Whoops! Who could possibly have seen something like this coming?
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But it feels like everyone in this world—or this country, at least—is being treated as an unpaid beta tester for technologies for which they never asked, and from which someone else stands to make a ton of money. The “move fast, break things” approach of tech bros is obnoxious enough when it comes to software, but it’s irresponsible and potentially deadly when it comes to things like cars and delivery robots.
They have these on a college campus nearby. I once watched one of these things try to get from a walkway onto a road after a delivery.
It didn’t just backtrack the way it came. It was looking for a sloping ramp, but the sidewalk ledge was too high for its tiny wheels. It kept going back and forth, retracing the same paths over and over, failing, then returning to the original location, turning around and doing the whole thing again. I stopped paying attention after 15 minutes of this.
It was like watching a drunk come out of a bar and stumble around trying to find his parked car.
Is this the real reason self-driving cars are expected to need 300gb of RAM, so that they can remember a failed route from thirty seconds ago?