I see. These vehicles can “weave through each other”. Great. Can they weave through pedestrians? If they can, are pedestrians biologically capable of avoiding massive stress from being “woven through” by large fast-moving objects?
If it did work,or for any other fleet system, here are some futher predictions:
The code won’t be public. People are routinely thrown in prison right now based on output from non-public code.
It will be basically impossible to go anywhere without creating a record. These records will be kept basically forever and will be accessible to more or less any powerful institution… but not to YOU, Citizen. This will most likely be used to profile you for various purposes, many of which you probably wouldn’t see as in your interests. If this is somehow avoided, then the interiors of the shared vehicles will literally be smeared with shit.
Those interiors will be utilitarian (perhaps able to survive being hosed off...) and not especially comfortable.
While you’re whizzing along on low friction bearings, advertising will be blaring at you. If it’s possible to shut it up at all, it will cost you.
If this is somehow avoided, then the interiors of the shared vehicles will literally be smeared with shit.
The system would work like this: If a car arrives and a user finds it’s smeared with shit, they report it, it goes into the depot for a check. Since the record tells us how long they were with the car, we know it wasn’t them who applied the shit[1]. We infer that it was the person before them. We get a license to decrypt their name and address. We fine them. I don’t know why you would think this was unsolvable.
[1]: it’s possible a person could, in the two seconds after opening the door of a clean car, throw in a bucket of shit, close the door, then report the damage. People don’t generally do that.
Hmm. It occurs to me that this behaviour looks a lot like someone using the cars as a garbage can, which some assholes might legitimately want to do. Someone would have to be a sociopath to realize that they could do this and get away with it. It would be rare. If they’re using it for regular trash disposal, that could probably be proven in court. Look at them, look at the person they’re accusing. You can probably figure out which one is the motherfucker pretty easily in most cases. The incentive to do this isn’t there.
Since the record tells us how long they were with the car, we know it wasn’t them who applied the shit
Right. That’s why I only said the shit-smearing would happen if the record-making werer somehow avoided. Assuming you can actually keep track of who’s using it, you can deter vandalism most of the time.
You might have trouble with out-of-towners or people with nothing to lose, though. And let’s not make it too simple; it’s a BIG DEAL to ban somebody from the only available form of transportation… that’s something you wouldn’t want to see done without due process.
If they can, are pedestrians biologically capable of avoiding massive stress from being “woven through” by large fast-moving objects?
Are people biologically capable of sitting in a theatre in front of an image of an oncoming train? I think for anyone with mental fluidity, it will be hard to avoid coming to relate to cars… sort of in a similar way to how we relate to cattle. A single cow could kill you. They’re enormous, heavy, they run faster than you. But they’re afraid of you. They refuse to touch you.
There’s still a point there, though. In many cities, a lot of people will want ot be on the road. That will be annoying. See any intersection crossing in a major city, it gets crowded. I think retaining the same laws for pedestrians might be the best solution… traditional pedestrian crossings do slow down urban traffic, yeah? But are they the bottleneck?
I can’t work with this resignation to the code not being public. That would be an awful awful outcome. The cars wouldn’t be able to coordinate, they’d just end up having to drive mostly like humans. It would be hard to guarantee public safety. There would be huge political pressure for the code to be public. It might not amount to anything in america (though even that claim seems diliriously cynical to me), but elsewhere, it would amount to plenty, and once, EG, Germany did it, the pressure to copy it would be overwhelming. It wouldn’t be hard to do, because it’s an open system.
ad hellscape
I don’t believe these are really possible. Advertising garners the advertiser very little value per-user. It economically cannot be netting the advertiser service so much that you couldn’t just pay them a nominal fee to have them stop advertising you if it was bothering you. All that’s needed is a good, low-friction payment platform. We don’t have one, right now, so we still see ad-funding everywhere. If BAT takes off, it’ll end. Small donations will more profitable than advertising and any user with any taste will prefer paying 4 dollars a month (not per service, distributed between all services) over seeing ads.
The poor, at least under complete information, would not need to pay as much to offset the value of advertising to them, because advertising to them is not as profitable.
And if some way were found to increase the profitability of advertising, to make it more likely to change your behavior… the only way to do that to you is to make the information seem useful to you, and unless you’ve abdicated from faith in talking and critical reason, that seeming can only be sufficed by making it actually useful to you. This outcome could not be described as a hellscape. That would be an efficient information routing system and it would be extremely helpful.
