Uber wants to turn its drivers into a sensor grid for self-driving companies

A human doesn’t need to be shown every single road that exists in order to drive.

It'll shock you to know that you can simply get this from governments, some even provide this in API form

Of course, Waymo still has much more room for improvement. But it's much more efficient to supplement less but higher quality IRL data with large amounts of synthetic data, than to run a million data collection vehicles 24x7 because most IRL data is boring and useless.

Waymo said 6 years ago they simulate 20 million miles every single day [1]. Clearly, it's working for them given their scale of deployment right now.

[1] https://waymo.com/blog/2020/04/off-road-but-not-offline--sim...

I dunno about that. Tesla seems completely adrift, pretending to pivot with random forays into humanoid robotics or whatever, to the point that I wouldn't be surprised if they exited the consumer vehicle space altogether within the next decade. They have no answer for Chinese competitors.

The world model is basically intended as a more true-to-life simulator.

You can imagine improving i.e. a specialized math model (problem in, theorem out) with a normal LLM that knows lots of problems and theorems generally.

Is that the right kind of model for this particular application?

Accidents and near-collisions are exactly the kind of scenarios perfect for simulation. You don't test them out in the real world and risk injuries/deaths. You need to have confidence they're handled before you deploy.

There's nothing stopping the car makers from running their own taxi service and they already have networks of mechanics and cleaner as well as some level of storage. They'd need to scale up, but they don't need to start from zero.

Ubers success is in large part build on not having to own AND MANAGE their cars. With self-driving cars that advantage disappears, unless they're gaming that "drivers" will buy the cars and lease it to them.

I think enough people haven’t been in a Waymo to realise that the technology is basically here, and that we’re like 10 to 20 years of doubling away from AVs doing tens of millions of trips a day in America. By the time anyone has invested in true mass production of AVs, we’ll already be so far down that path that the policy deck will be dealt.

But that said, supposing we are looking at 60 years from now having a few billion fewer people on Earth, just by attrition (lack of replacement) that is not automatically bad. We could afford to shrink in population - if there’s a floor to that contraction. If indeed there are way too many people in a decade for the available human jobs, then it could be the equilibrium is just a lower population. Which could be temporary - who knows what the future could bring, such as possible space colonization, which may need more humans and also give people the hope that I think Gen Y and Z have lacked, which is one reason for their low repro rates.

The complete destruction of the human through exploitation and control, as seen in the article, is a major reason people are too unhappy to start families.

The worst part? Most people don't even know why, so there's never a general public reaction to fix it.

the only real argument for continued growth in to preserve the current structure of investment. that's your great filter, and it will result in economic collapse which isn't the same as extinction.

It’s here and it’s been here for decades - it’s just finally impossible to ignore or wave away

Gig workers are self-chattelizing because there is no floor to the depravity that society will accept, and an endless supply of people who will chattelize themselves for a moment of pleasure

Reminds me of when dockworkers resisted the shift to cargo containers. Those ports ultimately lost business in the end.

It sounds like a terrible business plan.