> This needs to work on an intubated patient, and be able to maintain a sanitary environment, neither of which it'll probably be able to do to the extent required by health and safety regulations.
I totally agree with you... but in the case where there are no respirators available at all, I'd rather have a 10% chance of secondary infection or contamination than just die.
I don't see a device like this as being a replacement for a $50k computer controlled machine, but as a stopgap in desperate emergencies.
I'm impressed. Maybe those guys in Italy who 3d printed the valves can 3d print some of these components. I'm guessing the doctors there would be willing to try anything at this point.
Honestly I'd like to see a 1 month quarantine, with the US government guaranteeing the wages of everyone in the workforce for that time. Something like 100% up to 50k/year, 75% of 50-100k, and cap it there. It would cost a few hundred billion dollars but it would keep the "I have to work or be homeless" people from being homeless and allow them to actually stay home for that time.
Should cars prevent people from running red lights? There are a few unusual circumstances when this is something you want to do intentionally and knowing the risks.
I agree with you. I think freeway travel can be 99% automated in the very near future. I also think that's where the MAJOR wins will come from. Long haul trucking can flow 24/7 at that point, with the drivers keeping their jobs and doing last mile delivery.
We've already seen this in aviation actually. AF447 is a good example of flying a plane into the ground because of reliance on automation and lack of experience hand flying.
There's a really great YouTube video called "Children of the magenta" that's part of a lecture the chief training pilot for AA gave about 20 years ago or so as part of their continuing education. He goes over incidents and situations and the essential conclusion is that pilots are getting too used to turning dials and flipping switches when in many situations they need to just take control and fly the plane.
The thing with other activities (diving, flying are great examples) is that when a problem occurs, you generally have minutes to analyze what's happening and decide on a solution. If my dive computer goes on the fritz, I can decide to immediately start an ascent, or go off physical dive table, or make an extra safety stop at say 20 feet just to be sure.
When you're going 45 in a curve driving along PCH, and a sudden fog bank obscures your cameras and LIDAR and the computer says "your controls, good luck!" you have maybe 2 seconds to react, if you're lucky. It might be a lot less.
Humans make really dumb decisions sometimes, but we are also outstandingly capable of reacting to novelty.
I've been beating this drum for years (but I'm a nobody, so it's like pissing in the wind):
1. Anything less than 100% FULL automation is MORE dangerous than manual driving, because the "driver" will almost certainly lack any situational awareness. When the need for manual intervention happen, it will be at the moments where you need maximum awareness and split second reflexes.
2. There are SO many edge cases and never-seen-before situations that happen when driving "at scale" that the automation features will fail unexpectedly and in strange ways.
3. G and Cruise might be exceptions, but most of the companies in this space are cowboys with reckless disregard for public safety and terrible "iterate quickly" coding practices.
4. At some point there will be an accident that kills a photogenic "middle America" person or people and at that point the government will crush this industry with regulation, with the financial backing of automakers, UAW, and other people who benefit from the status quo.
The only way 100% fully self driving cars will ever happen is for the infrastructure itself to be built to accommodate them. Mixing regular cars, parking, trucks, bicycles, scooters, pedestrians, dog walkers, hoverboards, etc all together on the same roads ensures that the problem is unsolvable.
So far, I have been killed exactly zero times in car crashes. All the empirical evidence tells me that there's no need to surrender control to a computer.
If I die in a crash, perhaps I'll change my mind...
This strikes me as Boeing lobbyists trying to pay people to create doubt. "Maybe it's not the plane, maybe the pilots are inferior to AMERICAN pilots, yeehaw!"
What a joke... floundering company CEO added to successful company board. Really? Dropbox management is atrocious, they succeeded in spite of themselves.
For those of us not in that situation it's a lot harder, especially if you want to work now so you don't have to work later and can retire asap.