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[Starver]

That's all good theory, but the trials of driverless cars seem to be involved in significantly less accidents per mile than human drivers.

Driverless Car Miles™ is about (IIRC) 130 million miles with one death. That could be an outlier either way, with the 'True Rate' being a billion miles per death (this one just happened unusually early in the long future-history of the statistic) or actually we really should have had half a dozen deaths for this number of autonomous miles driven by this current capability of system, just there were people paying attention more in other cases, to seize control back in good time.

(Non-autonomous deaths are about 1 per 0.1 billion* miles, it seems, which means that a presumed 1 per 0.13 billion isn't actually that far off human-level ability. And that figure includes significant drunk-driving, so Tesla is 'not quite so drunk', if we take the minimal data at strict first sight...)

* (short billion, given we're talking about the land of the colonials  )

So for all that e.g. a computer could be fooled by ambiguous sensory data "swirl of autumn leaves", it seems that on the balance, humans are distracted by more things than the robots.

But not actually so much, that we can tell.

Additionaly, the events that did cause an AI driver to fuck up showed to also be completely capable of causing a human driver to fuck up.

A sixteen-wheeler pulling across the path of an (originally) distant car driving beyond the apparent limits of its ability to see is not unknown in a fully-human scenario, but humans who do this tend to know (or ought to have known) that they're driving beyond their abilities. It appears the Tesla was oblivious to its impairment. And was not trained enough in the other circumstances to convert confusion into a better failsafe reaction.

[PanH]

That's all good theory, but the trials of driverless cars seem to be involved in significantly less accidents per mile than human drivers.

Driverless Car Miles™ is about (IIRC) 130 million miles with one death. That could be an outlier either way, with the 'True Rate' being a billion miles per death (this one just happened unusually early in the long future-history of the statistic) or actually we really should have had half a dozen deaths for this number of autonomous miles driven by this current capability of system, just there were people paying attention more in other cases, to seize control back in good time.

Are you talking about the Tesla ones ? Google's testing is far over 1 billion with no death.

As for hacking, this seems a rather weird angle. Unless they have an open network, it seems rather contrived or you'd need to already have control of the car to hack it. It would be akin to tampering with a current car.

[MrRoboto75]

We should ban normal cars, as someone could hack them by shoving a potato into the tailpipe

[Reelya]

Yeah, Bring Back Buggies I say.

Horses don't get hacked.

[MrRoboto75]

Yeah, Bring Back Buggies I say.

Horses don't get hacked.

Someone might spook the horse tho

I'd recommend walking, but someone might trip you.

[martinuzz]

Horses don't get hacked.

Boxer would like to believe you

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

[Starver]

Are you talking about the Tesla ones ? Google's testing is far over 1 billion with no death.

I couldn''t at first understand Google's figures.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_self-driving_car

When testing their autonomous vehicles on public roads, Google always has test drivers ready to take over if the car is not driving itself safely or smoothly enough. In August 2016, their cars traveled a "total of 170,000 miles; of those, 126,000 miles were driven autonomously (i.e. the car was fully in control)."

As of June 2016, Google had test driven their fleet of vehicles, in autonomous mode, a total of 1,725,911 mi (2,777,585 km).

To me that now suggests that by August their real-world use was comparable to Tesla, the earlier/higher figure including massive amounts of closed-road and track testing.

I think there's something in the self-driving car, I'm merely pointing out that the obviously better testing (Google) hasn't done enough to remove all my doubts, while Tesla's "it's only in beta, you really shouldn't be using it all that much but go play with it anyway, you know you want to..." has highlighted a failing that needs to be fully taken into account, going forward.

Yeah, Bring Back Buggies I say.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

[Helgoland]

PTW.

[Reelya]

https://news.slashdot.org/story/16/11/18/0523211/elon-musk-teslas-solar-roof-will-cost-less-than-a-traditional-roof

Elon Musk is saying that the solar roof tiles will end up costing less to install than traditional roof tiles. That's because they weigh about 20% of a normal tile so the shipping costs are a lot less, and they're less brittle, meaning less broken in transit. Even if it's not cheaper, if they can at get close on price, that could be the tipping point for consumer-level solar uptake: e.g. rather than solar being an added thing that you optionally pay for, it's included in a product that replaces something else, with the electricity generation just as a bonus.

[TempAcc]

Clever way to market it. If it can actualy replace normal roofing, it'll probably be pretty significant and even more distruptive to the energy production market. It doesnt have to have the same price as normal roofing, of course, but if its at least similar, it'll already be fair bit less expensive than adding solar panels to your roof.
If its actualy (somehow) cheaper than normal roofs, then it'll be pretty damn impactful.

[wierd]

Indeed. Then the problem with adoption would center around the "Hey? Don't lithium batteries have this bad habit of exploding when they get hot? Why am I installing a 15kw battery of this type in my attic?" instead.

[Reelya]

Local storage isn't needed, there are systems that feed your power into the grid. Solar spikes in the day, exactly when demand does. Just use it when it's produced.

"But what about night time usage". Well, the problem with that argument is that night-time usage is subsidized to encourage more people to use it, because of the reality that coal/nuclear plants run best at constant load, therefore a lot of night-time power is wasted. We basically give that shit away. If things switch to solar, then the incentive for making night-time power cheap goes away, the subsidies would switch to the day time instead, and big companies who use a lot of power at night when it's cheap, would stop doing that. Therefore in a solar world, cheap night-time power would go away, and more of the load would shift to the daytime. Large amounts of batteries won't really be needed.

[wierd]

True, but one of the major benefits of domestic solar is the ability to go off grid, which means local storage.

[Reelya]

But that doesn't make a lot of economic sense in the long-term. Power is worth more during the day, and less at night. People with solar make a profit by selling power during the day then buying the small amount of power they need for night time.

Going off-grid is expensive and forgoes all the things you can do with that, and doesn't really lower your carbon footprint any more than being on the grid: all that storage took a lot of carbon to produce.

[TempAcc]

Well, I suppose it doesnt have to be installed in your attic :U, I mean, a concerned person willing to spend a bit more money could maybe build a brick/concrete enclosure for their tesla powerwall to isolate it in case it explodes, kinda like people who use natural gas create for the gas canisters/tanks.