Autonomous vehicles work in San Francisco.
They don't work in Lagos, Mumbai, Jakarta, or Cairo.
And those four cities alone contain more drivers than the entire United States.
The problem: self-driving systems are trained and tested on:
• Lane-marked roads
• Predictable pedestrian behaviour
• Clear road signage
• Reliable weather and lighting
• Cooperative road users
Real roads in most of the world have:
• No lane markings, or markings that mean nothing
• Motorcycles, tuk-tuks, carts, livestock
• Unwritten social rules that no sensor can read
• Unpaved surfaces with undefined edges
• Children playing without warning
Waymo and Tesla are solving a First World traffic problem.
They're building for a world where roads are already the easy part.
The engineering challenge of autonomous vehicles isn't the technology.
It's that the technology was designed around a specific, privileged type of infrastructure.
Deploying it globally means either:
A) Rebuilding the roads of the developing world to match the AV's requirements
B) Building an AV that can actually drive in the developing world's roads
Option A costs trillions and takes 50 years.
Option B hasn't been done.
The most transformative automotive technology in history is being built for the 15% of people who already have good roads.
Is anyone working on the other 85%?
@dccommonsense there's a bbc interview with a maga supporter of the iran war saying despite higher prices he trusts the president on this matter and this is bigger than all of us.
talking about an ostrich. heh
Redheads require about 20% more anesthesia than people with other hair colors.
Scientists are unsure why anesthesia, both general and local, is less effective for redheads, but it may be linked to the MC1R gene mutation that causes hair to be red.
They're all interconnected folks.Make exceptions and "special circumstances" at your own risk.
"He that would make his own liberty secure must guard even his enemy from oppression; for if he violates this duty he establishes a precedent that will reach to himself."-Thomas Paine