Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Category: transportation – Page 477

Billionaire Elon Musk says he’s almost completed a tunnel under a Los Angeles suburb to test a novel transportation system that would scoot commuters underground on electric sleds called skates.

Musk tweeted Thursday that, pending regulatory approvals, free rides will be offered to the public in a few months. He also posted an Instagram video of the interior of the tunnel.

Last year, the Hawthorne City Council approved an approximately 2-mile (3.2-kilometer) test tunnel from Musk’s SpaceX rocket plant to a point east of Los Angeles International Airport.

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We’ve all dreamed of owning, or at the very least being a passenger of, a flying car. It’s the sci-fi dream that never transpired — until recently, that is. With a growing emphasis of developing flying taxis among several different companies, one wonders if the revolutionary Tesla Motors has plans to join in on this new venture.

Could Elon Musk’s random tweet from late last year be an indicator of Tesla’s interest in flying cars and their joining of this brand new “space race?”

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Taking the road less traveled is extremely difficult for self-driving cars. Autonomous vehicles rely on highly visible lane markings, as well as detailed 3D maps in order to navigate their environment safely. Which is why most of the major companies have eschewed testing on unmapped rural roads in favor of suburbs and cities.

Researchers at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) have developed a new system that allows self-driving cars to drive on roads they’ve never been on before without 3D maps. Called MapLite, the system combines simple GPS data that you’d find on Google Maps with a series of sensors that observe the road conditions.

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For an invited competition, Pickard Chilton and ARUP collaborated on the concept design for a Mega-Skyport – Uber’s vision for a next-generation urban aviation transport system. Dubbed “Sky Tower,” the project is intended to facilitate at least 1000 vehicle arrivals and 1000 departures per hour, with each vehicle accommodating up to five passengers.

Once the objective of the desired throughput was resolved, Pickard Chilton and ARUP endeavored to create an elegant yet highly engineered and sophisticated work of architecture that would support and augment the Uber brand. Due to the multi-faceted kit-of-parts and adaptability of the individual module, it can be applied both vertically and horizontally to suit any given context.

While the Sky Tower is conceptual, it is not science fiction. Based on a pragmatic and research-driven approach, the Sky Tower concept delivers to Uber a modular, extensible and sustainable solution that supports their vision for the future of intra-urban transportation.

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Roadways clogged by commercial vehicles and intense competition for affordable housing are imposing costs on prosperous cities and their most vulnerable residents.

Cities are the hubs of the emerging digital economy, attracting knowledge workers with higher pay and alluring lifestyles. One consequence of this concentrated prosperity is rising rents and a scramble for housing that places disadvantaged citizens in peril—as seen in the increasing rates of homelessness in cities such as Seattle. More people living in urban cores also means more commercial vehicles are needed to serve them, which is fueled by a surge in online deliveries. The resulting congestion is burdening cities with surprisingly high costs. The social stresses of the new growth should be on your radar.

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Many people in tech point out that artificial narrow intelligence, or A.N.I., has grown ever safer and more reliable—certainly safer and more reliable than we are. (Self-driving cars and trucks might save hundreds of thousands of lives every year.) For them, the question is whether the risks of creating an omnicompetent Jeeves would exceed the combined risks of the myriad nightmares—pandemics, asteroid strikes, global nuclear war, etc.—that an A.G.I. could sweep aside for us.

Thinking about artificial intelligence can help clarify what makes us human—for better and for worse.

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