Good. Early action will prevent this from being made controversial later on by groups who might see it as a threat (eg police unions trying to maintain traffic tickets as a revenue stream for departments).
The thousands of accidents caused by human commercial drivers each year won't matter at all when the first high-profile driverless accident occurs. Expect the question all over the media to be "Are we really ready for driverless cars?" The unfortunate victim of the accident will have proposed laws named after them as everyone with an elected office rushes to reassure their voters that they're on top of the danger and can be relied upon to legislate it away. A safer, cleaner, easier future of transportation will hang in the balance as reason contends with panic in the public consciousness.
And people will start getting annoyed by the "too nice" driving habits that driverless cars will have to adopt. I'm sure that some passengers will be livid that their car refuses to tailgate people when they're in a hurry. Granted, that could be somewhat alleviated by allowing the car to switch in and out of driverless mode, but that causes new problems.
Remember that plane that went down because the inexperienced pilot didn't realize that the plane was actually letting him stall it due to the minor equipment malfunction?
Unions are a stronger force in CA than most states, so it will indeed get interesting once it's a real threat.
I can almost see it now, there will be a long interim period where even self-driving cars will require a union driver. You know, for public safety reasons.
You know when the motor car was first introduced, the law required a man with a red flag walk in front of it at all times. The excuse of course was for safety reasons :p
We are not going to evolve as a society until we abolish unionized labor. I know that this is a strong statement. And it is likely to attract serious disagreement. Take this as on man's opinion and nothing else.
It is my contention that in modern times unionized labor has done absolutely nothing good for our society. I understand that they had a time and a place to exist. Today, there's far more evidence of the damage they cause than the positive effects they may have been intended to produce.
Unions create a false economy. One where people are paid exorbitant amounts of money for work that could be done for less in an open market. Unions also create stagnation both in terms of innovation and of human capital. Union members exist in an isolated cocoon where there is no need to excel or evolve past your station. Unions damage competitiveness at a national and international level. Unions damage the economy and destroy industries by creating contracts with unreasonable terms, benefits and pensions. Unions in government create a nasty conflict-of-interest situation where hordes of people vote as a unified block supporting the very laws and politicians that regulate their own jobs (vote for your own pay raise, etc.). Unions also use this vote-by-mob approach to influence politics and the politicians that want their votes.
It is my opinion that unionized workers, as individuals, are generally good hard-working people. However, once their thoughts and actions are controlled by the need to support their "team" (the union) the collective can, and often becomes, evil in many ways. Case in point: UAW contract clause that causes car companies to have to retain workers displaced by automation. These workers earn full salary to do absolutely nothing. The Chinese have got to be laughing their asses off when they see us self-destruct this way.
Teacher unions are yet another example. The list of evils is too long to list here. The most basic one is the inability to fire bad or even down-right criminal teachers.
We would be able to move at a very different pace if unions went away. I won't hold my breath.
If you seriously think that using a couple of the worst offenders in Unions is a good argument for abandoning unionized labor, you're more ignorant than you have any clue. You could easily use the same kinds of arguments for why we should abandon corporations, governments, or really anything at all.
When you look at the majority of Unions- and yes, even those in California- they are one of the few things holding the economy up. As much as I'm one of those who wants to push science, evolution, and transhumanism to it's limit, when it comes down to it, a distributed economy beats a top-heavy economy every time, no matter what. Every example of economies with this large a difference in income disparity ends in disaster- literally every example we've ever had. There are no examples of where it was a good thing.
The common sentiment of futurists is 'a little pain to get us to utopia', but the problem is, that pain can kill us very quickly. Without unionized labor, you immediately and wholeheartedly condemn millions to poverty. Furthermore, you're simultaneously abolishing free speech- for what's the use of free speech, if no one can hear you?
My biggest issue with the anti-union crowd is that they don't realize that Unions are just another competing force, except instead of competing in the marketplace, they're competing in the production line. Why do you think our golden example, Silicon Valley, has managed to stay away from unions? It's because of treating their workers pretty damn well, by anyone's standards.
But as long as there are people working 16 hour days in 110 degree weather for $20 an hour in Central California, WITH the help of a union? You're never going to have a good argument that unions aren't a powerful force for good. You're just ignoring the other side.
>My biggest issue with the anti-union crowd is that they don't realize that Unions are just another competing force, except instead of competing in the marketplace, they're competing in the production line. Why do you think our golden example, Silicon Valley, has managed to stay away from unions? It's because of treating their workers pretty damn well, by anyone's standards.
I disagree. The problems with unions is that they don't have to compete. If hiring a union worker were an option, then yes, they'd be competing. But that's not how it works. It's hire them or be fined. Period. That's how it works. Being forced to hire a local guy at $40 an hour just because I'm in their jurisdiction is strictly anti-competitive. The world isn't huge anymore. Forcing to hire local makes no sense when there are better people (ahem me! ahem) suited for the work.
