There is one tiny little mention of Waymo in there but that's clearly the main push for Google in robotics now, and if that's where those robotics aquihires went maybe that's what they wanted.
I wonder if that's because self-driving cars are not how the general public expects robots to look like. C-3PO, R2-D2, and those orange arms in factories are what most people imagine when they think about robots.
Or because it's a bigger market? How much do most Americans spend on transportation compared to say, things that come out of assembly lines? And how much value can robots add to each of those verticals?
A robot that prepares my dinner is more valuable to me than a self driving car.
Why? Well, when I leave work, I spend 45 minutes in the car, and another 45 minutes preparing dinner. With self driving cars, that will not change. But with self cooking chefs, that would add 45 minutes of quality time to my day.
According to the most recent data from the Department of Transportation, there are 11.3 million motor vehicle accidents a year in America, with 2.4 million people injured in said accidents. 2016 was the deadliest year in almost 10 years, with about 40,000 traffic deaths—up about 2,000 over 2015.
Note that these numbers are made up to a certain degree, much more so than the restaurant industry numbers, and so they are not necessarily comparable. The NHTSA puts the value of one life at $8.86 million (in 2010 dollars) [p. 114 of the report]. For 40,000 deaths, that's already $354 billion. They then add other costs, too, which are also hard or impossible to measure.
Things like this make me wonder if I just have an extreme lack of... grit, or tolerance for risking other people's lives or something. I mean, the idea of spending an hour and a half a day driving, experimentally, means I break after a few months even if the job is relatively stress free. (now, experimentally, I can ride a lot longer than I can drive, but I'm one of those people who can read while in a moving vehicle.)
I know this is a normal thing that normal people do; I know people who do it, but it is something I personally find incomprehensibly difficult.
Thank you for this inspirational quote, which I distributed to the team at Infinite Food this morning to start our week! http://infinite-food.com/
We are building a network of automated food preparation and retail service locations for high density mainland Chinese cities, with a view toward international expansion.
Your car isn't the sum total of what you spend on transportation. Every loaf of bread and gallon of milk was also transported a fairly long distance to arrive at your local supermarket. All the Uber stories here would lead you to believe that the initial thrusts for self driving cars will be in transporting humans, but I find it much more likely that the initial rollout of self-driving technology will, instead, be focused on moving stuff.
Truck driver is, IIRC, the largest single job description in the US. That's a huge target market for self-driving technology and a massive societal problem that's looking when so many people are left jobless.
In the transportation market, it may be possible to own the ordering and aggregation process , which in certain scenarios become something with a strong network effects, hence strong barriers to competition .
But like the rest of the efforts listed, that's not on the market at the moment. It probably isn't that close either, since there is no official release date.