Sunday, September 3, 2023

How Tiger Global fell to earth | Cherish your Uber drivers. Soon they will be robots | India's moon rover completes its walk, scientists analyzing data looking for signs of frozen water.

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Cherish your Uber drivers. Soon they will be robots - The Economist   

Like ChatGPT, self-driving vehicles are one of those marvels of artificial intelligence (AI) that make you pinch yourself when you encounter them because they seem so strange, and then pinch yourself afterwards because they become so familiar. The strangeness is quirky rather than scary. The robotaxi arrives at the tap of an app, with your initials quaintly lit up on the laser cone on the roof. You wave at it to stop, but there’s no driver with whom to make eye contact, so you run up the hill in hot pursuit until it finds a safe spot. Get in and a disembodied voice advises you that though the experience may be “futuristic”, you still have to buckle up. Then the steering wheel gently turns itself, and at a speed steady enough that you can use your laptop without feeling sick, you set off on a journey up the foothills of the AI revolution.

This part of the revolution is not yet on the breakneck scale of ChatGPT. Self-driving cars are AI in the physical rather than digital realm, and though it is annoying when chatbots “hallucinate”, any mischief-making by a robotaxi could be fatal. That is why safety, not speed, is paramount. Yet once you become accustomed to the experience, it is easy to imagine a future where more of life is spent in self-driving taxis; where commuters can work, watch videos or snooze while stuck in traffic; where tourists can sight-see without having to speak a foreign language; where lovers can escape the prying eyes of a driver. The questions are: how far away is that future, and what is the cost?

An immediate answer to the first question is that there are no signs of it yet in the drug-ravaged dystopia of San Francisco’s city centre. Schumpeter arrived there after taking a train from the airport. He tried to call a Waymo, but it is an area where robotaxis still fear to tread. He had to hail an Uber to reach Waymo territory. That is telling. After years of testing, Waymo (owned by Alphabet) and its rival Cruise (majority owned by General Motors) got the go-ahead from California’s regulators in August to sell driverless taxi rides across the city 24 hours a day. But they still lack permits to serve the airport, indicating how cautious supervisors remain. Both firms operate in parts of Arizona, and are expanding into more American cities. But the staggered San Francisco roll-out suggests self-driving taxis will not become ubiquitous with anything like the speed that Ubers or electric scooters did in the 2010s.

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