this post was submitted on 15 Jul 2023
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Read the article, this isn't talking about consumer-owned vehicles but the Cruise Origin robo-taxi service. They're small autonomous shuttle-style cars.
Basically GM reinvented the bus but made it smaller.
So to answer "How does it park at Walmart" - it takes the passenger to the front and drops them off then continues on its way. I believe the intent/current trials using Bolts have an app similar to Uber, you put in your current location + destination, then it comes and gets you, then drops you off.
Almost 0 value in removing a steering wheel or any kind of input to a consumer-owned car like that, makes some amount of sense for robo-taxis. (They specifically wanted passengers sharing the ride to face eachother to ease safety concerns, and they probably don't want random Joe getting up at the emergency controls and driving it off road)
I think that's a fairly common reaction, but it's important to remember what you're currently trusting your life to. Right now meat machines made for hunting and finding berries are operating giant death machines at speeds that they didn't evolve to understand, and sometimes that meat machine needs to constantly remind itself to pay attention and not shut down while driving, or to look for children, or to go the right speed, because driving isn't natural for meat machines. Not to mention that they take entire seconds to respond to stimulus (which can be hundreds of yards at speed), and they can only see in one direction at a time. And even if they do everything right, they can have a stroke at any time and kill everyone in their car and the car they hit.
Compare that to an actual machine, built to pay attention to everything in a full 360° at all times, never drives drunk or drowsy, and has double redundancy to prevent mechanical failure. They always drive at the right speeds, and react to problems within milliseconds.
Comparing humans to robots, it's honestly a testament to how chaotic driving is that robots didn't take it over a long time ago. But within our lifetimes I guarantee that we'll look at it the same way that we now look at chess. Humans may have been better at one point, but very soon computers will be so much better than us at driving that it's not even a competition. And it's fairly likely that they're already past that point, these GM cars already crash less than the average human driver
Please go back to reddit if you want to pontificate