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Bet you none of these newfangled Ai art generators will do you an upskirt Pope.

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He's lucky it wasn't Talk While Burping day.

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Later he explodes sinners with giant sturgeons coming from the inside out.

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Anything that deviates from normal is a conspiracy, including when things are precisely normal.

We know “self-driving” cars aren’t really self-driving. Waymo was using 1.8 humans per supposedly autonomous car for a while. They haven’t revealed more current numbers. [IEEE Spectrum, 2018]

The US Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation called a hearing on Wednesday February 4th to find out what barriers are in the way of self-driving cars everywhere! [Senate]

The biggest barrier is that the whole activity called driving is constructed around the assumption of a human brain. So you would need an AGI — an Artificial General Intelligence — to drive a car as well as a human does.

And it keeps turning out that all the jobs they sell AI as doing, one day in the fabulous future, assume a human intelligence!

So what do you do? Well, you do the obvious — you use an AGI. That is, A Guy Instead. You tell your investors the machine will totally do the whole job next year. It won’t, but that’s tomorrow’s problem.

In the hearing, Senator Ed Markey hammered on the remote operators. Dr. Mauricio Peña, the Chief Safety Officer at Waymo, admitted a lot of the operators were in the Philippines. Markey went off, and that’s what made the press. [YouTube; Business Insider]

Waymo also insists the cars are not actually driven remotely — just “advised” in some manner that totally doesn’t count as driving. But I suspect that claim is full of weasels and actions that would sure look like just driving remotely.

The reason this hearing happened is that Waymo and Tesla want less state legislation on safety and more overriding federal legislation they think they can tweak their way. This will let them kill more pedestrians. Such that you can no longer legally blame the company making the two-ton misguided missile.

The self-driving systems can be pretty good! We know a Pivot reader who lives in Silicon Valley and gets Waymos all the time and they’re great. It works! It’ll be highly tweaked to Silicon Valley. I mean, fine.

But I suspect the Waymo in, say, the middle of San Francisco need a lot more assistance from their remote totally-not-drivers. They want to bring Waymos to London too, which should be amazing.

I predict Waymo in London will use multiple “operators” per car to replace one minicab driver. They don’t care what they have to spend. The point is to make workers feel obsolete. Because there is nothing investors want more. Even if you have to lie about your AI to do it.

• Video — Podcast

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