A resounding success. No large-scale demonstrations, damaged cameras, lawsuits or political suicide for those involved. So we can expect this to be rolled out fully.

Crime prevention? Who said this has anything to do with crime?

If your time is worth the savings then why not? I have a feeling the prices reflect the general desirability of the neighborhood the McDonald's is located in so I doubt too many people are going to drive a few extra miles (particularly with gas being expensive) to save a dollar or two on a burger when they realize it means driving through the bad part of town.

The better question is if this will lead to an arbitrage market for burgers. You need not venture to the wrong side of the tacks when a brave Uber Eats driver will make the voyage to save $87.55 on a bulk order for a group of customers. I think I'm going to start working on a script. I'll pitch it to Hollywood as Blade Runner only more dystopian.

Adjusting for inflation, yes that will be the case. The price of insurance can't be less than the cost of dealing with all of the accidents that the insurance policies have to cover. If self-driving cars greatly reduce the rate of accidents then the cost of insurance will fall. I'm sure there will be some companies that are greedy and want to pocket the savings for themselves, but there will be greedy companies that want to poach their customers and who are willing to pocket just a little bit less.

Would you willingly pay your current insurance rates if another company were offering you the same coverage for lower cost? Do you regularly pay more for goods or services than you have to? If your answer is "no" then capitalism is working because you as a customer ultimately get to decide where you spend your money and if you're like everyone else and want to keep as much of that money as you can then it will incentivize companies to compete on price.

What would cause it to become unsustainable when it currently is? It will definitely be cheaper for a lot of people to get a car that is incapable of manual control, but insurance will also become cheaper for good drivers as a large chunk of what they pay is to cover for the bad drivers. I think future generations will largely avoid learn to drive unless they need to as a part of their job because a long commute isn't nearly as bad if a person doesn't need to operate a vehicle in traffic. But as self-driving cars get better and come into use, the accident rates will decrease and that will make insurance cheaper

They are kissing up to Donny by letting him rename everything he farts on.

Execute it for spying on gov't.

They do that with everything. I remember when JMS said the studios pulled the same shit with Babylon 5 because they would find ways to attach unrelated production costs to the project so that it never made money. Anyone working in or with Hollywood that isn't asking for a percentage of revenue is just asking to get fucked over by Hollywood accountants. The government doesn't care if actors or directors get fucked over as long as taxes get paid so don't expect them to care about the problem or try to fix it with legislation.

Fuck Benjamin Netanyahu

Donnie already has, several times. And both liked it.

The worries are coming from every level within the companies, from junior developers to safety officers to the C-suite and board...also from people who left the companies.

It's possible for the stated high-level worries to be a combination of fear of rogue bots AND angry investors, and thus they got together to collude...I mean agree to a slowdown.

Yes, limited local AI models certainly are going to be a standard feature in the future.

I run both local and cloud AI. There is still a huge difference, because my local machine has to use smaller and quantized models. It takes considerably longer for lower quality results.

local LLMs aren't there yet and probably won't for the forseable future for ordinary people. If you want to run a full model like DeepSeek v4.1 Flash, you need something like half a TB of RAM.

The open-source LLMs are a different threat: They enable a service industry independent of the large players. I could today get some venture capital, rent a few racks in a hosting center, install a bunch of beefy machines and offer the same service as Claude or ChatGPT, just on an open-source model. The differences in benchmarks are becoming irrelevant for 95% of common use cases. And if I can offer that service for $19/m while OpenAI wants $29/m then OpenAI has a problem.

And IMHO this is the chinese strategy: Undermine the US AI industry by breaking its business model.

Has everyone gone insane or are we witnessing a major PsyOps ?

Since AI isn't magical, for it to be able to "kill all humans", it would have to be able to acquire the means to do so. Which means that these already exist. It means someone is able to do it right now. And we're chill with that, but worried about AI?

No doubt a bunch of autonomous weapon systems linked into a C&C could cause considerable bloodshed. Given that most of the existing weapon systems of that kind are essentially suicide drones, it'll still be limited damage.

Human-killing virus? Still need a means of creating and delivering it.
Nuclear war? We have humans in the loop.
Drive us all insane with AI-slop TikToks? A few percent of humanity still don't use that.

So what is the actual scenario ? When someone shouts "AI will kill us all", why don't we ask them "how, exactly" ?

If the toaster has good brownness and heat-bounce sensors, I'm not sure AI is needed: just turn up or down the heat cells where needed to keep it even. Statistical analysis may be needed to manage adjacent cells, but once the formulas are known via lab testing it should be predictable.

nuf smelt.

The problem is an overly large proportion of them are creeps, and one may not be able to tell the difference.