As a mage, I just want to pursue the truth

Chapter 209 Autonomous Driving Technology

Being a truck driver is hard work, and there are few people willing to be truck drivers in Europe and the United States.

Therefore, the remuneration for this profession is quite considerable. At the same time, truck drivers have a certain bargaining power, and disagreements often occur.

As early as 2019, the American truck driver shortage was .

In the face of the pandemic in the next two years, the shortage of truck drivers was originally predicted to reach 2023 in 2022. As a result, the shortage of truck drivers was brought forward to due to the pandemic.

By 2024, there will be a shortage of around 12 truck drivers in America alone.

Some American delivery truck companies have even relaxed their screening of marijuana use records.

In recent years, the problem of resource surge faced by the European continent has continued to intensify.

The energy shortage has not been alleviated just because the world situation has calmed down.

As a result, oil prices rose too quickly and French truck drivers were frequently bagong.

To avoid this problem, France not only introduced England's autonomous driving technology.

They also introduced a batch of self-driving electric trucks built by Qiandu and FAW.

France wants to place bets on multiple sides, see which side's products are better, and then purchase in large quantities.

The prices of products made in China and England in the field of autonomous driving are almost the same, but China's advantage lies in electric trucks.

Electric trucks equipped with the latest battery technology from Kechuang Biotechnology have a much longer range than ordinary trucks, and electric vehicles also avoid the disadvantage of high oil prices.

Therefore, electric trucks produced by FAW are selling very well in Western countries, and only a few countries choose electric trucks equipped with Qiandu’s autonomous driving technology.

Many European and American countries still have doubts about allowing China's autonomous driving technology to enter their countries.

The American side even exaggerated in the media that China's autonomous driving technology would steal their geographic data.

"This is a serious threat to the security of the Western world. We should restrict China's autonomous driving technology."

The problem is that this is not the 19th century. Satellites in the sky have long collected all the geographical data that should and should not be collected.

Wherever electric trucks can go, satellites in the sky will only take clearer pictures.

America and even some European countries just don't want to see China surpass them in the field of artificial intelligence.

Even if it is just a certain sub-field of artificial intelligence, it will not work.

Among these countries, France is relatively friendly, so it was the first to purchase China's autonomous driving technology.

In order to gain an advantage in the competition with the Chinese, the English side even took the initiative to lower prices.

"Before we get Sinovation Biotech, there is no way we can compete with the Chinese in the electric vehicle field."

“The Semi plan should make some changes instead of sticking to the old ways. We don’t have to do everything ourselves.”

Since 2020, people have realized that trucks need to operate around the clock, but there is a huge gap in manpower. At the same time, the difficulty of truck autonomous driving is much easier than driving within the city.

A large number of companies committed to the field of truck autonomous driving technology have emerged.

Among them, Tesla is the new energy giant that seems most likely to achieve its goal.

They announced their own internal self-driving electric truck program called Semi as early as 2021.

"The Chinese electric trucks have a range of up to 3000 kilometers, while our Tesla Semi has a range of only 800 kilometers. Compared with the Chinese electric trucks, the Semi's range is too short!"

"We can completely adopt the same approach as Qiandu and Tencent, cooperate with Chinese car companies, and launch Chinese electric trucks equipped with Tesla's autonomous driving technology."

"Before we can get Kechuang Bio, some compromise is necessary."

Musk has basically stopped interfering in the day-to-day operations of Tesla. In other words, he basically does not interfere in the operations of any company under his name.

All his energy is focused on mining magic coins.

Originally, he would just focus on SpaceX, but he would still take care of it.

After Apple mined the first magic coin, Musk devoted all his energy to his wholly-owned company Magic Unlimited, which specializes in magic coin mining.

Originally, Musk thought that the future was the space age and he wanted to take people to Mars.

It's not easy to do, but he hopes to see it in his lifetime.

When magic appears before the world, Musk believes that the future is an era of magic.

Especially when he learned from internal channels in Washington that using the magic brain can not only give one the ability to cast spells, but also prolong one's lifespan to a certain extent and greatly improve the brain's logical thinking ability.

