Good for them and I think the best is yet to come. I view Google's work on robotics and automated vehicles as a secret weapon. Should the future consist of semi/fully automated vehicles (a very realistic possibility) Google is going to have a warchest of patents, licenses and technology that will generate tons of cash.
Good way to describe those 1-off/advanced initiatives. It really does seem like a hedged bet in some cases and a great way to keep people inside the company engaged/curious/thinking outside the box.
I thought Google was also doing significant funding (and research?) into high-efficiency solar panels.
To me, all of these efforts smell (in a good way) of some VERY forward-thinking people. Autonomous cars directed by Google technologies (Google Maps, showing Google Ads to the driver while engaged on an Android-based, internet device) and powered by ultra-high-efficiency solar panels is a future you can think yourself towards if you are ambitious enough and sitting there fitting pieces together.
Not saying they are going to get into all those industries, but it's not like these 1-off efforts are focused on optimizing vacuum cleaners to compete with Dyson or making the world's most resilient non-stick pan; there is some tangential connection to a greater future image in all of it, even if it's a vision 20-years-off.
It makes me really happy to know that there are people in this world, sitting around just trying to poke and prod the limits of what we know and drive us forward, even if the future ends up taking a slightly different shape.
In terms of automated vehicles, I think Google is in the same place as Xerox was 40 years ago with the Xerox Alto. Like Xerox at that time, they have a business that is absurdly profitable that funds interesting research that is well ahead of its time, but there is little motivation to make something commercially viable. I haven't worked at google, but I image the employees are motivated to do things that make a huge splash, rather than build businesses incrementally, because any business they could build within Google would be completely dwarfed by ad revenue, much like 1973 PC business compared to the 1973 copying machine business. If google were really interested in automated vehicles, they would be selling radar assisted braking software, pedestrian alert systems, lane control systems, etc.
Does Google really have any of that? The automated vehicle tech was entirely from the DARPA Grand Challenge / DARPA Urban Challenge teams who 'solved' the autonomous driving problem years prior. Any patents and licenses are owned by those teams and the universities they come from. From the articles I read way back when it sounded like Google was just working with those people to hook their systems up to Priuses with no mention of developing anything of their own. Maybe I missed it in other coverage.
It's true google hired many of those involved in the DARPA Urban challenge, and they are leading the effort. In particular, Sebastian Thrun, who appears to be in charge of Google's program, was the head of the winning Stanford team.
However, Google's cars are already far more sophisticated than those that won the Challenge, which involved navigating a relatively simplistic simulated urban environment. According to their blog post on the subject [0] Google has been running their autonomous cars on real roads and highways in real traffic, a dramatically harder problem.
"the technology is now advancing so quickly that it is in danger of outstripping existing law, some of which dates back to the era of horse-drawn carriages."[3]
HA, yeah heaven forbid that tech make driving safer and more efficient without the regulators and legislators along for the ride. because, you know, they make everything better.
Your right, companies should just be able to throw whatever they want on the road. How dare the government create rules to interfere in the safety of other people. After all, aren't we living in a post-apocalypse mad-max type world.
The fact is it takes a long time to decide how safe something is, especially on the roads. I know it is fun in the US to rail against the government, and forget about the wonderful world we live in, that is incredibly safe, thanks to these regulations.
The fact is it takes a long time to decide how safe something is, especially on the roads.
For each month this technology's market deployment is delayed, there's a 9/11 of American deaths in car accidents. Even if Google went ahead with maximally-unsafe public beta tests and killed a hundred people, that would still probably cause an enormous net savings of lives.
I know that, and you know that, but the general public is really bad at doing proper cost-benefit-analysis.
If 3000 people kill themselves (and/or their passengers) each month, that's "ok", that's accidents, they happen, it's noone's fault.
If driverless cars kill 100 people each month, then IT'S SOMEONE'S FAULT. Someone is liable. Someone can be sued. Someone in that case being the company that makes these driverless cars.
This means that personal cars will have a human somewhat in control to absorb the blame for a very long time.
I think the first driverless vehicles we'll allow on the roads will be unmanned trucks. They don't need a human onboard since they only transport goods, not people, and there's a huge efficiency gain if you can remove truck drivers, since they need to eat and sleep.
And then when people have gotten used to driving alongside fully automatic vehicles, public opinion might shift to also allow people to be transported by similar systems.
> I think the first driverless vehicles we'll allow on the roads will be unmanned trucks. They don't need a human onboard since they only transport goods, not people, and there's a huge efficiency gain if you can remove truck drivers, since they need to eat and sleep.
Rail and water-transport are a lot mot cheaper than trucks (either manned or un-manned). The only thing that keeps them (the trucks) running is the cheap price of gasoline in the States.
exactly. and google has a bigger incentive to prevent this, rather than a politician or regulator who has an incentive to react to how the public feels at any given moment
If a public beta test of driverless cars were to cause a significant loss of life, it'd sour the idea in public opinion to the point of killing all potential sales of the vehicles and probably lead to legislation banning the vehicles in at least part of the country. The tech would be set back for years more.
The road to driverless vehicle public acceptance is paved with extremely limited trials and an absolute focus on safety.
A hundred people out of how many beta testers? 10,000? That would be outrageous.
There are obviously a lot of legitimate safety questions about robot cars. Are they better or worse at avoiding pedestrian collisions than a good driver? An average driver? How does the average severity of an accident vary between human drivers and robots? It will take some expensive testing and stats/actuarial work to sort out whether they would actually save lives at this point or anytime soon.
There are some important security questions too. How many exploits will be found per year? Will they be used to commit anonymous acts of violence? Do the cars connect to a network of any kind and pass viruses? If a car has been off or out of range during an infection, does it have to be quarantined from other cars and forced to update? "Pulling over to restart driving-service." How do you verify that an infected car has actually updated? Lots of completely untested, life-critical systems.
When other vendors enter the market, what kind of standards will they have to meet? How do we verify the security of their car software, will we require they be open source? If a vendor goes out of business, who is responsible for maintaining their upgrade distribution network?
There's a lot of important policies to decide on, it's going to take awhile.
The US government (and governments in general) has/have killed many, many, many more people than Google (and corporations in general).
Not sure why you think of them as so benevolent.
Maybe you trust the agencies entrusted with our transportation (DMV and TSA, anyone?) over Google. I think most rational people would make the opposite choice.
I'd find that especially amusing because "Google is an AI company, they just don't advertise the fact." If they can't make money on anything except AI, that would be strong confirmation.
Google is going to have a warchest of patents, licenses and technology that will generate tons of cash.
That would be the case if the patent system isn't completely different in 10-20 years, which I sincerely hope it will. Having Google as the next big patent troll would be a sad and ironical stain in its history and a deep stab at our generation.