Not every Union is written into the law in the area. In fact, the vast majority(I'd estimate well over 80%) of Unions aren't even related to Government in the first place. Grocer's Unions, Retail Unions, Laborer Unions, Operating Engineer Unions, Metalworker, factory worker, etc etc etc. It's a fallacy that Unions don't have to compete. But I'd agree, that in the places that they don't? They're most likely overstepping and perhaps even causing issues.
First of all: If you are going to resort to ad-hominem attacks you are not going to get very far. I resent you characterizing me as "ignorant" and clue-less. It is uncalled for and without justification. You don't know anything about me.
I was not going to comment beyond that until I saw this:
"Unions- and yes, even those in California- they are one of the few things holding the economy up"
Really? How so? I think this is, again, utter nonsense. How are unions holding-up the US economy? You are joking, right?
You really should learn what an ad hominem attack is. If I say you're ignorant and clueless on the topics of labor in economies, based upon what you've said about labor in economies, that's not ad-hominem. That's just resorting to insulting you. However, I shouldn't have done it in the first place, and for that I apologize.
Currently, America has an estimated 11.4% of it's workers in a Union. These are people who universally are working jobs where they are getting better benefits/pay/work conditions than if there were not a Union. Now, considering that the majority of Union jobs are for positions not requiring college degrees, you're looking at a situation of helping the most vulnerable members of society still afford to live on a year to year basis- those who are least valuable to the economic system. To take away Unions, in the vast majority of cases, would cause a few basic results-
* Lowering of hourly pay
* Removal of benefits
* Worsening of work conditions
Now, I could take the reasonable argument that the first and third options would probably stay static in over half of the cases if Unions were to be removed. But without a Union, I don't think that suddenly these companies are going to decide to pick up paying for benefits. While some companies involved with unions pay for their employees' benefits, once again, the majority are given benefits by the union, including health and life insurance at the least, and many include more than that. So you're looking at the very least, with more people unable to afford healthcare.
In the end, yes, the members of the union don't pay out that money to dues- but this won't be enough to afford the benefits they have otherwise. And that means they won't be able to afford many of the other things in their lives, such as houses, cars, or most luxury items. You could make the argument, 'Their job isn't worth that much, they shouldn't be able to do that.', but remember- Unions are largely made up of those who couldn't afford to go back to college in the first place. Less and less young people are joining Unions because most of the newer, more modern industries don't have them. Essentially, unless you're going into government work or healthcare, you'll most likely be outside of the union system.
And this is all avoiding the basic point, that once again- there are a lot of jobs out there right now, that would be wholeheartedly unsafe without a Union pushing back at the employer. And not just unsafe because of simple things like railings, or dangerous locations- but things like overworking employees, dangerous weather conditions, etc. And many companies, even those under Unions, are still able to keep many of these conditions on their employees because the Union is either too new or just doesn't have enough leverage.
You could just as well rewrite that for any other politically convenient target:
We are not going to evolve as a society until we abolish corporatized capital. I know that this is a strong statement. And it is likely to attract serious disagreement. Take this as on man's opinion and nothing else.
It is my contention that in modern times corporatized capital has done absolutely nothing good for our society. I understand that they had a time and a place to exist. Today, there's far more evidence of the damage they cause than the positive effects they may have been intended to produce.
Corporations create a false economy. One where people are paid exorbitant amounts of money for work that could be done for less in an open market. Corporations also create stagnation both in terms of innovation and of human capital. Corporate shareholders exist in an isolated cocoon where there is no need to excel or evolve past your station. Corporations damage competitiveness at a national and international level. Corporations damage the economy and destroy industries by creating contracts with unreasonable terms, benefits and pensions. Corporations in government create a nasty conflict-of-interest situation where hordes of shareholders contribute as a unified block supporting the very laws and politicians that regulate their own companies (oversee your own pollution, legal compliance, etc.). Corporations also use this vote-by-dollar approach to influence politics and the politicians that want their cash.
It is my opinion that corporate managers and shareholders, as individuals, are generally good hard-working people. However, once their thoughts and actions are controlled by the need to support their "team" (the corporation) the collective can, and often becomes, evil in many ways. Case in point: HP had a contract clause that caused Carly Fiorina to get paid tens of millions of dollars just for getting fired. She earned tens of thousands of times the average worker's salary to actively damage the business. The Chinese have got to be laughing their asses off when they see us self-destruct this way.
Fossil fuel companies are yet another example. The list of evils is too long to list here. The most basic one is the inability to tax them for emitting pollution that threatens to criminally kill millions.
We would be able to move at a very different pace if corporations went away. I won't hold my breath.
Not actually arguing for the abolition of corporations, for that matter. Though my parody has some validity to it, so does what I was responding to. But my point is that there's a world of difference between noting there are some instances where an institution did a bad thing and saying that that would justify their abolition.
It's not by working with examples that you make a rule. It is by understanding the underlying logic and principles. It is fairly obvious that unions are self-centered organizations that aim only at benefiting themselves at the expense of the rest of society, as demonstrated by the post you made a parody of.