Musk realized that in the future, magicians would form an even more irreparable gap with ordinary people than the current top and bottom classes.

Becoming a magician is Musk's only goal in the short term.

To reduce disputes, he used his own cash to set up his own company.

As for the possibility of being controlled by Merlin, Musk doesn't care.

In his opinion, gain and loss are equivalent, and it is worth losing a certain degree of freedom in order to gain magic.

What's more, there is no absolute freedom for people in the world.

Tesla's current CEO is Baglino, formerly the vice president in charge of technology. He joined Tesla as early as 2006 and is the most senior executive in Tesla.

Originally, Kechuang Biopharma planned to open its lithium battery technology to overseas markets in early 2024, but after accepting investment from Chinese officials, the Chinese government helped Kechuang Biopharma to block all external pressure.

The proportion of state-owned enterprise shares in Kechuang Bio has exceeded 20%.

Even if Tesla builds a super factory in Shenhai, it still cannot obtain China's most advanced lithium batteries.

Tesla's executives went to Shenhai several times to negotiate for this. The Chinese government said that it was a commercial act and they could not interfere.

"If we don't use autonomous driving technology first, this market will be a market where one company gradually approaches a monopoly and other manufacturers will basically have no chance."

"What we need to do now is to become one of the players in this field first, and then consider the subsequent construction of the entire industry chain."

"There must be many Chinese joint venture automakers willing to cooperate with us."

After Baglino finished speaking, he paused and looked at Jerome, who looked a little embarrassed in front of him.

Jerome is Tesla's operations director and is also very experienced, having worked at Tesla for fifteen years.

Jerome replied: "Yes, Huaguo Shenhai General has expressed its willingness to cooperate with us."

"Although GM and Honda have teamed up to launch electric vehicles priced as low as 3 yuan in an attempt to compete with us globally."

"But Shenhai General Motors doesn't have much say, and they are very interested in our proposal."

"And the Shenhai government is also interested in promoting cooperation."

"We can work with Shenhai GM to build self-driving electric vehicles, and we will be responsible for the self-driving module."

"But if we are determined to cooperate with Shenhai General, we need to speed up the process." "I think it is worth paying a certain price."

"Because although the Shenhai government will definitely favor us, Google and Microsoft both want to cooperate with Chinese car companies, using Chinese electric trucks as a platform and installing their own autonomous driving technology."

Google cannot enter the Chinese market, but that does not mean it has no business in China.

Google has extensive business in China.

Google opened an artificial intelligence research and development center in China in 2017, with its main research and development goals focusing on natural language processing and advertising optimization.

At the same time, China has a team responsible for the development of Google's open source library TensorFlow.

Google's Pixel phone supply chain is located in China. Google's advertising business is also in China, specifically targeting Chinese companies that want to enter overseas markets.

Not to mention Microsoft, whose Microsoft Research Asia has always been located in China.

China's self-driving electric trucks were first rolled out in the Yangtze River Delta and Pearl River Delta regions.

Google and Microsoft noticed it at the first time. They thought it was very promising and started to do preliminary market research and send it back to their headquarters.

Microsoft and Google only started to take action after electric trucks were sold to overseas markets.

Shenhai General Motors is the Chinese auto company most likely to achieve cooperation.

It doesn’t matter if you have never made a truck before. There is a big difference between electric trucks and ordinary trucks. Other car companies also have no experience.

Baglino smelled trouble; neither Google nor Microsoft were easy opponents to deal with.

If neither of these two companies wants to enter the market, Baglino is confident that he can reach a cooperation agreement that is beneficial to them.

The confidence lies in the cooperation with Tesla. China's self-driving electric trucks can be sold to more European and American countries, not just France.

With Tesla lobbying in the middle, at least America won't have a problem.

But what Tesla can do, Microsoft and Google can only do better, and these two lobbying groups in Washington are much more powerful than Tesla's.

"You go and prepare the materials. I will go to China in person when the time comes."

Currently, there are far more than American giants in the market that want to use Chinese car companies as a springboard to install autonomous driving technology on Chinese electric trucks.

