this post was submitted on 25 Jul 2023
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Oh well, at least the hype is distracting the US from attacking the more productive sectors China's economy. US government officials really seem fixated on whatever the current tech buzzword is.
Honestly, the self-driving car hype train from a decade ago made me a bit skeptical about the newest AI wave. In spite of the absolutely massive gains Nvidia's machine learning chips have made, Full Self-Driving is perpetually coming next year according to Tesla.
And the sad thing is that the self-driving vision is mostly about "how do we automate away an already precarious group of taxi/rideshare/lorry drivers."
Notice there's little discussion about automation as an efficiency tool (networking to smooth traffic flow, automatically draft for efficiency, schedule fleet vehicles for maximum utilization) Probably because trains already do it all better.
It's all either economic titans trying to own the space so they can invent dodgy new business models, or wrapping it for consumers as the same old self-indulgent car pap, almighty individual in his overpowered FreedomPod(tm) but now he can play Candy Crush instead of watching for pedestrians.
and honestly no matter how good you make self driving cars, they will always be inferior to trains, which China has plenty of! (although even they are still too carbrained, some of their highways are actual abominations
I kind of wonder, if “Buy America” wasn't a requirement and the US allowed China to bid for High Speed Rail contracts would the US already have decent HSR network by now?
No, the automobile lobby is too strong here. The US used to have an extremely strong railway network before the automobile industrialists destroyed it, and they won’t be letting their cashcow go that easily