> I feel morally obligated to use what I know to improve the state of the world. This has, unfortunately, led to a lot of unemployment and serious depression.
And as you would suspect, I'm a PhD grad working in the Bay area on mas surveillance AI. Half a million dollars a year.
I honestly don't know how to invest the money anymore. Index funds are boring at this point.
This is an example where companies could put people over profits and share what they’ve learned to keep things safe. I don’t see a lot of research papers (I see none) coming out of Waymo, Tesla, Uber, or Cruise.
This is another form of collaboration. You could publish your innovations in some technical forum w/o code and it'll automatically drive the industry forward since SOTA results will be available.
Right now, no one really knows the performance of the Waymo system. Millions of miles doesn't mean a lot. I can do billions of miles in a parking lot with no cars or pedestrians. Even millions of miles on road doesn't say anything about the performance of the components.
Is there a business model for providing detection data to other fleets in real time? This is a stretch of the word "collaboration" but it could possibly prevent deaths while leaving the IP in the hands of the company.
Why would I share technological innovations with another company?
Because nobody has a real market until some of these problems are solved significantly better than current state-of-the-art?
Having some baseline collaboration on common components and safety systems could plausibly move the entire industry towards viability much faster, both on a safety and tech trajectory and for regulatory oversight. It's not a crazy idea.
I would support laws that said, in effect, you can't compete on safety. Meaning, if one self-driving car[1] company comes up with the software equivalent of the seatbelt or the airbag I think they should not get exclusive right to implement it. They should have to share that with the other companies. I don't see how doing otherwise wouldn't put safety above profit.
So how do you compete? I don't know. Along other dimensions, I guess.
There is another aspect of this that I want to bring up: auto-autos should share data with each other and with the surrounding traffic infrastructure in real-time, for safety and for dynamic traffic-shaping. They should be able to cooperatively track pedestrians and non-automated vehicles. The cars and the roads and the signals and something like Waze should all be integrated and cooperating for maximum safety and efficient throughput with low latency. And they should all share experience (training data) of normal and exceptional events across the whole fleet (regardless of manufacturer.) Optimizing across the whole thing will be, uh, optimal. From this POV, non-cooperative behavior (due to the profit motive or just people being people) by any single actor will be seen as a bad-faith move and the network can be expected to route around it one way or another.
Because they pay you for a license, might be one reason. Maybe some system (possibly backed by legislation) makes it easy for them to share technology without some companies being freeloaders and others being suckers.
Competition obviously is a powerful motivator, but sharing tech can reduce costs for everyone, at least in theory.
Isn't it ethically preferrable for Waymo to push their own, better, safer system, as far as they can, rather than to improve competitor systems in a lesser way by sharing their secret sauce that competitors can only partially implement?
That's funny. Moving to a different country is a complicated and long process. It can take over a decade, require thousands of dollars in expenses and hundreds of hours of work. Investing in another country's stock market takes 5 minutes and you can do it on your phone. Shouldn't it be "feel free to buy a different index fund if you're not pleased with the growth in your country's index," instead of "feel free to relocate if you're not pleased with the quality of life where you currently live"?
That’s an incredibly dishonest put-down certain sort of people use.
For one thing, it’s not exactly easy to move to another country, not since World War I. You can’t simply pick a country and move to it - and you full well known that when you dismiss somebody with this sentence.
For another, I like my country. And I have every right to not like where it’s heading. “If you don’t like my politics, emigrate” is preposterous.
And as you would suspect, I'm a PhD grad working in the Bay area on mas surveillance AI. Half a million dollars a year.
I honestly don't know how to invest the money anymore. Index funds are boring at this point.