[Looks up from a paper mockup of a pricey eBook custom made for Actuators, for now covered in redacted articles where they haven’t had a raise for Open Access publication.] Respectfully disagree I do; the market for respectful conversation has gone straight to the HFT Noise Basement (and a peppering of happy Amazon Alexa creamed corn and 10-episode dystopia aficionados?) Also DSLs (say, just things you’d say to the staff,) are so businesslike people are afraid of fixed costs dragging them down the first they speak them.
HackADay doesn’t gel where it should? Maybe people get arduinos and pineduinos and peachpi6 but look straight from the I/O 28 pin thing to the price for upkeep on the USS Lincoln and nope out about giving their 6" square PC legs or a digestion system or a graphene …you know, peeling… and orientation thing to make superconductor or arms etc quickly. Somewhere in the social conversation bossy Walking Dead Characters started hustling long weekends away from hobbyists?
Design resources for robot butlers…there’s gotta be an Avnet recap or something like that for that, right? Arrow maybe? Even “230 things we did we don’t do now”? [Oof, that search didn’t go off like I’d hoped.]
Well nuts, did we also socially get mad at failing whoever asked for robot butlers (besides the name meaning slave servants, a bit much compared to Fire TV Cube House, Plant and Equipment and Garage 9-Arm Orderlies, which look at it, that’s a lot of nonsense.) Did we get mad at failing to blow up the outside infosec case with (open vulns and) robots due to Bush suspicion procedural error creep subbing itself in? Did we largely get mad at failing things c.f. people who can’t accept offers of demilitarizing and getting paid for it (and not because of the uh…union?) Russian Pilots for Peace and Robots Who Wrestle With The Dog.
Yeah, it really was surprisingly soon after 2016 that self driving cars arrived (they existed before 2016 in the same sense that they don’t exist now).
I don’t know if anyone is mad about it, but I think there’s a persistent and problematic longing for low-risk companionship that avoids the mess of human interaction with the bonus of cleaning up the mess around the house during time not spent lobbing zingers back at our self-talk and day-to-day foibles. It’s not noble, and dwelling on it too much inevitably leads to realms of creepypasta. We’re probably better off as a species that’s able to put our dirty socks in the laundry and interact with each other now and then.
Except I don’t think I could handle that many friends.
Yes, to all of this. I also remember the smoking section in the back and when flying from New York to Frankfurt necessitated a stop at the Gander CFB, Newfoundland to top off the fuel.
As far as general robots go - it’s still the power source that is the problem.
The self-driving car thing is explained by the “a dishwasher is a robot” argument: it’s difficult to make a robot that can operate in the human world because the human world is messy and unpredictable, so the straightforward solution is to put the robot in a box that you can make very predictable. People hoped that places a car can go would be predictable enough, and robots adaptable enough, to do it. Turns out, not quite.
Oh that’s still the unstated goal: make cities no go areas for pedestrians, cyclists, all other traffic, and have municipalities make new purpose built robot roads everywhere. They want to externalise the cost of their dystopia to sell some fucking cars which they will call “freedom” but which will actually have us in chains and servitude.
The Concorde started flying 51 years ago, so even if it was a big improvement it wouldn’t really contradict the “flying hasn’t gotten much better in the last 50 years” argument.
In my experience the in-flight entertainment in coach class got slightly better, then much worse over my lifetime. They used to include headphones, various audio channels, and at least a crummy movie on a CRT screen. Then the seat-back displays with various options. But for the last 10 years or so none of the planes I’ve flown on included any form of free entertainment at all. No headphones unless you pay for them, no seat-back video screens (which have been replaced with iPads available for rent) and not even any magazines. The budget carrier that I took from Los Angeles to Europe didn’t even offer free water, let alone an included meal or snacks. Yeah, maybe that’s my own fault for choosing the cheapest flights, but still, it’s been a pretty significant decline.
All military applications, to be sure, but we haven’t sat still.
I’m not an aerospace engineer, so I don’t know whether and what improvements can be made to passenger plane design, whose purpose is to move hundreds of people and cargo great distances quickly and economically.
That’s not just your point, it’s the author’s point. Here’s the original quote again:
I think it’s fair to say that at least for commercial civilian aircraft the last 50 years can be considered a period of “gradual integration.” Certainly much more gradual than the first 50 years of flight.
I don’t think most of us are smart enough to know what the next “big leaps” in aircraft technology are going to be, or if the next big leaps in long distance travel technology will involve aircraft at all. But I’m humble enough to not make predictions that there won’t be any more big leaps in transportation technology.
IMvHO the next leap will be power storage (which obviously won’t be limited to airplanes), which will allow for some very different methods of propulsion.
Speed was continuing to improve on commercial jets. The Concorde and the Tupolev Tu-144 were hitting 1300-1400 mph in the 70s. But they could only operate at full speed over the oceans, because people get very NIMBY about sonic booms. (Having lived next to an air force base for a number of years, I grasp why people would feel this way, even if you do get used to it after a while.) Price per passenger was also higher than most people were willing to pay for the reduced travel time, although I suspect that might have come down over time if there was sufficient demand for domestic use.
NASA will be showing off an experimental jet tomorrow which can travel faster than the speed of sound without producing a full-on sonic boom, and a number of private companies have been testing similar designs. So we may actually see a big leap forward in flight speed on domestic flights in the latter half of this decade.
But odds are high that we’ll be crammed in like sardines eating subpar food with plastic cutlery on our 1400mph flights.
Yes, I think those are called People movers, and they run in a set pattern at set times. /silly, sarcasm
FSD still needs a LOT of work before it’s considered anything better than a glorified cruise control system. Even when you give it sensors that work better than the Mk. I eyeball. (machine vision should not be the only object detection system used by a semi-autonomous driving system, despite what Elongated Muskrat has stated. An auxiliary system to collect/correlate data and decision trees, yes. An ‘enhancement’ to a system that already uses things like proximity sensors, lidar, etc? yes. But not as the sole, primary system, I don’t care how good the lab says it works.)
I’m guessing that @thekevinmonster wasn’t referring to “self driving” Teslas, but instead to robotaxis like Waymo that are already running passenger service in San Francisco. There’s plenty of debate over whether these fully autonomous vehicles should be allowed to operate on public roads but the reality is that right now they definitely are.
Our Robot butlers are probably going to be software that coordinates the bits. HomeKit or which ever competitor will be coordinating the robot household and at some point the coordination or function of the bits will fit some definition of what a robot butler should do. It just will not look like what we think/want(? Do we really want it)
The toaster senses the last bread and crumbs on the floor and whatever coordinator sends out the vacuum and adds bread to the grocery retrieval system.
The robot arms running along tracks in the kitchen will probably be fairly late to the party.
