Posts by BenWilson
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Speaker: Confessions of an Uber Driver…, in reply to Alfie,
I suspect you’re railing against the inevitable march of robotics Ben
It certainly doesn’t need any more cheerleaders. But there’s an awful lot of applications in which robotics might not actually be inevitable, and an even bigger, by several orders of magnitude, set of applications in which it is incredibly unlikely to be profitable to anyone except the engineers (but not the people paying them) in our lifetimes. That already goes for most technological businesses in spades in the first place, they’re mostly risky as fuck. But to add “insanely difficult” and “replacing something that isn’t broken” to that puts the projects well beyond viable.
And no, I’m not “railing against” it. I’d be happy if it wasn’t the case that robotics is actually not going to do what Sci Fi reckons, much as the space race hasn’t, and a whole lot of other science applications. Because it’s not interesting to write about Sci Fi reality. No one likes to hear about practical limitations, except as a fictitious plot device that brings it back to merely impossible from hyper-impossible, and we get to watch another sad superheroes story in which humans use magic to act like children.
I’m simply stating my case that I’m not at all worried about it, when it comes to the replacing of human drivers in cabs, and pointing out that cheerleading this shit might actually be serving a more sinister side effect. I actually have a checklist on what is likely to be a successful intelligent agent project, and have done since I studied the engineering of systems like this in the mid 1990s, before embarking on a career in it. I can remember exactly all the same bullshit rhetoric about self-driving cars even then, and similar videos in which someone sat in a self-driving car with their hands hovering suspiciously close to the wheel, given that their actual lives finally depended on their own development, and the million things that could go wrong literally approached them at speed. Always, they were confident that in the next few years this system would be ready to drive on roads. That’s actually the main constant in this kind of development, that it’s always just around the corner.
<continued below, as my longest ever single PAS rant>
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There will be a way to engineer a response to that. Expensive vomit detectors perhaps. Or maybe a STASIesque bank of people watching a video stream, statistically narrowed down by triggers. It will employ 50 geeks for 5 years designing it. At the end it will be 90 percent as reliable as a dude sitting there and smelling some arsehole puking in his car.
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Speaker: Confessions of an Uber Driver…, in reply to Rich of Observationz,
I'd pretty much expected someone to come in and start proposing solutions to my list. This is what keeps the dream of this kind of thing alive. That as a person it's easy to see a solution to every problem. Each one sounds trivial.... to a human. But the list of them just goes on and on. And each solution isn't just a guy sitting there making up his mind to do it that way, but a software engineering problem involving designing, testing, then rolling out the changes to millions of units. Rinse and repeat ten thousand times.
In theory, it can be done. So can interstellar travel. That doesn't mean it's not something that's well beyond practical to actually do. This is a truly colossal change. What does it actually acheive in the end? The destruction of the extremely cheap labor of millions of people who are already doing this job as well as such a system could ever hope to. As in literally the aim is to be almost as good as what we already had. Or cheaper, maybe, by the billionth ride.
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You don’t have to think very hard to think of scenarios that are all in a day’s work for a human driver that are nightmare scenarios for programmers, could represent tens of thousands of hours of programming each. And these just go on and on and on. How will it handle:
-McDonald’s Drive Thru
-Long right of ways
-Passengers dropping the pin in the wrong place
-Passengers being in inaccessible locations
-Requests to drive in a particular way, slow down, stop, go back, a little further, looking for number 89B/2 thanks
-Drunks generally
-Being stopped by police, road works, detours
-Breakdowns, particularly on the motorway
-Anyone needing any assistance in or out of the vehicle.
