t even need to break passwords to launch an attack. As the technology begins to find more and more applications that affect our lives, this is a threat we need to take seriously.
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The Boeing 737 - Max crashes might be due to new control software "fighting" human pilots to correct the "angle of attack", the angle at which the wings cut into the air flow. This angle dictates whether the plane is flying or falling through the air. In the new Boeing, the programming is obscure and invisible. The human pilots cannot switch it off to take back control.
Imagine such automatic robotics losing control of a billion travelling vehicles.
However much Boeing have spent on the flight computers - developed over many decades - humans are better pilots and better drivers and better decision makers - than programmers in Silicon Valley trying to predict and preordain mechanical reactions to every and any future events that might occur. The humans have lives to lose; the robots do not care whether they live or die.
...The crash last year also involved a plane that went down minutes after takeoff and after the crew requested permission to return to the airport.
In that case, investigations by the Indonesian and American aviation authorities determined that the Lion Air plane’s abrupt nose dive might have been caused by updated Boeing software that was meant to prevent a stall but that can send the plane into a fatal descent if the altitude and angle information being fed into the computer system is incorrect.
The change in the flight control system, which can override manual motions in the Max model, was not explained to pilots, according to some pilots’ unions.
After that crash, Boeing said that it was continuing “to evaluate the need for software or other changes as we learn more from the ongoing investigation.” It was unclear if the company had made any changes.
| ROBOT VEHICLES |
“By the end of 2019, we expect over 100,000 Level 3 cars with Mobileye installed.” (Mobileye is an Intel subsidiary.)
20TH MARCH 2018 - Self-Driving Uber Car Kills Arizona Pedestrian - The New York Times
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/19/technology/uber-driverless-fatality.html
16 hours ago - SAN FRANCISCO — A woman in Tempe, Ariz., died after being hit by a self-driving car operated by UBER, in what appears to be the first known death of a pedestrian struck by an autonomous vehicle on public roads.
Millions of empty-vehicle journeys.
100 times more dangerous than human-drivers.
5 times more expensive. Hackable by villains & kids.
This might be the first robot-driver-caused death of a pedestrian - a woman pushing her bicycle - but it certainly will not be the last. Last year a TESLA owner was killed when his car, in self-drive mode, failed to recognize a huge truck across the road and tried and failed to drive under it; the cretinous driver was watching a video. The computer industry and gangs of government technophiles, some embedded in Transport Ministries, are utterly determined to convince us all, all humans, that we cannot drive safely unless we hand over control to the computer-industry.
The investments being poured into this project are immense. The Public Relations budget to persuade us we cannot be trusted to drive vehicles - is equally huge. What's the prize for investors? There are 222 million drivers in America, all incompetent. There are 39 million UK drivers, all incompetent. There are 291 million drivers in Europe, all incompetent. That's already more than 550 million licensed drivers who, according to Silicon Valley, can't drive. Extrapolating to all the vehicles in use globally comes to more than 1 billion. If the technophiles have their way - ALL vehicles will have to be equipped with robot-drivers, which currently cost about $80,000 per vehicle. ...And they still crash into things and kill people.
So, the global market is today worth $80 trillion - and with China and India and Africa using their new wealth to buy cars - the market is ever expanding. It is a cornucopia for the computer industry. All they have to do is convince us that we cannot drive.
Or can we? For example, the 38 million UK vehicles annually drive 323.7 billion miles, an average of 7,800 miles each - without robot-drivers. There are 1,732 road deaths annually. Lets assume all road deaths are the fault of drivers (though half are of drunken pedestrians) - that's a kill rate of 0.004% and a safe-driving rate of 99.996%. Are computers that reliable?
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| 100 TIMES MORE DANGEROUS THAN HUMANS |
Globally 35 cities are testing no more than 10 "autonomous" cars each, say, 500 worldwide. There have been 2 deaths (0.4% - a hundred times more dangerous than humans), and more than 200 collisions (40%). And that is with hundreds of millions of dollars and teams of engineers trying to make them safe. My instinct to never, never, ever be driven by a laptop, is a case of justifiable paranoia.
Trident Missiles - designed at the cost of billions of dollars by top scientist over the past 30 years - cannot yet be reliably steered. We recently fired one that wandered off over Miami. Oops ! My Microsoft office software still gets glitches, after 33 years of development. The Russians have recently hacked into all the control systems for the USA energy and infrastructure. Imagine what fun they will have with driverless vehicles.
Electric cars - YES. Robot cars - NO.
28th March 2018 - BUT GOOGLE/WAYMO THINK ROBO-CARS WILL BE IN USE BY 2020: but, AGAIN... "Earlier today, Governor Doug Ducey indefinitely barred Uber's robo-cars from testing in the state."
THE SELF-DRIVING CAR industry is in the final miles of a grueling marathon to bring autonomous technology to market. Uber needs autonomous tech to offer ride-hailing services sans human drivers. GM bought Cruise and put autonomous Chevy Bolts on the roads of San Francisco in an effort to remain relevant when people stop buying private cars. If Tesla can cross the line first, it could disrupt the other guys and even offer its own ride-sharing service.
And ahead of them all is Waymo. After nearly a decade of R&D, the company that started life as Google's self-driving car project has shifted its focus from tech to operations—from development to deployment. The Alphabet subsidiary says it will launch its first commercial, driverless service later this year, in Arizona. It already has the permit. All of which makes it the irritatingly fresh-looking guy, in a dayglow tank-top, taking big bouncing strides at the front of the running pack.
Today, Waymo announced it’s partnering with Jaguar Land Rover to build autonomous versions of the $90,000 electric I-Pace SUV. “It’s going to be the world’s first premium, electric, fully self-driving car,” says John Krafcik, CEO of Waymo. That sounds like a claim Elon Musk would love to be able to make about Tesla.
Waymo plans to buy 20,000 of the vehicles over the next couple years, do extensive testing and validation, and then fully integration them into its passenger-carrying fleet by 2020. The company says the new cars will be able to offer a million trips per day. It’s a huge expansion for Waymo, which has around 600 vehicles on the roads now, and an existing partnership with Chrysler for “thousands” more minivans.
Waymo is launching its debut service in Arizona, thanks to relaxed legislation and good weather. But Uber's recent crash in Tempe—one of its cars killed a pedestrian pushing a bike across the street—raises questions about the ethics and wisdom of testing on public roads. Earlier today, Governor Doug Ducey indefinitely barred Uber's robo-cars from testing in the state.
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