The only remaining case for awful advertising that I can see just collapses to a case for arbitrary extortion… which is just… okay you don’t believe there will be open code. Well. Fight. You’ve seen what will result from a closed marketplace. Fight it.
I can’t work with this resignation to the code not being public. That would be an awful awful outcome. The cars wouldn’t be able to coordinate, they’d just end up having to drive mostly like humans.
Sure they could coordinate. They’d use the ISO 27B-6 Car Coordination Protocol, which would be negotiated in a mind bogglingly boring and bureaucratic process by the representatives of the various car companies. Those companies would have big bakeoffs where they tested against each other’s implementations. They would probably even hire auditors to check one another’s implementations.
You could buy a copy of 27B-6 for 250 dollars or so.
The IP network we’re talking over uses public protocols. Some specs are free, but you have to pay for others; you couldn’t build a smart phone (legally, and including building the chips that go into it) without spending thousands of dollars for copies of standards. And a ton of the products involved have private code.
It’s not that hard to get an ISO protocol into public availability if people care about it. There’s sci-hub. For the more traditional way, you likely will have lawsuits about accidents that still happen and those might put a lot of the relevant documents into the court proceedings and thus into public domain.
Here’s the thing though. There’s less of an immediate need for an cars that can cross the boundaries between cities, for long trips it becomes reasonable to ask the user to change cars. The systems can be localized. If this is treated as a municipal issue- which it is- similar to public transport, it will be exposed to a lot more effective political light. A lot of municipal governments are corrupt, but most of them are more representational than national government. If the public can be convinced to say “actually we would like it to stay cheap, free and safe”, a lot of people will listen.
Are people biologically capable of sitting in a theatre in front of an image of an oncoming train?
The whole reason you’d put an image of an oncoming train in a movie would be that it does stress the audience. A little stress can be fun.
I’m not so sure that people would be very comfortable with cows if cows were in the habit of running nearly silently out of nowhere and passing them 2 meters away at 40 km/h. I think after one cow did that in front of me and another one did it behind me a second or two later, while a stream of cows whooshed by on the cross street, I’d start to get pretty nervous about cows. I guess maybe I’d get used to it if I’d had years of experience to show me that cows unerringly avoided me. But I wouldn’t bet too much on it.
But that’s neither here nor there; I don’t think the vehicles could reliably miss the pedestrians to begin with, and you seem to agree.
Where? No, I think that’d be fairly easy, though not something you’d want them to have to do too often, I’d guess it’d require them all to slow down a lot.
The only remaining case for awful advertising that I can see just collapses to a case for arbitrary extortion… which is just… okay you don’t believe there will be open code.
So, if the advertising is there by default, that means that the advertiser is already “extorting” my attention, and has already shown a willingness to extort money from me to make the advertising go away.
More correctly, the advertiser already seems to see my attention is their property, rather than mine. If that’s how they view it, the price of selling it back to me isn’t going to be determined by what they make off the ads. It’s going to be determined by how much they think I will pay to be left alone, at least unless I have some other leverage. If you want to call that extortion, then, fine, I believe there’ll be extortion. I don’t believe they’ll think of themselves as engaging in extortion, though.
All that’s needed is a good, low-friction payment platform. We don’t have one, right now, so we still see ad-funding everywhere. If BAT takes off, it’ll end.
I don’t know what BAT is, but I do know that we all wanted micropayments instead of an advertising-supported Internet in 1990.
Even if you have a good micropayment protocol it can be hard to get everybody enrolled. Remember, you have to enroll everybody you’d see on a city bus. That means the 12 year old kid, the homeless guy, the 85-year-old who already has trouble every time they change the coin till, and even the crazy drunk. They all have to be able to figure it out, they all have to be able to get an account, they all have to be able to fund stuff, etc.
I don’t know what BAT is, but I do know that we all wanted micropayments instead of an advertising-supported Internet in 1990.
What makes you think so? When I heard Marc Andreessen opinion on the topic, than he said that one of the main reasons why payment in the internet didn’t get implemented is because the guys didn’t bother.
Phone calls and SMS do have payment options and there’s no foundamental reason why they didn’t bake payment into the web on a basic level expect that they didn’t bother at the time and focused their attention on developing different features.