-Lost property
-Fare jumping
-Homeless people who just want to sleep in the car
-Vandals
-Multiple pickups and dropoffs
-Waiting by the roadside as people shop
-Getting luggage in or out
-Some having a medical issue like an asthmatic attack
-Passengers overloading the vehicle
-Passengers carrying babies in their arms or sitting small children in adult seats
-People using it to transport dirty things like a lawnmower, or bags of fertilizer, or animals, or garbage
-People eating in the vehicle, and leaving their rubbish there
-An irritated taxi driver standing in front of it stopping it from working indefinitely
-A passenger who disputes the destination or route
-People just stealing it and stripping it for parts
-Emergency usage
-Verbal commands to do anything that would be expected of a human to understand, coming from a police officer, road worker, emergency worker, film crew, civil defence
-The enormous possible array of natural impediments that can occur randomly on the road
-Getting trapped
-Getting a dirty camera
-Getting a busted microphone
-Going offline due to a network outage
-Passengers disputing who is actually in control of the vehicle
-Hearing commands over loud music
-Not acting on commands that might be heard in loud music
-Reading road signs and acting on them
-Working out changed road conditions that have not been entered into the database, like unpainted lines, or newly scraped lines.Now think about how they programmed the human drivers to do that stuff. Oh, yeah, they didn’t. They just work. Hard, and well.
Of course you can always invent a cunning solution to each problem, with sufficient programming time and systems engineering. But I can think of another problem in a whole lot less time than that. These are just things off the top of my head, not an exhaustive list. Ultimately if you want fully autonomous dangerous machines fully coexisting with humans using their existing infrastructure and all the assumptions that go with it, you need to solve the “common sense problem”. Which is not even close to being solved.
The best you can do (before then) is engineer an infrastructure that is different in which the conditions are tightly controlled. Guess what? It’s already been invented and it’s called a railway.
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I can't say I'm worried about Uber's end game. What they have made is so easily reproduced that the dominance of that particular company is very much in doubt. An UberAutonomous would really, really break their existing model so much it's hard to consider them to have any competence in it at all (quite aside from the Sci Fi ness of the idea at the moment). Their whole thing has been exploiting workers, getting them to go above and beyond in customer service for peanuts. Suddenly it's not going to have that in there at all. Instead you get a vehicle that you basically have to control yourself solely through the app and voice commands (that will be great fun, I'm sure), which has just had any number of unsupervised people in it who could easily have left rubbish in there, vandalized it, stolen things, vomited on the seat. Getting laws altered to allow such vehicles on the road is a massive, massive compliance job. Which is not exactly Uber's core competence. It won't be them driving this technology.
But they do love to talk it up, and I think that's mostly a rhetorical assault on the value of drivers. It's their little way of saying that drivers are basically worthless, despite being 99.99% of their employees, most of their capital investment, and almost all of what is good about Uber from the customer POV.
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Speaker: Confessions of an Uber Driver…, in reply to Alfie,
A lot of drivers in NZ are over 50. But I think the over 65 group is pretty small. Unless they're actually impoverished, I'd think people doing it at that age would be doing it for a hobby and for company. If they're doing it in an expensive car, like what a lot of old people have, they could even lose money doing it.
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Can't remember which libertarian philosopher proposed the free market as a substitute for God and morality. Prophetic. Certainly a corporation like Uber wields God-like powers and people worship it and look to it for the future and salvation. It's much easier than coming up with your own moral code.
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Speaker: Confessions of an Uber Driver…, in reply to Sacha,
Probably planning on undercutting by ignoring restrictions on driving hours etc. What could possibly go wrong?
Presumably also any kind of standards for a delivery vehicle. Food will be transported unfrozen, heavy objects in vehicles that have no proper safety barriers, and hazardous goods are likely to be transported in vehicles that then take passengers in the same spaces. Maybe even at the same time.
But so far there have been no moves against Uber by the government whatsoever on any compliance issues to NZ law. Not a damned thing. So why wouldn't they? A big part of the disruptive model is not just to disrupt the industry, but to disrupt the entire legal and moral framework of the society in which it's happening. NZ is proving to be a country with no will to resist at all. A scarily large number of people don't just accept this, they actually love it. And certainly that is the government's position.
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Also interested to know how much variation each axis explains. Does it diminish rapidly so that PC3 is approaching the limit of usefulness?
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Speaker: What we think and how we vote, in reply to David Hood,
Is PC2 health vs education? Or are they linked and opposed to less something less easy to summarize? Are you able to show the top 10 word loadings on the graph? Presumably the party positions are centroids?