It is far less obvious to make a similar kind of statement about corporations. Corporations thrive mostly by satisfying customers/consumers/users/wider needs in society. When they stop doing so, they perish and disappear or shrink in a significant way. There are indeed very wrong things about Corporations links with Politicians (clear conflict of interests), patents abuse, etc... but as a whole, Corporations are enablers of innovation and progress in society.
It does not make much sense to try an analogy between corporations and unions.
It makes perfect sense to me. Let's try the switcheroo again:
It is fairly obvious that corporations are self-centered organizations that aim only at benefiting themselves at the expense of the rest of society, as demonstrated by the post you made a parody of.
It is far less obvious to make a similar kind of statement about unions. Unions thrive mostly by satisfying customers/consumers/users/wider needs in society. When they stop doing so, they perish and disappear or shrink in a significant way. There are indeed very wrong things about union's links with Politicians (clear conflict of interests), patents abuse, etc... but as a whole, unions are enablers of innovation and progress in society.
I don't really see where it works. Unions never care about the end users or customers. That's not their agenda. They only care about unions members benefits. They are the parasites of corporations.
Neither, for that matter, do publicly held corporations. Any caring about the end-user is a side effect of the primary mission of maximizing shareholder value.
Note that it's easy to come up with examples where unions, too, will fight for the end user. See, for instance, teachers' unions fighting for increased educational funding and smaller class sizes, or nurses' unions pushing for universal health care.
> See, for instance, teachers' unions fighting for increased educational funding and smaller class sizes, or nurses' unions pushing for universal health care.
Yeah, but you don't get it, I think. They pretend to be on the side to the end user, to get public support for their agenda. And when the State tells them they cannot do much to reduce the number of kids per class, then the unions come back on "salary negociations". They typically play the game of asking for irrealistic goals to push for more benefits, with the taxpayer money. I have seen this hundreds of time. And let's not forget the incredible pressure put on non-unionized employees by union members. This is downright criminal and would be considered as power harassment if it were from a boss or colleague, but since they are powerful unions, they can get away with everything.
That is part of the problem. They also never care about the long-term effects that their demands have on their employers. A case in point is pensions. The state of California is sinking under the weight of the ridiculous deals politicians (government workers) made with unions (of government workers) with regards to pensions. So, you have politicians who favor and need the vote of unions granting deals to unions of government workers to provide them with pensions and benefits that nobody in their right mind would even consider in the free world. The end-result is that they bankrupt the State and all of us end-up working for THEM. At the rate we are going even my kids will end-up working for the unionized government workers in California if we stay in this state. This is down-right criminal.
The vast majority of corporation exist in a free market economy. They compete with others for human resources and business.
On the political front, when was the last time you saw a corporation mobilize MILLIONS of their employees and align them to vote in support of a law or political candidate? What you are more likely to see is that a corporation has a diversity of people with different ideas and opinions. In other words, individuals.
I've worked inside a unionized environment. I know what it does to people. It's ugly. The comparison to the free market alternative is nothing less than ridiculous.
Do I really have to go into the musty bureaucracy of corporate hierarchies? The incestual relationship between CEOs and corporate boards? The sweetheart deals? The nepotism? The stacking of the deck against non-establishment players? The corruption of government to prevent market prices on pollution?
And sure, union culture mobilizes labor to vote because they have bodies. But corporations are more than happy to mobilize and coordinate billions of dollars to effectively bribe government officials, either pre- or post-election. And that's just directly: just as unions have fostered a culture where labor and their families will vote for their interests, corporations have fostered a culture where management and shareholders will give money to corrupt and warp government.
A small detail here. Corporations use THEIR money to follow what they want to do. That is not for your to decide what they should do or not do. Unless they indulge in illegal activities. And let's not make a generalization here. There may be a few big corporations actually involved in bribing, but most certainly a large majority has never done so. This is not the core of their business.
Unions regularly abuse taxpayer money with their agendas. And you have no say about it. Their business is corruption and pressure on officials. That is what they thrive on. Thay do not "produce" anything.
Corner bakery
Local health club
Childcare center
Starbucks
Children's Hospital
Cancer Centers of America
Local used car dealership
IT Consultant
Your kids' Karate studio
Your little girl's Dance studio
The restaurant you might frequent
The only remaining local book store
The Bed and Breakfast at that camping spot
The bicycle rental shop
Chevron
GE
United Airlines
Ford
The Humane Society
Microsoft
Google
Facebook
Apple
And, probably most businesses you frequent, recommend and have worked for.
All evil? All colluding to destroy the planet? All secretly communicating through back channels to concoct schemes to extract untold profits by polluting and buying-off politicians?
I don't know you so none of the following is aimed at you whatsoever. Again, this comment is not --it is NOT-- about you:
This is the kind of crap our colleges and universities are pounding into kids brains simply because most professors don't have a clue as to how the real world works.
Very often when I hear pro-union, anti-corporation, anti-business or anti-capitalism comments its from people who have had very little experience in what I call "the real world".
No experience in actually making something. No experience taking a risk; failing; taking another risk; failing again; not giving up; taking yet another risk; and finally succeeding. Yet, these people want and use all of the benefits that come from evil corporations and capitalism. And, yet again, these people think that entrepreneurs magically become evil once they make it and particularly if they make it big.
