The article provide this: "Despite billions spent on safety technology, fatal truck-involved crashes are up ≈40% since 2014"
Though I wonder how much that number compares to how much the trucking industry grew in that time. If it grew 200% that would actually mean a big win for safety.
Edit: some quick, AI driven research suggests it might've grown 20%. So... Still an issue
I just looked briefly at the data provided by the NHTSA, and what I see is a jump after the pandemic, followed by declines in 2022 and 2023, contradicting the OP:
Because you only went to 2018. The article mentions 2014, and if we use your own DOT tool to build a table [0] from 2013 to 2023 (the latest year available), and filter to include large trucks and fatal collisions, we see... a ~42% increase in fatal accidents from 2014-2023
Yeah, me too. I tried to avoid linking the actual page (the generated table has a yellow banner explicitely calling out that the link cannot be bookmarked), but with a private window I get 401'd too.
Unfortunately I don't have time to go beyond an imgur link, or asking you to generate the table yourself :/
Your second link shows a slight reduction from '21 to '22, but even then it's still significantly higher than during '18 - '20. And it doesn't show anything prior to '18.
Tech companies, and in particular ad-driven companies, keep a very close eye on their metrics and can fairly accurately measure the cost of an outage in real dollars
This gets into the economics of whether it's more worthwhile to sell to a large, casual audience for say $10 or a small enthusiast audience at $30-40. At the enthusiast price I expect a polished game at launch and loads of reasonably priced expansions in the not too distant future.
If you asked someone 300 years ago what an automated dishwashing machine would've looked like, it would be a lot more like a person than the wet cupboard we have now. I'm assuming many tasks will be like that -- it's more of a lack of imagination for why we say we need a humanoid robot to solve that task. I'm assuming it'll be the minority of tasks where it make it makes sense for that
A robot that isn't stationary, in a home or in a factory, wants legs. Wheels are fine for cars but not great for stepping over things (like on cluttered floors) and stairs. So legs, assuming we've got the compute and algorithms to get them to work well, only make sense. The rest allows for application of creativity. As a human, have a head, my brain is in it, as are my eyes. Humanoid robot doesn't need a head, and can have cameras in its chest and on its back, and then also have its brain in the chest. Depending on what's useful, it doesn't need to be limited to two arms. It could have one centrally mounted in its chest, with two cheaper ones on both sides. Or four, two on each side. I've wished for three hands before. The problem though is that they look weird. Any non-traditional design is going to fall into the uncanny valley, so that no matter how much better your non-traditionally armed robot is technically, it's just not gonna sell to the mass market. We only have to look at weird cars/vehicles which have a history of being boondoggles. So it's not a failure of imagination, and more a matter of practicality.
This needs to be some sort of maxim: “The most useful robots are the ones that don’t look like (or try to be) humanoids.”
For some reason (judging by Fritz Lang, Gundam, etc.) humanity has some deep desire or curiosity for robots to look like humans. I wonder if cats want robot cats?
> humanity has some deep desire or curiosity for robots to look like humans.
I don't think you can draw that conclusion. Most people find humanoid robots creepy. I think we have a desire for "Universal Robotics". As awesome as my dishwasher is, it's disappointing that it's nearly useless for any other task. Yeah, it washes my dishes, but it doesn't was my clothes, or put away the dishes. Our desire for a humanoid robot, I think, largely grows out of our desire for having a single machine capable of doing anything.
The vast majority of “universal robots” are portrayed as humanoids in science fiction. Perhaps part of the reason is that true “universality” includes socializing, companionship, human emotions, and of course love.
Or, alternatively, general-purpose robots tend to be human-shaped because the world as it already is has already been fully designed for humans. Single doors are tall because that's the size of a human. Tools are designed to be held in something like a hand, sometimes two of them. Stairs are designed to be walked on, and basically any other traversal method just falls apart.
Of course, there is also the thing where authors and artists tend to draw anything with human intelligence as humans, from robots to aliens. Maybe it's the social reason you mention, or they just unconsciously have assumed humans to be the greatest design to ever exist. But even despite this, in a human world, I expect the first true general-purpose robots to be "standing" upright, with one or several arm-like limbs.
If you want to make a more general-purpose robot, then approximating a human form is rational, because our spaces and systems are designed for human interaction. At the moment, though, no-one has really succeeded at that, and all the successful robots are much more specialised.
Right but that's very task specific, and what many people want is a single robot which can do many different tasks, and do so without modifying the existing environment. I would love a robot which could cook and clean and do laundry (including folding) but I still need to live in the same space it would use. The most obvious way to do that is a humanoid robot, which is why nanny companies are working on it, and here he's arguing that's not going to work.
The other obvious way to do it is to centralize it, have a lift in your house that brings up meals and clean laundry to order, where you can put your dirty dishes in when you're done, and a central space where staff and robots take care of things.
I'm actually surprised or interested that this isn't more of a thing, it doesn't take any high tech either. I suppose people like having their own stuff, or people can't be trusted, or it's prohibitively expensive to outsource food / laundry (even if especially in the US ordering food or eating out is very common).
I've actually had the same experience the author describes -- me and a friend worked on a web game for 6 years together, and then later my friend made a steam port and extended the game. The experience was pretty awesome playing it for the first time; the connection to code review feels pretty trite in comparison.
The experience is more like discovering there was an extra book in a series you've read 20 times over. Except you were the original author!
...but why not by voice? "Vibe editing" images by voice doesn't offend my 20+ years of developing Photoshop skills the way that typing-out an imagined conversation between MacGyver and a 1980s image-editing-computer does. Oddly, I can't explain why either.
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What I dislike the most about "prompts" being the default input for AI models thesedays is the inability to "browse" its featureset to see what it's actually capable of. I don't want to spend minutes/hours throwing different natural-language commands at it to seeing if it understands chroma-keying from chromatic-aberration - or if it can do lossless JPEG block-level transformations. It's when something stops being a useful tool but a hinderance or even a toy (perhaps even with Achievements and microtransaction unlockables).
Though I wonder how much that number compares to how much the trucking industry grew in that time. If it grew 200% that would actually mean a big win for safety.
Edit: some quick, AI driven research suggests it might've grown 20%. So... Still an issue
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