I still maintain that you're experiencing your first instance of "professional disappointment" - when you read a popular discourse on a subject that you know enough to be an expert about and the focus of the author isn't the one you'd choose. Display technology articles in Scientific American used to give me headaches, and of the two people I know who have written in Sciam, both of them hated the fuck out of the end result (and generally hate what everyone else has to say in their field). That's the problem with populism - your publication automatically dumbs your words down to the lowest common denominator and whatever you, the expert, may think it requires too much basis of knowledge in order to refute. This is an article written for people who literally think As you yourself pointed out - there are good things in this article and there are bad. With nearly everything else it's all bad. You're disappointed that the article isn't better because it was good enough to get your hopes up. Get used to that - it's going to happen more and more often. I also think the "big question" is different from what you think - I don't think AVs are a question of converting human driving intelligence into machine driving intelligence, I think it's a question of intermutability between individual transit and mass transit. A car is an autonomous vehicle piloted by a lone human. It's part of a larger system but the links of that system are ad-hoc. A self-driving car is on a spectrum between autonomous and fully-dependent - on freeway or commuter flows it's a fully-integrated part of a mass transit system. On local flows it's an extension of a larger transit system. That this spectrum cannot be bridged by humans is the core of the problem - we have trains and we have cars and in between we have buses but from a transport perspective, those three things are discrete modes of transportation. Throw AVs into the mix and the distinction blends, particularly if it works out economically to get away from the 1car = 1family model. The "self-driving" part of it all is big news to the geeks, but it's a tiny aspect of the overall changes engendered: Apparently mk and I are the only ones who read that article, which is a shame, because some of the fallout of automated truck fleets includes: - 75% reduction in freight charges - 150-200% decrease in transit times - radical improvements to public safety - Loss of at least 1% of all jobs in the United States I mean, that's some straight-up disruption and nobody even gives a fuck about the autonomous technology because these are giant trucks and that shit is mostly handled. It's just a matter of time. And nobody read that. It's hidden on tech crunch. Nobody here read it. NOBODY CARES. So be thrilled that at least Petroski took a swing at it, and recognize that it's going to take a steady drumbeat of people like Petroski (hint hint) to get people to care. So grab some sticks. ________________________________ As far as "ground traffic control system" I think it's gonna be like this: Google, as you pointed out, is mapping shit down to the inch. That's a massive first-starter advantage that nobody else will have the ability to catch up with. Everyone else is going to have to combine Google's slavish mapping tendencies with shortcuts that allow them to compete. It's going to be chaos - you're going to see elected officials, who will read things like the Petroski article with slack jaws, gobsmacked by the implications that they've never considered. These will be people who wouldn't understand LIDAR with Bill Nye standing next to them with a PowerPoint and they're going to have to pass judgement on what constitutes "autonomy-ready" vehicles and what doesn't. And, like every jurisdiction everywhere, they're going to kick the can upstairs, where eventually it'll end up in the hands of a large bureaucracy like NHTSA, who will have to come up with standards for autonomous vehicles. And as every manufacturer will have been trying different things, and as they won't be able to come up with mutual standards without assistance and subsidy, there will be a big industry initiative which will be called something evocative like "DRIVE2100" (evocative is easier to raise taxes for) and it'll have recommendations for what needs to be built into lights, signs, addresses, crosswalks, intersections, roundabouts, onramps, offramps, parking lots, the whole nine yards, and it will be seen as a giant works project by every industrialized nation, and the ones that are ahead of things are going to be the ones that are going to benefit the most because these are going to be cost-plus contracts and it's going to be bigger than the Americans with Disabilities Act and the guys who get to play in that game are going to be the guys who made a credible effort up to this point and the guys that are going to be dictated to are going to be the guys that didn't and if you ever wondered why Apple and Google are playing games with self-driving cars it's because we're on the cusp of the single biggest worldwide infrastructure expenditure in the history of civilization and it's gonna make The New Deal look like Cash for Clunkers. And it starts with articles like this. ("This year alone more people will be killed in traffic accidents involving trucks than in all domestic airline crashes in the last 45 years combined. At the same time, more truck drivers were killed on the job, 835, than workers in any other occupation in the U.S.")
It's gonna take a while, I'm afraid. While one of the insights I gained last year from doing my thesis was exactly what you mention (AV's creating all in-between forms of transport), that still likely manifests itself after we know what's the best way to make vehicles drive themselves. There is a path dependency there that might have major implications further down the road. The first big success is likely going to dominate the field because it is so difficult to get up to that level of safety standards. Not saying that it isn't also a very interesting and Big Question - just that I think the machine intelligence sets the precedent. I DO! I just totally missed that article. My second choice of thesis topics is to investigate the benefits of quay-to-customer or quay-to-warehouse full automation for the harbor of Rotterdam, which already has a fully automated port.Get used to that - it's going to happen more and more often.
NOBODY CARES.
Well... I dunno. There's going to be patchwork acceptance, and there's going to be conflict, and then there's going to be a working group and standards and public input periods and we'll still end up with an "open" standard like docx except it'll cost $8k to implement per vehicle. I think our fundamental disagreement is that I don't think there is a "best" way for AVs to drive themselves. I think there are probably several approaches that can be made to work, depending on environment, and I think that the bigger you are now, the more likely you are to be able to force your approach. Even then, it's a gamble. Sony lost Betamax but won CD and BluRay. And this battle is going to dwarf those. There is a path dependency there that might have major implications further down the road. The first big success is likely going to dominate the field because it is so difficult to get up to that level of safety standards. Not saying that it isn't also a very interesting and Big Question - just that I think the machine intelligence sets the precedent.