The very computers and the communications networks they use to spew-off these moronic ideas are monuments to the triumph of the free market system over every other idea in history. Yet, as they make use of everything that these economic system have provided they insist that all of it is evil.
I have yet to see one of these people forgo all that has come out of these evil systems and go live somewhere where capitalism is rejected and corporations are not allowed. Somewhere where, presumably, everything is owned and run by the --always benevolent, of course-- government and nobody is allowed to make a profit beyond a government-approved level. I'd love to see see folks who spew out these ideals actually live by their own words for a few years and then compare notes.
The good news is that we still have such bastions of alternative though in this world. Pick one. Go live there. Have fun.
To re-iterate, none of this is about you.
The general sentiment expressed by these groups also reminds me of an argument a good friend of mine had with his neighbor. He is into guns. I'm not, but I don't have any issues with people owning them. His neighbor is as anti-gun as you can possibly get, to the point of harassing my friend about his gun hobby (not very smart, if you ask me). They've had this argument for years. One day my friend decided to settle the argument once and for all. He had these nice large signs printed. The first red something like: "We own guns and support your right to own them" while the second said "We are against guns and don't own any". In the middle of the night he placed the sign on their corresponding lawns. Predictably, in the morning his doorbell rang. The neighbor was angry about this sign. When my friend asked him why this sign was a problem if it was what he believed he replied: "We'll get robbed". Case closed.
Don't like capitalism and corporations? Go find a place that does it some other way and enjoy.
> Don't like capitalism and corporations? Go find a place that does it some other way and enjoy.
Luckily enough (well it depends on one's perspective) we have a number of examples of how countries turn without free market, where evil, self-centered, corrupted corporations are abolished and where people are closer to experiencing true Paradise on Earth: Cuba, North Korea, the former Soviet Union, former East Germany, former China...
I don't think unions exactly are the problem. What is a problem is special treatment for unions, which has been achieved by union influence over policy makers. Of course, the same argument applies to many other problems, so it's not all the fault of unions.
What I do think should be applied to unions is the freedom to work in an industry without being covered by a union agreement. There should also be competition between unions for members, which in most cases doesn't exist. Unions use their monopoly positions in particular industries to screw the members over and the industry in which they are entrenched. Competition between unions could allow workers to choose which union they belong to, and thus which agreement they wish to work under.
The freedom for employees to associate to increase their bargaining power isn't necessarily a bad thing, in many ways, it's a good counterweight to the ability for people who own capital to force people into bad deals.
What is a problem is protection of union monopolies and regulations that tend towards unions being able to control industries. This is the same as any other organisation or group that gets a government mandated monopoly.
However, it's good to see these things being civilly discussed. You shouldn't be ashamed to hold an anti-union point of view if you can express it by argument and not by insult.
As is always the case, the problem has many facets. Yes, you are right, the special treatment of unions is a problem. The other problem is what unions extract or obtain from employers by sheer force. In any other context this would be called extortion.
I'll grant that there are places where unionized labor is probably still justified. Once case that comes to mind is mining. I say this out of complete ignorance as I don't know the first thing about the mining industry. Maybe even that industry is beyond unions as well.
One place where unions do not belong is in government. Here unions create a "gang" of people who act against their employer --our government-- and, of course, us, the tax payers. This is a huge conflict of interest. It creates a never-ending need for more and more money rather than creating a competitive environment where creativity and efficiency are rewarded, just like anywhere else.
I don't much care for unions and have severe reservations about their compatibility with public service in particular. However, if you think of a union as an employee-owned labor supply corporation that has a right to enter into exclusive contracts with labor purchasers, people clearly have a right to organize, market, and sell their labor, and suppliers asking buyers to enter into exclusive purchasing agreements for several years at a time is not so weird.
A long list not backed with facts of any kind? This is normally called a diatribe.
As for the Chinese, the CCP is the largest union in China.
As for the US, 12% of all workers are unionized[1]. With them representing 1:8 waged workers whats to stop other 7 from picking up the pace and showing those union workers how to really do a job?
If don't have to back-up anything. If you are interested you go and do the research, it's actually very easy these days. Also, I worked within a unionized environment for eight years. I have seen the beast from the inside. What it does to people and businesses is nothing less than horrible. I have seen people come to work drunk knowing full-well that they could not be fired for it. I have seen people sleeping at work. Again, can't fire them. I have seen people refuse to help out where help was needed because it was not in their union contract ("Can you help me move this (light) box? No. It's not in my contract"). I've seen people get paid $150K per year to do what most anyone would consider nothing or very little. Jobs that in the "outside" free market would not justify more than $15 per hour suddenly become $50 per hour + benefits + pension for life jobs in an unionized environment.
When you look at the fact that government is loaded with unionized workers one of the most immediate reactions should be: As tax-payers we are getting shafted. These people are getting paid lots more than their free market equivalents. Lots. And, of course, when you count lifetime pensions funded by taxpayers the numbers are far worst.