Although car companies have no experience in manufacturing electric trucks, truck experience is equally important.

It’s not that the American giants don’t want to look for Chinese automakers with truck experience, such as Jiefang.

But the problem is that someone got there first and established a joint venture subsidiary with Jiefang.

Many small entrepreneurial companies have stronger desire and faster execution.

For example, PlusAI in China, the capital behind this autonomous driving company is Sequoia Capital China, Huachuang Capital and GSR Ventures.

The company has been testing its self-driving trucks extensively in America since 2016.

Tests were carried out in Europe and China in 2019. The test runs were successful over 10 kilometers on two long-distance routes in China without any accidents.

After breakthroughs in new energy technology and autonomous driving technology, PlusAI and the capital behind it are unwilling to be left out.

They have been planting trees for a long time, and it's time for them to harvest.

The company jointly established by PlusAI and Jiefang has started mass production of self-driving electric trucks. As long as they accept JD.com's investment, JD.com's self-operated logistics will introduce their electric trucks on a large scale.

The advancement of science and technology has brought changes to society in all aspects.

A technological breakthrough brings not only a breakthrough in this niche field, but more importantly, a breakthrough in the entire industrial chain.

It is precisely because technological breakthroughs can be a point-to-surface event that America is wary of Huawei's 5G technology.

As for why American did not interfere with Kechuang Bio but interfered heavily with Huawei, it was because Huawei had alternative products while Kechuang Bio did not.

When people accuse you of being a monopoly, you'd better really be a monopoly.

“We can think of what Merlin calls the Heber Test as a more advanced version of the full Turing Test.

The advanced here just means higher difficulty or requirements.

Our current artificial intelligence can already pass the Turing test."

The Turing test is a thought experiment proposed by English computer scientist Alan Turing to test whether a machine can demonstrate a level of intelligence close to that of a human.

Simply put, if a machine can have a conversation with humans without being identified as a machine, then the machine is said to be intelligent.

Under Wiles' leadership, the artificial intelligence program progressed rapidly.

The artificial intelligence they created was named Ameca, and it can deceive nearly 50 percent of people in conversations with them.

In other words, about 50 percent of people cannot recognize that it is artificial intelligence on the other end of the communication tool.

In any other year, this result would have been enough to get the English media hype as further evidence that England is leading the world in artificial intelligence.

However, when it comes to rewards, if announcing them actually stimulates competitors to speed up their progress, that would not be a good thing.

Therefore, the news was blocked from the outside.

Even if someone chats with Ameca through WhatsApp, regardless of whether he can tell whether the person on the other end of the chat box is a real person or not, the experimenters will not tell him the truth.

If the opponent finds out that Ameca is an artificial intelligence, he will lose the opportunity to chat with Ameca.

If he doesn't see through it, Ameca will keep chatting with him until he sees through it.

The longest person I've chatted with so far is more than three months. That person is a otaku who is usually addicted to Japanese anime.

Even though England and Japan had a falling out in the international mainstream media, it did not affect his love for Japanese anime at all.

The man chatted for so long that he almost regarded Ameca as the perfect chat partner.

So much so that the researchers of the Ameca experimental project suspected that the other party knew that Ameca was not a real person, and the fact that he was not a real person made him more willing to chat with Ameca.

“We’re going to pass the full Turing test this year and then be ready to try the Hybrid test.”

The technologies that can pass the Turing test include only natural language processing, knowledge graphs, reasoning, and machine learning.
In order to further improve the requirements for artificial intelligence, scientists added requirements for two other technologies to the complete Turing test: computer vision and robotics.

"I don't think we need to add robotics. Merlin won't come to see our AI technology live. Just computer vision will be enough."

"After submitting the program twice before, it failed each time, and Merlin didn't tell us why it failed."

“The Haibo test feels like a black box, we submit the code, and then Merlin returns a result to us.

At least so far, all we have achieved is failure.

We need to think carefully about whether our direction is inconsistent with Merlin's requirements."

"Although this is possible, fundamentally speaking, the definition of artificial intelligence is the same, and even if there are deviations in direction, they will not be very different."

(End of this chapter)