
Apple meets California officials to discuss self-driving car - sethbannon
http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/sep/18/apple-meets-california-officials-self-driving-car
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BinaryIdiot
Interesting; I wonder if they'll actually attempt to go to market with this
thing or if it's just one of their many experimental projects that never sees
the light of day. I'd love to see more competition in this space regardless.

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dzhiurgis
I am just wondering, could Apple's partnership with IBM got them access to
TrueNorth chips to gain competitive advantage against Googles car?

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BinaryIdiot
While that makes sense on paper, in practice do those chips provide better
support for networked, autonomous activities? I haven't heard much about their
usages just some PR things about them so I'm genuinely curious.

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Moshe_Silnorin
The machine learning people I know have been very unimpressed with it. From
the little I understand, it cannot run the style of neural network that have
been breaking records.

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BinaryIdiot
Hmm that sounds unfortunate. I'll have to try to look into it further because
I didn't even know about them before and they sound really interesting.

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huuu
To me it feels Apple and Uber are years behind Google. Today it's not very
difficult to build a self driving car. But over the years Google developed a
gigantic network of all kinds of data used by the cars.

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jMyles
It's just normal now for huge companies to meet with government "regulators"
who have the power to empower or disable their business model and that of
their competition.

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gnaritas
How else do you propose new technology become legal if not by meeting with
government regulators to promote change? You can't just sell self driving cars
because you want to, the law must first be addressed.

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jMyles
I propose that "legal" is the default state for new inventions.

The time and manner of invention and evolution do not yield to government nor
even recognize its purview. I think it's becoming clear to all of us that the
internet will not abide government and I really don't want it to have to come
to a head in the form of violence.

Think about it this way: Seven generations hence, do you really think that
internet will be a triviality to be 'regulated' by cronies?

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threeseed
> I propose that "legal" is the default state for new inventions.

This is a pretty ridiculous concept.

It would just encourage dodgy entrepeneuers to rapidly produce disruptive
products without any care for safety or public benefit. Some things need to be
thoroughly tested before releasing them into the public e.g. milk formulas,
vaccines, cars otherwise they could kill masses of people before anyone has a
chance to stop it.

And in fact a place already exists with lax regulations: China. And look
what's happened there over the last few decades. So bad in fact that the
public desperately looks to Western countries for food and health products.

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jMyles
Just so I understand: You are holding up _China_ as a refuge from totalitarian
tendencies?

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azernik
When it comes to economic rules, China went from a centrally-controlled
economy to a shockingly unregulated (by Western standards) market economy. If
you want to speak up against the government you're out of luck, but if you
want to sell baby formula without inspections it's much easier than in the
States.

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jMyles
I'm saying: obviously China, which is an environment of dreadful rights of
expression of all sorts, is not a good example of the potential of innovation
sans government.