OK, since you are an evidence kind of guy (or gal, I don't know) I'll take the time to give you some of that data. Let's use this link:
Oh, wait a minute, that's the link YOU provided. Yup. Thanks. I reviewed the page and came up with these interesting notes:
"In 2011, among full-time wage and salary workers, union members had median usual weekly earnings of $938, while those who were not union members had median weekly earnings of $729."
Translation: If you do the math, median union worker wages are about 29% higher than equivalent free market workers.
I'll leave it to the reader to Google a little and find data comparing wage differentials by occupation.
Here's another one:
"In 2011, 7.6 million employees in the public sector belonged to a union, compared with 7.2 million union workers in the private sector."
Sounds fairly benign, right? Until you read the next two sentences:
"The union membership rate for public-sector workers (37.0 percent) was substantially higher than the rate for private-sector workers (6.9 percent). Within the public sector, local government workers had the highest union membership rate, 43.2 percent."
So, on average 37% of government workers are unionized. And, if you look locally, over 43% belong to a union.
Only 7% of free-market workers are unionized!
Something stinks here. Government workers figured-out how to game the system by unionizing. We now work for them.
This is where the huge conflict of interest is created. Government workers belong to unions in staggering numbers and they vote and act as a block. They also enlist the support of other unions in getting behind legislation and politicians who will keep throwing candy at them. Again, all you have to do is look at California and the disaster that politicians and unions have created to understand how badly this can degenerate.
"a research team based at Stanford University and headed by Joe Nation, a former Democratic state assemblyman, released an updated analysis of state and local pension funds, concluding that they are underfunded by hundreds of billions of dollars and, unless reformed, will seriously erode future financing of schools, health care and other services."
Anyhow, you can believe what you'd like. You can believe that corporations are evil. And that's fine. That will not change reality. Even when corporations cover everything form the corner bakery to Apple. And, BTW, nobody ever claims that Apple is evil. It's those other evil corporations. Also, nobody ever seems to state at what revenue level corporations become evil. Or after what number of employees? By any measure Apple should be one of the most evil corporations in the world. The reality that remains unchanged is that we and our children are very likely to have to pay for union pensions for the rest of our lives. And, that, among other things, is horribly wrong.
While I could be more ignorant than I have a clue (as someone in this thread kindly pointed out) the sad reality is that even this does not alter the facts. If it did I'd gladly declare myself to be an utter idiot. The facts are that unions are causing and will continue to cause a lot of damage at many levels. Here in California we ought to seriously look at the idea of, at the very least, removing them from government.
What planet is this union shop supposedly on? I've worked as a temp in a unionized printshop in a right to work state. The unions had the owners buy, for everyone, ear protection. They made sure everyone took regular breaks and 30 minute lunches (last thing you want is some idiot making mistakes from low glucose at a press). They also had the audacity to ask the owners to run the airconditioning (this was SE Florida) at comfortable levels.
I call your union story bullshit. Coming into work drunk violates a dozen local, state and federal laws, not to mention your own company contract. No union is going to protect you from that. They will help you find a lawyer.
You other arguments never even back up your previous post. Nothing you've posted has anything to do with how unions are screwing business. They make too much money. Guess what? everyone wants more money. Calpers is going bankrupt, it's available to all government employees. So how is pensions going bankrupt the unions fault? only 37% of the gov't employees are in one.
Purely as a comment on the structure of their argument -- I'm not sure where I stand on the issue they're talking about -- they're not singling out unions. They're just saying it's a necessary condition, not saying it's the only necessary condition. Surely someone can talk about an individual condition without having to talk about them all.
As for why it passed 37-0, it's almost all upside; all the data indicate that it can only reduce the externalities of vehicle usage (pollution, accidents), which externalities are already very well documented and understood. Even where the technology breaks down, a single point of failure (autonomous driving system) is far easier to analyze, budget for, and litigate from a product liability point of view. Google is much more likely to be a rational actor than an aggregated population of vehicle users, and risk premium can be very easily calculated for the number of vehicles that are deployed. As adoption increases, the roads are likely to get safer and faster; my only real worry would be about whether manual driving would be restricted and penalized. Then again, since I don't have a car that's largely an academic concern to me. I used to enjoy riding a motorcycle but I feel fairly confident that an automated driver would do a better job than I would over the long haul.
The other big reason is economic; with all the data pointing towards automated driving as the wave of the future and the leading commercial innovator being here in California, and California facing a $16 billion deficit, the prospect of Mountain View becoming Detroit 2.0 for a global market is a no-brainer. California has also been quietly stepping towards building an electric car infrastructure: Gov. Brown used his powers to take a windfall legal settlement related to the CA power crisis a decade ago (think Enron) and apply it to the construction of charging infrastructure without needing to get legislative approval. http://gov.ca.gov/news.php?id=17463
I'm thinking that automated clean vehicle swarms are the increasingly-credible strategic alternative to high-speed rail in California. I really like trains, but the HSR project looks like a fiscal, bureaucratic, and legal disaster. If we can slash the costs of driving then we could probably cut down the cost of vehicle construction, not to mention creating an entirely new set of goods for manufacture. With reliable automated vehicles, you don't necessarily need people to drive them, so pickup and delivery could essentially be done by autonomous large wheelbarrows instead of needing to have cabs on the front for humans to sit in.
