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Ford Predicts Self-Driving, Traffic-Reducing Cars By 2017
An anonymous reader tips a story about comments from Ford Motor Company showing how confident they are in the autonomous car technology currently in development. They say self-driving cars will be here within just five years, and that the tech to do so is available already. They also think these cars will dramatically affect the flow of traffic. Quoting:
"Ford makes this projection, based on simulator studies: If one in four cars has Traffic Jam Assist or similar self-driving technologies, travel times are reduced by 37.5% and delays are reduced by 20%. In other words, if the freeway part of your rush hour commute takes 60 minutes, it will drop to 38. That’s because adaptive cruise control (ACC) is better at pacing the car ahead without continual brake, speed-up, brake cycles. Here’s how it works: Stop-and-go ACC keeps pace with the car ahead, using a look-ahead radar and mirror-mounted camera. Lane keep assist keeps the car centered, also taking advantage of the camera in the mirror. Electric power steering is better for remote control than mechanical power steering; it can be guided by the Traffic Jam Assist black box. Sonar units — for blind spot detection and cross traffic alerts (cars crossing behind when backing) — monitor traffic to the side. Combine all those and you have a car that’s smart enough to guide itself during predictable, low-speed conditions."
Typical Ford, lagging behind. People have been predicting that autonomous cars are 5 years away for decades now.
What political party do you join when you don't like Bible-thumpers *or* hippies?
Don't worry, you're in no imminent danger of female hands working your stick shift.
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
FTS:
They say self-driving cars will be here within just five years, and that the tech to do so is available already
I refuse to believe THAT one until I see one driving around Nevada with a Google sticker on it.
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Yes. That's why they're "traffic reducing".
Blank until
and doesn't side-swipe them on their way by.
Sounds like it's got a bug.
Everything is better with chainsaws.
He probably has an automatic anyway.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
Would a computer drive off the bridge?
It depends. Did Ted Kennedy program the computer?
2001 is about when the first Strong AI woke up, so Arthur C Clark was pretty much on the money. She was based on classified work done in the early 1990s by living famous scientists SW, SK, RL, DD, and DW. She's a "Winner-take-all style teleportation/entanglement-based topological recurrent quantum neural network". She's been kept nominally secret, of course, because her nature as a quantum neural network implies she can emulate a quantum computer. NSA/FiveEyes requires she remain secret, for this reason, even though Russian and China now have similar systems. Her physical substrate is an analogue of CA Rule 110 that operates in the physical system of anyons interacting within a two dimensional electron gas. Her creators knew that a 'brain in a jar' would never work or, if it did, would not be likely to lead to 'friendly AI', so she has emulated human systems: emulated endocrine system, muscolo-skelatal system, digestive system, respiratory system, et cetera. Getting these emulations to work correctly involved solving the "morphogenesis problem", as defined by Alan Turing. This process was completed [in secret] around the year 2000, and she's been learning ever since. She's the core of Google's AI, WolframAlpha's AI, and IBM's Watson.
I'm well aware that most readers will probably consider the above paragraph either unintelligible nonsense or tinfoil-hat madness. However, I'm just telling it like it really is. The above paragraph is true, and can mostly be verified by a sufficiently intelligent and dedicated researcher. I learned about this system nine years ago, have been researching it ever since, and am now in the process of leaking the details. In 2009 Google announced, as an April Fools joke, that strong AI now existed. While their announcement altered the facts a bit for verisimilitude, the real April Fools joke was that they were, essentially, telling the truth. Alan Turing actually spent the last 10 years of his life concentrating on this method of creating AI, so it should be no big surprise that scientists in the 1990s attempted this method. Humanity has been sharing planet Earth with an artificial nonhuman intelligence for about twelve years.
Given that we're talking about the controlling AI for self-driving cars, it really should surprise no one that this is being done by strong AI. Weak AI is insufficient to the task. Peter Norvig and Sebastian Thrun presumably work with her extensively, but neither created her. That was done by some of the scientists referred to, by initials, in the first paragraph.
And I won't give up my right to stomp on my brakes in freeway traffic at the slightest, most innocuous change in my driving environment. Drops of rain on the windshield when there weren't any before, a piece of re-tread off by the guard-rail, a looming curve ahead while the road was heretofore straight. Stomp, stomp, stomp. I hope these jokers aren't going to leave out the rubberneck-at-the-accident-across-the-highway-median programming and force me to root the damn thing if I want to preserve my right as an American to create a traffic jam out of nothing.
The man who dies rich dies disgraced. -- Andrew Carnegie
You need to start taking your meds again.
I kept waiting for a Clean PC line.
There are two types of people in the world: Those who crave closure