BAT is Basic Attention Token, part of the Brave project IIRC. Though it’s not necessary for micropayments replacing advertising, it’s a direct path.
It’s weird to think that digital micropayments simply weren’t possible until cryptocurrency started to attack the legal barriers, but that is what I’m thinking.
I see. These vehicles can “weave through each other”. Great. Can they weave through pedestrians? If they can, are pedestrians biologically capable of avoiding massive stress from being “woven through” by large fast-moving objects?
If it did work,or for any other fleet system, here are some futher predictions:
The code won’t be public. People are routinely thrown in prison right now based on output from non-public code.
It will be basically impossible to go anywhere without creating a record. These records will be kept basically forever and will be accessible to more or less any powerful institution… but not to YOU, Citizen. This will most likely be used to profile you for various purposes, many of which you probably wouldn’t see as in your interests. If this is somehow avoided, then the interiors of the shared vehicles will literally be smeared with shit.
Those interiors will be utilitarian (perhaps able to survive being hosed off...) and not especially comfortable.
While you’re whizzing along on low friction bearings, advertising will be blaring at you. If it’s possible to shut it up at all, it will cost you.
The system would work like this: If a car arrives and a user finds it’s smeared with shit, they report it, it goes into the depot for a check. Since the record tells us how long they were with the car, we know it wasn’t them who applied the shit[1]. We infer that it was the person before them. We get a license to decrypt their name and address. We fine them. I don’t know why you would think this was unsolvable.
[1]: it’s possible a person could, in the two seconds after opening the door of a clean car, throw in a bucket of shit, close the door, then report the damage. People don’t generally do that.
Hmm. It occurs to me that this behaviour looks a lot like someone using the cars as a garbage can, which some assholes might legitimately want to do. Someone would have to be a sociopath to realize that they could do this and get away with it. It would be rare. If they’re using it for regular trash disposal, that could probably be proven in court. Look at them, look at the person they’re accusing. You can probably figure out which one is the motherfucker pretty easily in most cases. The incentive to do this isn’t there.
Right. That’s why I only said the shit-smearing would happen if the record-making werer somehow avoided. Assuming you can actually keep track of who’s using it, you can deter vandalism most of the time.
You might have trouble with out-of-towners or people with nothing to lose, though. And let’s not make it too simple; it’s a BIG DEAL to ban somebody from the only available form of transportation… that’s something you wouldn’t want to see done without due process.
I said you just fine them for damages. Why would you call for a ban?
Are people biologically capable of sitting in a theatre in front of an image of an oncoming train? I think for anyone with mental fluidity, it will be hard to avoid coming to relate to cars… sort of in a similar way to how we relate to cattle. A single cow could kill you. They’re enormous, heavy, they run faster than you. But they’re afraid of you. They refuse to touch you.
There’s still a point there, though. In many cities, a lot of people will want ot be on the road. That will be annoying. See any intersection crossing in a major city, it gets crowded. I think retaining the same laws for pedestrians might be the best solution… traditional pedestrian crossings do slow down urban traffic, yeah? But are they the bottleneck?
I can’t work with this resignation to the code not being public. That would be an awful awful outcome. The cars wouldn’t be able to coordinate, they’d just end up having to drive mostly like humans. It would be hard to guarantee public safety. There would be huge political pressure for the code to be public. It might not amount to anything in america (though even that claim seems diliriously cynical to me), but elsewhere, it would amount to plenty, and once, EG, Germany did it, the pressure to copy it would be overwhelming. It wouldn’t be hard to do, because it’s an open system.
I don’t believe these are really possible. Advertising garners the advertiser very little value per-user. It economically cannot be netting the advertiser service so much that you couldn’t just pay them a nominal fee to have them stop advertising you if it was bothering you. All that’s needed is a good, low-friction payment platform. We don’t have one, right now, so we still see ad-funding everywhere. If BAT takes off, it’ll end. Small donations will more profitable than advertising and any user with any taste will prefer paying 4 dollars a month (not per service, distributed between all services) over seeing ads.
The poor, at least under complete information, would not need to pay as much to offset the value of advertising to them, because advertising to them is not as profitable.