One advantage of clean, automated cars over trains: they are far more agile (in the buzzword sense), which is another point for why they're likely to be more sustainable.
To elaborate what I mean: regardless of how you evaluate the pros and cons of the California HSR project (I'm skeptical myself), some unfortunate realities of it is that it will be far more centralized, require far more planning, necessitate the build out of a complicated and new infrastructure, and not be cheaply scaled or repurposed. Automated cars are the complete opposite. They can easily be used on our existing infrastructure. If you need to go to a new place, you simply flatten and pave a long rectangle of area that's a couple meters wide. They merely need to be allowed instead of planned for (the problem is small enough and the incentives easily created enough that a corporation can realistically accomplish the necessary R&D and planning). And if they turn out to be a hit, it's relatively easy to just sell more of the automated cars.
And let's grant, for a moment, the rosiest projections of California HSR, and it's just a matter of doing it right. It's still a complicated, multidecade-long undertaking: all it takes is a random idiot in Sacramento or DC hellbent on sabotaging the project to change it from a convenient way to get from SF to LA to a one-way ticket from Fresno to Bakersfield. Needless to say, there are lots of random idiots in government ranging from incompetent to hellbent on sabotaging any potentially good government program: should we really be betting a costly attempt to ensure our ecological well-being on the hopes that neither type will come into power for the next 20 years? (This might be construed as giving into metaphorical terrorism, but thems the breaks.)
This also is not a matter of public versus private transit: it's trivially easy to imagine buses taking advantage of them to lower costs significantly, and not at all difficult to imagine totally new forms of public transit being made available.
I completely agree. I wanted to like the HSR project, but between bureaucracy and negotiation problems like holdouts by private actors, environmental litigation by private attorneys-general [1] and so forth, it just looks doomed. The fact that they don't anticipate electrifying the rail lines from San Francisco to San Jose until 2020 is just absurd. Last time I went down to Stanford (~35 miles from where I live) for a conference, the only way I could get there by 8am on Saturday morning by public transport required a $60 taxi journey for the last few miles, or taking a bus to San Jose and then going back north from there.
1. Dredging the port of Oakland to allow larger ships to dock (thereby boosting the Bay area economy) sounds like such a simple idea, and yet it took 25 years of litigation and a major rethink in the management of infrastructure projects to get it done: http://www.law.nyu.edu/ecm_dlv/groups/public/@nyu_law_websit...
all it takes is a random idiot in Sacramento or DC hellbent on sabotaging the project to change it from a convenient way to get from SF to LA to a one-way ticket from Fresno to Bakersfield. Needless to say, there are lots of random idiots in government ranging from incompetent to hellbent on sabotaging any potentially good government program
I'm not all that familiar with local US politics... why would anyone in government be hell-bent on sabotaging a high-speed rail network that will help their state/county/etc?
The main reason is that what helps the state doesn't necessarily help every county equally. To have high speed rail, you have to have trains that don't stop everywhere. High-speed rail from SF to LA might be good for California, but politicians elected by Fresno and Bakersfield will want it to stop in Fresno and Bakersfield. Which makes it more useful for those people, but less useful as a whole.
You certainly get robots delivering items in factories/warehouses which e.g. stop if a worker steps in front of them, but that might be too limited and controlled compared with a public highway.
If anyone has ever lived in California, they will know that trains obviously aren't a practical option for most transportation needs. Due to extreme sprawl, cars are required almost everywhere in California, and only the poorest of the poor go without them.
However, with automated vehicles, trains or something like them could be very logical ways to connect relatively distant urban areas.
Johnny Cabs always annoyed me. Why do you need an animatronic driver taking up valuable seating space? Why not just have a voice in the dash?
Peering into the future always has the strange cruft of taking current business models and behaviour forward with it. I know it's only movies, but they are a way people look into the future.
It's like Dick Tracy. Somehow people could believe talking into a two-way wristwatch was somehow believable. If he had a small rectangular 'phone' in his pocket to talk to, that would have been ridiculous, right?
This is great of California's Govt, and I really can't wait to use this form of transit. However, which of the following is going to make this increasingly difficult, and how does Google and friends plan to supplant them?
* car manufacturers -- less need for [fancy] cars when
* no one is looking
* computers are doing the handling
* car manufacturers -- less need to purchase cars
* there are less owners -- cars are more easily shared
* there are less totals -- cars crash less
* there is less wear and tear on autonomous driving
* insurance providers -- less claims... less revenue
* etc...
Will atonomous cars hit these players' bottom lines? What can they do to lobby against autonomous cars actually coming to fruition? I see it being akin to the MAFIAA vs. Entertainment Industry and possibly worse.
Car ownership for status reasons would not change. The market would still be stratified by style, size, badge/brand and features.
