📌 TOPINDIATOURS Eksklusif ai: Waymos Cause Traffic Jams Across City During Power O

Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night will stay these robotaxis of their appointed trips — but a power outage apparently will.

On Saturday evening, a blackout left nearly a third of San Francisco in the dark. But its most visible casualties were Waymo robocabs, which were left stranded on the city streets like large toys inconveniently discarded by a child.

Footage shared online shows numerous Waymos stalled in the middle of busy roads, blocking human motorists. Often, the self-driving cabs were gaggled together, serving to unintentionally cordon off city blocks, their emergency lights blinking in unison. In one video, at least five Waymo robotaxis can be seen piled up in the same intersection. It appeared that without traffic lights to guide them, the highly advanced cars were utterly rudderless.

“Somebody’s gonna set this thing on fire if it doesn’t move soon,” a pedestrian observed, as motorists honked their horns in vain at a frozen Waymo.

In short, it was a PR disaster. With its cabs going on strike of their own accord, Waymo simply made it official and suspended ride-hailing services that evening following the power outage. It’s now resumed rides as of Sunday afternoon.

“Yesterday’s power outage was a widespread event that caused gridlock across San Francisco, with non-functioning traffic signals and transit disruptions,” a Waymo spokesperson said in a statement, via CNBC. “While the failure of the utility infrastructure was significant, we are committed to ensuring our technology adjusts to traffic flow during such events.”

It was an edge case to be sure, but the episode will put a dent in Waymo’s image, and perhaps robotaxis at large. Though Waymo reports a stellar safety record, the cabs remain controversial with locals due to the disruptions they cause, a sentiment that has reached a boiling point over incidents such as when a Waymo struck and killed a beloved San Francisco bodega cat.

It’s fair to criticize the company for seemingly not having a contingency plan in place for an event like a power outage. Tesla CEO Elon Musk, whose self-driving cars have been involved in their fair share of blunders as well as deadly accidents, was quick to make this point by gloating about his own autonomous fleet.

“Tesla Robotaxis were unaffected by the SF power outage,” he tweeted.

We don’t know if Musk’s claim is actually true, but it shows that the Tesla-Waymo rivalry is still in full-swing, even if Musk’s automaker remains a distant second. Musk has used Waymo accidents and blunders to needle the company in the past, and has shown he wasn’t above some literal dick-measuring.

Still, this is far from the first time Waymos have disrupted traffic. The robotaxis have shown that they can be overwhelmed by events that fall outside their programming, like a parade or a police standoff. These aren’t easy things to account for — but you might demand better from a company that already has thousands of autonomous cabs operating across the country.

More on Waymo: Waymo Spotted Driving Wrong Way Down Busy Street

The post Waymos Cause Traffic Jams Across City During Power Outage appeared first on Futurism.

🔗 Sumber: futurism.com

📌 TOPINDIATOURS Update ai: We Could Hitch a Ride to Unknown Frontiers on Super-Fas

Mysterious interstellar object 3I/ATLAS made its closest approach to Earth on December 19, coming within just 167 million miles.

Scientists have been closely monitoring the object — which is largely believed to be a natural comet and only the third of its kind to have been directly observed in the solar system — as it continued on its highly eccentric trajectory.

The encounter with Earth, however, turned out to be a bit of an anticlimax, as Harvard astronomer Avi Loeb, who has long championed the far-fetched theory that the object may be an alien spacecraft, lamented in a blog post titled “3I/ATLAS Ignores Earth.” Instead of doing something you might expect of aliens during their closest approach to Earth, it simply cruised on by.

While hopes that we were just visited by an alien race diminish even further, Loeb made an interesting pivot in a follow-up piece, proposing that other objects like 3I/ATLAS could be useful for our future attempts to explore beyond our solar system.

“The Voyager Golden Records, containing a time capsule of sounds, images, music, and messages from Earth, were attached to NASA’s Voyager 1 and 2 spacecraft, which are currently traveling out of the solar system,” he wrote. “These records serve as humanity’s message for any intelligent extraterrestrial life that might find them, essentially a ‘message in a bottle’ sent out to interstellar space.”

Thanks to their tremendous speeds, exotic visitors like the latest interstellar object could carry a human spacecraft out of the solar system on our behalf, Loeb argued.

By “riding 3I/ATLAS,” which is traveling at a speed of 37 miles a second, he argued that we could reach “interstellar space by the year ~10,000 CE instead of the year ~30,000 CE.”

Even though they launched almost half a century ago, Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 only recently reached the boundary of the heliosphere. To enter true interstellar space beyond the Oort Cloud, where objects are no longer bound to the gravitational effects of the Sun, it could take Voyager 1 another 28,000 years.

“The discovery of interstellar objects over the past decade offers new opportunities for humanity to send time capsules to interstellar space,” he concluded.

To attach the message to objects like 3I/ATLAS, Loeb proposed using a “high-power laser beam to engrave a message” or “design interceptor missions” to attach technological objects to their surface.

For its part, 3I/ATLAS is expected to get within just 33.3 million miles of Jupiter on March 16, 2026, offering us yet another opportunity to have a closer look using spacecraft positioned there.

Nobody knows when we’ll be able to observe the next interstellar object careening through our neck of the cosmic woods. But according to Loeb, we should seize the opportunity.

To “gain respect near the top of the food chain in the Milky Way galaxy,” Loeb argued that we must take matters into our own hands, and “endeavor to interstellar space.”

Loeb himself says he’d even jump to commit his own body to such a project.

He “would have loved to hitchhike 3I/ATLAS and let it carry my remains into interstellar space,” he wrote, “if offered the opportunity.”

More on 3I/ATLAS: Mysterious Interstellar Object Now Approaching Earth

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🔗 Sumber: futurism.com