And if some way were found to increase the profitability of advertising, to make it more likely to change your behavior… the only way to do that to you is to make the information seem useful to you, and unless you’ve abdicated from faith in talking and critical reason, that seeming can only be sufficed by making it actually useful to you. This outcome could not be described as a hellscape. That would be an efficient information routing system and it would be extremely helpful.
The only remaining case for awful advertising that I can see just collapses to a case for arbitrary extortion… which is just… okay you don’t believe there will be open code. Well. Fight. You’ve seen what will result from a closed marketplace. Fight it.
Sure they could coordinate. They’d use the ISO 27B-6 Car Coordination Protocol, which would be negotiated in a mind bogglingly boring and bureaucratic process by the representatives of the various car companies. Those companies would have big bakeoffs where they tested against each other’s implementations. They would probably even hire auditors to check one another’s implementations.
You could buy a copy of 27B-6 for 250 dollars or so.
The IP network we’re talking over uses public protocols. Some specs are free, but you have to pay for others; you couldn’t build a smart phone (legally, and including building the chips that go into it) without spending thousands of dollars for copies of standards. And a ton of the products involved have private code.
It’s not that hard to get an ISO protocol into public availability if people care about it. There’s sci-hub. For the more traditional way, you likely will have lawsuits about accidents that still happen and those might put a lot of the relevant documents into the court proceedings and thus into public domain.
Geez, interesting, that’s pretty dire.
Here’s the thing though. There’s less of an immediate need for an cars that can cross the boundaries between cities, for long trips it becomes reasonable to ask the user to change cars. The systems can be localized. If this is treated as a municipal issue- which it is- similar to public transport, it will be exposed to a lot more effective political light. A lot of municipal governments are corrupt, but most of them are more representational than national government. If the public can be convinced to say “actually we would like it to stay cheap, free and safe”, a lot of people will listen.
The whole reason you’d put an image of an oncoming train in a movie would be that it does stress the audience. A little stress can be fun.
I’m not so sure that people would be very comfortable with cows if cows were in the habit of running nearly silently out of nowhere and passing them 2 meters away at 40 km/h. I think after one cow did that in front of me and another one did it behind me a second or two later, while a stream of cows whooshed by on the cross street, I’d start to get pretty nervous about cows. I guess maybe I’d get used to it if I’d had years of experience to show me that cows unerringly avoided me. But I wouldn’t bet too much on it.
But that’s neither here nor there; I don’t think the vehicles could reliably miss the pedestrians to begin with, and you seem to agree.
Where? No, I think that’d be fairly easy, though not something you’d want them to have to do too often, I’d guess it’d require them all to slow down a lot.
So, if the advertising is there by default, that means that the advertiser is already “extorting” my attention, and has already shown a willingness to extort money from me to make the advertising go away.
More correctly, the advertiser already seems to see my attention is their property, rather than mine. If that’s how they view it, the price of selling it back to me isn’t going to be determined by what they make off the ads. It’s going to be determined by how much they think I will pay to be left alone, at least unless I have some other leverage. If you want to call that extortion, then, fine, I believe there’ll be extortion. I don’t believe they’ll think of themselves as engaging in extortion, though.
How would you expect to “fight it”?
I don’t know what BAT is, but I do know that we all wanted micropayments instead of an advertising-supported Internet in 1990.
Even if you have a good micropayment protocol it can be hard to get everybody enrolled. Remember, you have to enroll everybody you’d see on a city bus. That means the 12 year old kid, the homeless guy, the 85-year-old who already has trouble every time they change the coin till, and even the crazy drunk. They all have to be able to figure it out, they all have to be able to get an account, they all have to be able to fund stuff, etc.
I don’t know what BAT is, but I do know that we all wanted micropayments instead of an advertising-supported Internet in 1990.
What makes you think so? When I heard Marc Andreessen opinion on the topic, than he said that one of the main reasons why payment in the internet didn’t get implemented is because the guys didn’t bother.
Phone calls and SMS do have payment options and there’s no foundamental reason why they didn’t bake payment into the web on a basic level expect that they didn’t bother at the time and focused their attention on developing different features.
BAT is Basic Attention Token, part of the Brave project IIRC. Though it’s not necessary for micropayments replacing advertising, it’s a direct path.
It’s weird to think that digital micropayments simply weren’t possible until cryptocurrency started to attack the legal barriers, but that is what I’m thinking.