The introduction of driverless cars, if anything, is likely to make total miles driven go up. The actual number of cars purchased would go up as long as the miles are going up. The number of individual purchasers doesn't matter, it's how many old cars are getting worn out that matters. They get serviced as they wear out, and manufacturers would still make plenty of money doing that. Even more so, probably, because they could program the cars to come in for a service when needed, guaranteeing them more service revenue.
Insurance providers would only be too happy to write out policies on overall crash/theft data that doesn't involve random events like people falling asleep or driving drunk. If anything, it would make vehicle insurance easier. But the number of claims doesn't really matter to an insurer - they expect to pay out all of their policy revenue on claims - what matters is investing the pool of funds well in the holding period between policy income and claims expense.
Any new product can only be positive for the people who make them. The only ones looking at real trouble are those who don't enter the market (if it turns out to be a success) or those who chase the wrong ideas, plus people who make a living driving cars.
Does this mean that you can hop into the back seat and let the car drive unsupervised or is a driver in the driver seat still mandatory? And if a driver in a driver seat is still mandatory, then why do they need this piece of legislation in the first place. How is this different from driving a car using other less sophisticated yet still autonomous technologies.
From what I've seen in ai-class.com and cs373 on udacity: The cars are completely autonomous. The only reason there's a human in the driver's seat is legislation because it's mandatory that there is a person in the driver's seat.
But, the cars are already at the stage where you can feel safe just reading a book while sitting in there. They work in normal San Francisco traffic without any intervention at any time by the human.
They even plan their own routes and can change them when something strange happens on the road so they're forced to take a detour. They even wait for pedestrians crossing streets, follow all traffic rules and so on.
It's really quite amazing when you think that just 8 years ago the DARPA challenge wasn't finished by a single car that entered the race. (and that was without traffic, just a desert with roads)
A little side note, riding in the desert might seem like a no-brainer, but it's really really really hard for a computer to make sense of the terrain or what's ahead, which is why it took some time for the first cars to even finish the race. A lot of the technology that has been developed just to make sense of the terrain is now used to keep track of pedestrians, other cars and obstacles.
On one hand I think this is great because it will help research in that domain move forward (no pun intended), but I can't help but think of the very strong lobbying from Google that had to have been necessary for it.
"The California bill, which passed in a 37-0 vote"
A 37-0 vote for something that is far from being productized or even clearly defined (what defines "self-driving car" vs. other assistive technologies?) and has very serious and legitimate safety and legal (e.g. who's responsible of accidents?) concerns, is at the least surprising.
As a Google employee unaware of any of our lobbying in this matter, I would suggest you ask yourself these questions:
1. Why would Google lobby to produce a unanimous vote, which is not necessary to pass such a law?
2. If Google did so, what would the marginal cost of each superfluously lobbied vote be? Consider that the 37th voter on the fence can ask for a whole lot in such a scenario.
3. Is the marginal cost of lobbying to convince each and every of the 37 voters worth whatever benefit you derived in the first question?
I wonder how much this industry could be or already is locked down by patents? Anybody know? The cynical part of me worries that, if this isn't bogged down by obstructionists, then most of the economic advantage will be captured by Google or some other big monopoly.
I believe that, if this works out, it will be a huge technological improvement that will dramatically improve the quality of life of a lot of people. Imagine all the people who can't drive right now because they are disabled, for example. Many of those people who live in suburban or rural areas are just stuck inside a lot of the time. Having a car that can park itself somewhere away from where its passengers are dropped off is another big advantage. Or maybe it won't be much of a net benefit to average people because they'll have to fork over tons of money to have an automated vehicle.
Self-driving cars are a risky technology that requires large, long-term capital investments and genuine innovations. If Google is granted a 20-year monopoly on their in-house inventions, to me that would be a fair and proper use of the patent systems.
I'm opposed to the patent-troll business practices that have arisen recently, but not opposed to a patent system that grants rights to genuine innovators who take risks to bring new developments to market.
The other companies who will want this technology (car companies) are extremely well connected politically, and infinitely more experienced than Google at lobbying (see gas mileage requirements).
Google simply won't be allowed to monopolize the technology, no matter what patents they have.
Seems like they are looking for partnerships (they wouldn't really want to get into the business of integrating and building the whole hardware I expect):
> While Google had no immediate plans to commercially develop the system, the company hopes to develop a business which would market the system and the data behind it to automobile manufacturers (from the Wikipedia page).
Every time the subject of Google's driverless cars comes up, here or anywhere, almost 100% of the discussion always seems to presume that this technology is heading directly towards consumers as a travel solution. While I'm sure it'll get around to that eventually, I think the realization of a scifi-like fantasy might be distracting people from a more obvious, practical reason for Google to be doing this.
Sebastian Thrun co-developed Street View. You know, with all those cars driving around gathering information about meatspace? One might say... crawling meatspace? Thrun is also a major force behind the driverless car project. Isn't it likely that for Google, at least for now, this is all about making a system of real-world crawlers, exactly analogous to its web crawlers?
What is it about google that causes people to throw all of their thinking ability out the window?
