Comment If they break into people's homes.... (Score 1) 392
I realize that they dare not explicitly say that is what they are going to do, but once they are caught doing it, it will amount to exactly the same consequence as if they had.
I realize that they dare not explicitly say that is what they are going to do, but once they are caught doing it, it will amount to exactly the same consequence as if they had.
Tire noise is not nearly as loud as you think it is
Outside of first gear on an ICE, the noise of tires on the road will dominate the noise that any properly functioning modern vehicle is making. The tire noise is still very plainly audible on a car that is simply coasting with no engine running at all (which could be argued to be comparable to the noise level of a pure electric vehicle) at even surprisingly slow speeds... basically anything over about 15km/h or so.
That said, tire noise rises logarithmically with speed, and at slow enough speeds, it can admittedly be difficult to hear. However, as the speed of the vehicle is reduced, the driver also gains much more time to react to anything that might be unexpected, and at speeds where the tire-on-road noise is genuinely not easily perceptible, the stopping distance can be well less than 10 feet (virtually zero in many cases) unless the road is icy (which incidentally tends to be noisier on tires than asphalt at a given speed anyways, and so is more likely to be heard anyways).
Last time I checked, there wasn't any coming back from death. A fascist dictatorship, however, can at least be eventually overthrown.
Of course, overthrowing said regime requires that you actually be alive.
The obvious extrapolation to the machines doing everything is no need for money
Except for the fact that people are greedy and are always wanting more.... any proposed no-money model usually fails to account for a disturbingly large percentage of people who will *ALWAYS* try to exploit those with less power.
And as AI gets sufficiently advanced, I expect that there will eventually be virtually no thought process that humans are capable of which cannot be performed equally or better by an artificial intelligence, and I expect that the number of jobs available a century from now that are practical for human employment will be less than a fifth of what we have today.
Of course, automation has happened plenty of times before and it's always brought about new career opportunities in the past, but we've never automated the process of creative and independent thought before, and automation has never been historically possible on scales that practical AI could really accomplish, so I'm not entirely sure that past experience would apply to AI's.
Last year, Tesla delivered about 33,000 Model S sedans and said the current wait for delivery is one to four months. Tesla has already presold every Model S that it plans to build in 2015. "If you ordered a car today, you wouldn't get it until 2016."
There's no contradiction at all... last year, they said that the wait was one to four months. At the time that they said this, that is actually what it was at the time, hence their use of the word "currently". Now the waitlist is more like a year.
I don't think a dealership actually have any cars to function.
You're wrong, at least in terms of selling new cars at retail. I think dealerships without car lots can exist if they are a wholesaler, but it's my understanding that if they are selling new cars to the general public, they need to maintain a stock of vehicles that they can actually sell. I'm not saying they need to stock every car that they sell, but they still have to have at least some stock of unsold cars. As every Tesla that is currently made is already sold before it even gets out of the factory, there are zero unsold Telsas to put in car lot. Tesla showrooms exist, but the car they have on display is privately owned, and you can only test drive it by appointment, or on scheduled days when the vehicle owner will be there and they can let a bunch of people test drive it. the Tesla showroom near my place has only had a couple such days in all of 2014. I've met the owner of the vehicle, and he doesn't even work for Tesla. I imagine he is compensated by Tesla for showing his vehicle, although I don't know how much.
Living on Earth may be expensive, but it includes an annual free trip around the Sun.