Google Cars Drive Themselves, In Traffic

An anonymous reader noted that "At the TED 2011 conference this week, Google has been giving extremely rare demos of its self-driving cars. TED attendees have even been allowed to travel inside them, on a closed course. The car is a project of Google, which has been working in secret but in plain view on vehicles that can drive themselves, using artificial-intelligence software that can sense anything near the car and mimic the decisions made by a human driver."

Comments

Re:awful, awful awful awful

[causality]

there is no way a @#$ robot can judge what to do about oncoming accidents, like a pedestrian, a deer, a squirrel, a semi jackknifing, an ambulance passing, a crash ahead of you, a gigantic pothole, a box full of dishes that fell off a truck, a big tree branch, a patch of black ice, a tire blowing out, a semi weaving in a strong wind, etc etc etc.

Perhaps not, but it's likely to be a hell of a lot better at not doing the idiotic things that cause the overwhelming majority of accidents in the first place.

Almost all accidents other than collisions with animals that run out in front of you are due to human stupidity. Black ice may be an exception, maybe, except that if the conditions allow it to happen a prudent driver accounts for the possibility (note that if you hit a patch of black ice the accident is considered your fault esp. for purposes of determining liability). Everything from:

• Tailgating
• Running red lights
• People who think the purpose of the left lane is to drive the exact same speed as the car to your right so other drivers are tempted to perform dangerous maneuvers just to get around your inconsiderate punk ass, rather than submit to your roadblock
• General failure to yield
• A belief that your text message is more important than the lives of others
• A sudden urge to make a right turn from the left lane because proper planning of your route is too much to ask from a puny intellect and you're far too self-important to go a little up the road and find somewhere to turn around and go back
• Drunk driving

You name it. It's plain old human stupidity. It's a particularly egregious kind of imbecility too, the kind that fails to recognize that other people exist and can be harmed by your poor decision-making. If "robots" can be programmed not to do these things I'm all for it. Alternatively, if robots can be programmed to beat the living shit out of people who do these things, I'm all for that too.

to do that, you first have to win over the 'trains = communism' crowd using some kind of distributed jobs program

That's a new one to me. I have heard complaints that many train systems would be uneconomical, in the sense that they'd never survive without some kind of subsidy. I haven't heard anyone actually refer to alternate transportation as a tenet of Communism, however.