This isn't some conspiracy to inundate you with ads, this has nothing to do with building "crawlers" for meatspace (seriously?).
This is a multi billions dollar industry that is potentially as large as google is on the internet, but in "meatspace".
This is as disruptive as google was to the internet, probably moreso. Actually, almost certainly moreso. Our ties to automobiles dictate the way cities are built, and the way that we interact with our environment.
Gee whiz, google employs an absolute shitload of brilliant engineers and encourages them to work on side projects. It appears that some of them have built something.
NO NO! Must be some alterior motive! Couldn't be that google is a business, and this is a viable revenue stream for them!
I see your point about the tone, but it's true that widespread adoption of such technology would yield interesting new technology for Google too. As a simple example, shifting traffic patterns are a useful leading indicator of economic change at a very high resolution. You can get a lot of statistically useful data from a surprisingly small sample size (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sample_size_determination). Consider, for example, the length of time cars spend in the parking lot at a shopping center. When you have that for hundreds of individual cars per day and/or longitudinally (over repeat visits) you can infer an awful lot of data about the local business climate in a non-intrusive way. Even if you make the cars wholly autonomous and don't collect data on individuals there's still a lot of environmental data that can be usefully harvested.
I see it the other way around. One thing driverless cars need is very accurate geo-data to be any use. If a car is going to turn up at 1 Long st, it needs to know exactly where that is.
While there is no doubt these 'crawlers' will gather data while 'crawling', to me it's unlikely that this is their intended purpose.
The real winner for automated vehicles is automated delivery of stuff. The big cost for a pizza delivery service is paying the guy behind the wheel to drive a 1 ton vehicle around to deliver 1 pizza.
With automated delivery comes a reduction in size, weight, fuel consumption and of course, cost. It also gets around the problem of people not wanting to 'passenger' in an automated car.
I've said it before - think of those little box-like droids that zip around in star wars films. Imagine each one of those in UPS livery taking a small set of packages to a set of destinations. Tied in with online shops, I think you're looking at the future of retail.
People talk about automatic delivery, but how does the car get inside the pedestrian gate at my apartment building and up the stairs to leave the package outside my door?
1) It's not real-time: it would likely refresh data every couple of weeks. That limits the number of applications.
2) The data gathered would be... well, my lack of imagination is stumping me here. The number and species of trees people have? The color of their houses? New business openings? Typical length of lines outside the door? The existence and extent of potholes on the road?
3) I'm sure even expanding street view would be valuable. But the leap from effective autonomous vehicles providing street view data on public roads to autonomous vehicles providing transportation to real consumers seems pretty small to me.
I have a strong hunch on this one that the limitations are on our imaginations, and not on the potential applications once such an infrastructure existed.
I agree that the leap to transportation is small and that it will happen. I just can't see why Google would have been motivated to do it for that reason, but I can see World Crawlers as a natural evolution of their core mission.
It seems to me that a fleet of driverless information-gathering cars would be a natural component of a world with driverless cars. Primarily they'd be used for continuously mapping roads for any potentially useful information or dangers, eg lane closures, construction, potholes, etc. From there, though, there's no reason you wouldn't naturally start gathering more information: traffic, weather conditions, strength of cell/wifi signals, ambient noise levels, and all sorts of other things. A highly distributed network of sensors could provide all sorts of interesting information.
(Note that there's no reason that they'd even have to be empty cars. I see no reason why every car couldn't or wouldn't be decked out with sensors and reporting back to Google.)
I think there are a couple interesting issues with self-driving cars.
1. Liability: How does an insurance company properly underwrite a self-driving auto policy? How is fault/liability determined if there's an accident?
2. Privacy: Does it make sense to have self-driving vehicles synced to each other to optimize road safety? Will there be a "black box" recording driving data? Or even a camera? Who will have the right to access that data?
California state Senator Alan Lowenthal said of the autonomous car he rode in, "I have to say that there are some still [sic] issues with it, but it's a better driver than I am." I just read this after hearing Larry Page tell Charlie Rose that the autonomous cars as of May 21st are currently better than most drunk drivers but less skilled than the average human. I really hope he stays off the road for a while.
Is there an alternative to the current Lidar they use to generate the world map? I imagine something more integrated into the car would be better for commercialization. Maybe a series of smaller sensors?
Self driving cars well have to be specially equipped- it's not unreasonable to add LIDAR as the standard fare for these cars. After all, it's extremely well suited for the task
I can't wait to see self-driving cars that come out of other companies (as the article briefly mentioned at the end). This is a complex system that Google and its computer scientists are well suited to build. Not so much the same story at GM or Toyota, I'd imagine.
I think economic reasons will actually come first. Traffic jams will be a thing of the past if all the cars on the road are automated, and the length and slow speed of the daily commute is a bigger issue than the risk of death from driving for nearly everyone I know (of course that's anecdotal).
You say that as if human-operated cars aren't already the planet's foremost killing machines.
Honestly, in terms of safety, having your automated car do "better than a human driver" is a pretty low bar, compared to the risks faced everywhere else in your life.
