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Reuters reports that General Motors will test thousands of self-driving electric cars in partnership with Lyft in 2018:
General Motors Co plans to deploy thousands of self-driving electric cars in test fleets in partnership with ride-sharing affiliate Lyft Inc, beginning in 2018, two sources familiar with the automaker's plans said this week. It is expected to be the largest such test of fully autonomous vehicles by any major automaker before 2020, when several companies have said they plan to begin building and deploying such vehicles in higher volumes. Alphabet Inc's Waymo subsidiary, in comparison, is currently testing about 60 self-driving prototypes in four states.
Most of the specially equipped versions of the Chevrolet Bolt electric vehicle will be used by San Francisco-based Lyft, which will test them in its ride-sharing fleet in several states, one of the sources said. GM has no immediate plans to sell the Bolt AV to individual customers, according to the source. The sources spoke only on condition of anonymity because GM has not announced its plans yet.
Also at Ars Technica, TechCrunch, and The Verge.
(Score: 2) by AthanasiusKircher on Monday February 20 2017, @08:00PM
I'm starting to feel nostalgic for times when words had a straight meaning and metaphors where artifacts to be used in poetry/literature
I'm really not sure when that "golden age" existed. From my perspective, what changed is our BS detection due to lack of education. Schools used to TEACH people how to persuade (or, in more cynical terms, "lie") in classes on "rhetoric," which was a subject dating back to ancient Roman orators and part of the foundational education of scholars throughout the middle ages and into modern times. Now obviously rhetoric wasn't all about persuasion and lying, but it taught educated people the standard ways to shape how their words were perceived.
Of course, most of the common folk didn't have this "classical" education in centuries gone by, so they'd be as vulnerable to BS as they are today. But educated folk knew better. Unfortunately, with the dawn of the public high-school movement in the early 20th century, many educational reformers and designers didn't think the general population would be up for the standard "classical education," so they threw out things like Latin and Greek, logic, and rhetoric. The goal of the educational system (at least in the U.S.) was to train obedient factory workers to do basic skills like reading, writing, and math, not to teach advanced thinking skills and certainly not independent thinking.
Fast forward a few decades, and the remaining private academies for the elite started bowing to the pressure of curricular reform too, since a lot of the traditional curriculum was HARD. Why struggle through trying to sort out some philosophical text in Latin or ancient Greek when you could read The Catcher in the Rye and have fun talking about teenage angst or whatever? So rhetoric (which was often connected to Latin curricula, taught along with ancient oratory techniques) went the way of the dodo.
Is it really just a coincidence that we saw the rise of the big "advertising agencies" around this time, specifically designed to exploit and manipulate customers who no longer were equipped with classical BS technique knowledge to detect it? And now it's not just the "masses" who can be manipulated this way -- even folks with college degrees are more susceptible to rhetorical nonsense. I mean, 49% of white college grads in the most recent election voted for a guy whose entire oratorical strategy is basically a huge ad hominem fallacy, repeated again and again. (Not that the alternative was much better, but very few people seemed to see through the obvious rhetorical bluster that was designed to deflect and impair rational discussion of anything substantive. Any classically trained adolescent a century or more ago would have been utterly baffled by how anyone could take such a rhetorical smokescreen seriously.)
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Monday February 20 2017, @08:28PM
The loss of logic and critical thinking in education is bigger in effects than the loss of rhetoric.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford