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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."
Classic fear mongering. The car always had a driver in it (with override capabilities) while on public roads.
Have you seen the lunatics out there? Give me a robot any day! We are given a licence (one test only) in our youth and then out you go, rain, hail or shine, fit or unfit, tired or not, drunk or senile or both. That's ignoring the meatheads who want to deliberately drive dangerously and those not paying attention on a mobile phone texting "RORL" (roll off road laughing). I see your point but lets move on.
The 2nd order effects from this are going to be interesting. If you only have robot drivers (and you will, cause with lower accident rates, you'll have lower insurance rates if you always let the computer drive), you won't need visible signs or traffic lights. How would this affect pedestrian crossings? Would pedestrians feel irrationally unsafe crossing a road with robot drivers on it? Will we remove speed limits as computer reaction and cognitive ability gets faster?
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:
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.
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.
It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. - Einstein
Absolutely false. The car is completely capable of detecting pedestrians, deer, stopped cars, etc. This thing knows how to stop in the event that some shit goes down (see link below). You're just making up a lot of bullshit based on literally no research.
SOURCE: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Atmk07Otu9U Skip to 2:10 to see where the ABC reporter makes a move like she's going to run out in front of the car. The thing slams on the brakes.
-1 disagree is not a modifier for a reason. -1 troll, flaimbait, redundant, overrated are NOT acceptable substitutes.
This is just funded by Google. It's the group at Stanford which did the DARPA Urban Challenge that's doing the work. It's essentially the same technology. They're getting very good at this.
The thing on top of the car is a rotating cone of LIDAR scanners. The original version of that was developed by Team DAD for the 2005 DARPA Grand Challenge. The prototype, which was a much bigger wheel of scanners, fell off the vehicle. But they then built a more compact production version, the Velodyne scanner, with 64 lasers. It costs about $100K per unit, but automatic driving became much better once that came out. Most of the teams in the DARPA Urban Challenge used that.
Personally, I think the rotating machinery approach is too expensive for production, and that the Advanced Scientific Concepts flash LIDAR has more promise as a production product. The ASC system requires some exotic custom imaging ICs, with a time-of-flight timer behind each pixel. That's the kind of thing that's incredibly expensive when you make 10 of them, and cheap when you make 10 million.
Taxi: Welcome to the free automatic Google Taxi. Where do you want to go? ...
Passenger: To the train station.
Taxi: OK. By the way, there's a Starbucks on the way. They currently have a special offer, two coffees for the price of one. Maybe you want to go to there first?
Passenger: No, I just want to go to the train station.
Taxi: If you are interested in train stations, maybe the railway museum would interest you. It's only five minutes from here.
Passenger: I'm not interested in the train station, I just want to get my train.
Taxi: Maybe you are interested in Morton's model railway shop? They have great models, and I can get you there in only ten minutes.
Passenger: I don't want a model train, I want to use the real train!
Taxi: Did you know that just this week, the Railway Academy opened? In the first year they give discount for their locomotive driver courses. I can send you the application form to your phone.
Passenger: I don't want to drive the train, I just want to take the train. And if you don't drive me there soon, I'll miss it.
Taxi: Did you know that you can buy train tickets with 5% discount at train-ticket.com?
Passenger: I already have the train ticket. I just want to get to the fucking train.
Taxi: Oh, you are interested in fucking? There's a whorehouse not far from here
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.