#Tesla#EVs#AI#Autopilot#SelfDrivingCars: "Tesla Inc. must face a proposed class-action lawsuit alleging that it misled consumers about its cars’ self-driving capabilities, a fresh setback for the electric-car maker just as Chief Executive Officer Elon Musk has staked the company’s future on autonomy.
Tesla has been accused of overstating in 2016 that all its upcoming cars would have the “hardware needed for full self-driving capability” and would be able to drive themselves from Los Angeles to New York City by the end of 2017.
“If Tesla meant to convey that its hardware was sufficient to reach high or full automation,” the complaint “plainly alleges sufficient falsity,” US District Judge Rita Lin wrote in an order Wednesday."
WRITER FUEL: A malicious technology can trick self-driving cars into “hallucinating” phantom vehicles and veering dangerously off-course to get out of their way, researchers have discovered.
This articulates my exact feelings about San Francisco, the tech industry, & the entire social crisis of Capitalism we are all facing. Ms. Solnit writes with fierce precision & grace, connecting the dots with damning evidence rather than hyperbole.
“Developing driverless cars has been AI’s greatest test. Today we can say it has failed miserably, despite the expenditure of tens of billions of dollars in attempts to produce a viable commercial vehicle.”
Maybe the science-fiction vision of self-driving cars is a difficult technology to perfect in reality, and releasing these killing machines onto public roads was a PR disaster?
#AVs#DriverlessCars#SelfdrivingCars#SiliconValley#AI: "AllOver’s new rideshare service boasts driverless cars (called “CRs”), but the reality is more sinister—instead, contractors like Teresa operate the vehicles while hiding inside a secret compartment. Clinging to the job for financial security, Teresa drives around the clock, witnesses disturbing incidents inside her vehicle, and loses herself in the ouroboros of AllOver’s bureaucracy. Wrong Way is a chilling portrait of economic precarity, and a disturbing reminder of how attempts to optimize life and work only leave us all more alienated than ever before.
McNeil Zoomed with Esquire from her home in Los Angeles to discuss the rise of AI, the uphill battle of life under capitalism, and the gap between Silicon Valley's words and actions. This interview has been edited for length and clarity."
Self-driving car-makers could face prison for misleading adverts in UK.
The UK's Automated Vehicles Bill would make it a criminal offence for car-makers to use certain marketing terms unless their vehicles are fully self-driving, with a punishment of up to two years in prison and a fine.
In a recent guest lecture I noted that self-driving cars are still a dicey proposition despite an investment of 30 years and $100bn. Now San Francisco has suspended Cruise operations after its robotaxi drove over and pinned a pedestrian hit by another car to the ground. I know Cruise gives their cars cutesy names, but did they really have to name this one "panini"? 😬
#Cruise#BigTech#AVs#DriverlessCars#SelfDrivingCars#AutonomousVehicles: "In an internal address on Slack to his employees about the suspension, Vogt stuck to his message: “Safety is at the core of everything we do here at Cruise.” Days later, the company said it would voluntarily pause fully driverless rides in Phoenix and Austin, meaning its fleet will be operating only with human supervision: a flesh-and-blood backup to the artificial intelligence.
Even before its public relations crisis of recent weeks, though, previously unreported internal materials such as chat logs show Cruise has known internally about two pressing safety issues: Driverless Cruise cars struggled to detect large holes in the road and have so much trouble recognizing children in certain scenarios that they risked hitting them. Yet, until it came under fire this month, Cruise kept its fleet of driverless taxis active, maintaining its regular reassurances of superhuman safety.
“This strikes me as deeply irresponsible at the management level to be authorizing and pursuing deployment or driverless testing, and to be publicly representing that the systems are reasonably safe,” said Bryant Walker Smith, a University of South Carolina law professor and engineer who studies automated driving."
#AVs#DriverlessCars#SelfDrivingCars#AutonomousVehicles: "Superficial accounts of self-driving cars suggest a ‘race’ to ‘solve’ a singular ‘autonomy’. Behind the scenes, AV developers have different aims, emphasizing different attachments and targeting different niches. Alongside the possibility of consolidation to a few dominant players, there will also be differentiation as AV companies jostle to attach themselves to the world for competitive advantage. Optimistically, we might conclude that the social constitution of the autonomous vehicle is not yet set. But it remains to be seen whether the technology’s developers will break free from the narrative of autonomy or further entangle society within its effects."
#Automation#Fauxtomation#SelfDrivingCars#Driverless#GM#Cruise: "G.M. has spent an average of $588 million a quarter on Cruise over the past year, a 42 percent increase from a year ago. Each Chevrolet Bolt that Cruise operates costs $150,000 to $200,000, according to a person familiar with its operations.
Half of Cruise’s 400 cars were in San Francisco when the driverless operations were stopped. Those vehicles were supported by a vast operations staff, with 1.5 workers per vehicle. The workers intervened to assist the company’s vehicles every 2.5 to five miles, according to two people familiar with is operations. In other words, they frequently had to do something to remotely control a car after receiving a cellular signal that it was having problems.
To cover its spiraling costs, G.M. will need to inject or raise more funds for the business, said Chris McNally, a financial analyst at Evercore ISI. During a call with analysts in late October, Ms. Barra said G.M. would share its funding plans before the end of the year."
Engineering professor and materials scientist @debcha's new book How Infrastructure Works is a hopeful, lyrical - even beautiful - hymn to the systems of mutual aid we embed in our material world, from sewers to roads to the power grid. It's a book that will make you see the world in a different way - forever:
More roads push everything farther apart. Once everything is farther apart, you need more cars.
Geometry hates cars. You can't bargain with geometry. You can't tunnel your way out of this. You can't solve it with #VTOL sky-taxis. You can't fix it with #SelfDrivingCars whose car-to-car comms let them shave down their following distances. You need buses, subways and trams. You need #transit.
Waymo and Cruise were granted permission from California officials to expand their operations in San Francisco, but some of the residents are taking a stand and temporarily disabling the robotaxis. BBC journalist James Clayton seeks to understand why the city is so divided on self-driving vehicles.
#Cars#RoadSafety#AVs#SelfDrivingCars: "A recent tweet from Matt Farah got the Jalopnik staff thinking about this. A system that’s 99.9-percent reliable sounds nearly perfect, but in reality, that 0.1-percent error rate is enormous.
So how good does a fully autonomous vehicle need to be in order to be safer than a human driver? As Jalopnik’s resident mathematician, figuring this out fell to me — and to data pulled from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.
According to NHTSA, Americans drove 2,903,622,000,000 miles in 2021. That’s nearly three trillion miles, many of which were likely the sort of boring, uneventful highway driving where current Level 2 driver-assistance systems excel. American human drivers crashed 5,250,837 times in 2021 — once every 552,983 miles traveled.
Here’s how the numbers break down for human drivers in America:"
Cruise, the self-driving car subsidiary of GM, is being called upon to reduce its robotaxi fleet by 50% in San Francisco following a crash Thursday night with a fire truck. TechCrunch has more: https://flip.it/z6wwHa #Tech#SelfDrivingCars#Technology
"the magic interval when a confidence trickster knows he has the money he has appropriated but the victim does not yet understand that he has lost it" (#JKGabraith)
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
They spent $2.5b on #SelfDrivingCars, producing a vehicle whose mean distance between fatal crashes was half a mile. Then they paid another company $400 million to take this self-licking ice-cream cone off their hands: