"But of course, the CCP is ideologically opposed to self-representation."
Don't think it's to do with ideology, just desire of a small cabal of people to have absolute power and control over a country and everyone who lives in it.
In my view, accidents aren't the main issue, it's more the disruption caused if an AV, with no human driver, encounters the 'freezing robot problem' (I.e. When traffic lights not working, with policeman directing traffic) & gets stuck in a busy city centre, blocking traffic all around.
I'm not aware of any fallback remote takeover mechanism that can be used to recover AV's on this situation.
EDIT: I'm convinced, that until we majorly overhaul our road infrastructure to be more 'robot friendly', it's hard to see _fully_ autonomous AV's work in major cities I.e. electronic beacons on lane dividers, electronic signals on traffic lights, vastly stronger GPS network or replacement thereof, six nines level mobile network coverage at high bandwidth.
"AI is the phrase behind which magic hides and people love magic. Everything that has the aura of “humans don’t fully understand how it works in detail” will be used by charlartans, snake oil salesmen and conmen."
I think you're right. I'm hoping that "show me your qubits" will put a stop to that. It's easy to see qubits because they're hardware; it's a little harder to see a local minima-avoiding heuristic search algorithm.
"Uber/Lyft do have a VCs-will-not-race-to-the-bottom-with-them moat, and tomorrow they might as well raise their prices to turn profitable."
That's the multi billion $ question, if they hike prices to become profitable, will customers swallow it, or jump to local alternatives. My feeling is the latter, I don't think you get economy of scale for running a taxi business, because your biggest cost is paying local drivers.
I have several apps on my phone for calling a ride. I usually pick Uber because it's cheapest, but if there is any hint of a surcharge I scan all of the apps to pick the cheapest.
I presume it's because they're contracting? It's the way to cash out in software in the UK, I believe in most companies, contractors get to sidestep the HR/salary budget hierarchy, usually because the company is really desperate, and they tell themselves "they're only temporary, so won't apply salary banding on them"
"10 teams of 3 each owning their own little slice of the pie sounds like an organizational nightmare; mostly, you can't keep each team fully occupied with just that one service, that's not how it works. And any task that touches more than one microservice will involve a lot of overhead with teams coordinating."
I guess that's where the critical challenge lies. You'd better be damn sure you know your business domain better than the business itself! So you can lay down the right boundaries, contracts & responsibilities for your services.
Once your service boundaries are laid down, they're very hard to change
It takes just one cross-cutting requirement change to tank your architecture and turn it into a distributed ball of mud!
Which has to stand as a damning indictment of the one-service-per-team model, surely?
Something so inflexible can't survive contact with reality (for very long).
At work we run 20-something microservices with a team of 14 engineers, and there's no siloing. If we need to add a feature that touches three services then the devs just touch the three services and orchestrate the deployments correctly. Devs wander between services depending on the needs of the project/product, not based on an arbitrary division.
I think other professions emphasise past experience and referrals more. That and official credentials, especially in certified professions (I.e. Medicine).
That said, I think all interviews have an element of silliness to them. I know a financial consultant who was quizzed over articles published in the days financial times newspaper. Also know one of our analysts makes candidates do long division on paper! Don't forget the infamous how many golf balls can you fit in a jumbo jet kind of thing.
Terrifying stuff, it literally is straight out of a black mirror episode.