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Autonomous Cars Will Save Money and Lives
cartechboy writes "Autonomous cars are coming even if tech companies have to produce them. The biggest hurdles are the technology (very expensive and often still surprisingly rudimentary) and how vehicle to vehicle (V2V) communication happens (one car anticipates or sees an accident, it should tell nearby cars). So what are the benefits to self-driving cars? They may save us thousands of lives and not a small amount of cash. A new study from the Eno Center for Transportation (PDF) suggests that if just 10 percent of vehicles on the road were autonomous, the U.S. could see 1,000 fewer highway fatalities annually and save $38 billion in lost productivity (due to congestion and other traffic problems). Right off the bat you can imagine autonomous driving easily topping your average intoxicated drivers' ability behind the wheel. At a 90 percent adoption mark those same numbers in theory would become: 21,700 lives spared, and a whopping $447 billion saved."
Hey, let's play this game with computers, after all we don't need freedom behind the keyboard either and **AA's claim piracy cost the economy countless billions of dollars every year. Let's have autonomous computers! We'll make the operating system and hardware completely closed to prevent anyone from altering their 'trusted' environment. Now in order to keep anyone from hacking into their computers and driving by themselves we'll have to make sure that we take away the ability to install software that hasn't been approved.
We'll do this through a centralized market place where every application is signed and approved. Now the signing agency is taking on a lot of work to act as big brother and censor everything so it's only fair that they get a cut of 30%. How if your application sells well we'll cut the fee down to 20%. Now we have to make sure that your computer can't be used to pirate software so we'll keep up the autonomous trend and make all updates automatic. By locking out software from any distribution method other than the market and ensuring updates are automated your environment will stay trusted for software companies to continue offering you software.
Welcome to Microsoft Surface RT of the future, big brother knows best. What possible legitimate reason do you have for driving your own computer and endangering the economy by enabling the possibility of piracy? Think of the children!!!
I'm extremely frugal and I'd still buy one the instant an affordable one is released simply because an autonomous car represents a potential savings of 4,000 hours of my life over the life of the car. That's represents 2 years of a full time job. That's time that could be spent doing whatever I usually do at home, including sleeping, entertainment, and personal work/finances. It's incredible to think about.
Actually, Autonomous cars are a productivity gain that quickly translates, by allowing you to nap or read in the car after you buy one.
We want to put as many people out of work as possible, that's really the whole point of technological advancement, that's how we make our lives better. There are obviously powerful people who steal our productivity gains, like Wall St. and real estate brokers, our expanding law enforcement and industrial prison system, etc. We must reclaim these productivity gains for ourselves by enforcing transparency upon those that rule us, ala big banks, big companies, and governments, as well as by shortening the work week.
You know, after the industrial revolution, workers needed to do exactly this to but by forming unions, fighting in communist revolutions, etc. Unions were the ones who shortened the work week from six to five days during the 20th century, which helped bring about more prosperity. France has benefited economically form it's 35 hour work week more recently.
At present, our best way to force the government to shorten the work week is to : (a) Invent technologies that put masses of the pointless white collar workers out of work. High frequency trading helped reduce the number of people needed in finance, for example. And (b) obstruct Keynesian make work programs like the expansion of law enforcement through the war on drugs, war on terror, and surveillance state.
Autonomous cars are cool though because they require no connected political reform, just put all the drivers and cabbies out of work (yey!), and save everyone an hour or so per day (double yey!).
See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ie5zO-mF31M
1 - If the car hits someone. Who is responsible
2 - If the car hits another autonomous car who is at fault.
3 - Imagine the much more complex and costly process to sort out damage claims.
4 - Strict standards and regulations will be required. This of course means less freedom.
5 - Government will want to switch off your car when you don't comply. For safety of course.
6 - The NSA and FBI will get their hands on those switches and do with you as they please (Movie: Fifth Element)
7 - The perceived benefits are so great that soon manual driving is banned.
Result, cost goes up freedom goes down. As much as I love my car to take me home after having a few too many drinks, I think I prefer to take a cab and retain my freedom or what is left of it.
This is not a lifestyle I want to live. I can't imagine a future population truly being happy with this either. No matter what the soccer mom associations running western society, today say, there's much more to life than safety and convenience, especially when it comes to control over mental state and physical location/transportation.
Does it matter that the autonomous car will be continuously recording everything around it, and will retain plenty of that recording to put that kid in jail for attempted murder? Not too many people will dare to even approach such a car with bad intent. I'd build such a car to record everything around it all the time, even when parked :-)
Bus will be first. Route is known and static.
When considering whether someone thinks they are better than average in driving skill you should look at this study
Svenson (1981) surveyed 161 students in Sweden and the United States, asking them to compare their driving safety and skill to the other people in the experiment. For driving skill, 93% of the US sample and 69% of the Swedish sample put themselves in the top 50% (above the median). For safety, 88% of the US group and 77% of the Swedish sample put themselves in the top 50%.
Yes I suspect for every 10,000 lives saved there will be one death. But a fantastic death; where the car will just drive a family off a cliff or something sensational that the media will be all over. Then for a while people will be, "I'm not getting into one of those death traps."
Plus there will be a huge number of special interest groups who will desperately try to keep drivers in cars: Taxi unions, truck driver unions, bus driver unions, classic car associations, the police (if the drivers are perfect then no more tickets), and even groups like MADD might find themselves without a mandate if there are no "Drivers". But then you get more subtle groups who will lose their minds: many small municipalities coffers will become empty if they can't be handing out fines. Even larger governments might discover serious drops in revenue without any ticket revenue coming in.
And even groups like the police will be ticked that they can't pull "suspicious" people over by just waiting for them to make a traffic mistake.
Then you get stores and other commercial areas that have made based their financial model on easy parking, but if you are using either your own robot car or more specifically a cheap robot taxi then you can get dropped off in the most dense parts of downtown and go to your specialty stores and when done get picked up at the push of a smartphone button. So if these groups realize the threat to their business models then they too will squeal.
But on a side note one of the biggest threats to life and limb posed by robot cars will be the potential for a drastic reduction in the average distance walked. I can see some people integrating a robot car so much into their movements that they step out their front door into a waiting car, it drops them off at the front door of destination one, picks them up at the front door when they are done, and this would continue until they are eventually dropped off at the front door of their house. Whereas right now they might have to walk from their parking, walk among a cluster of destinations, and then walk back to their car.
This whole lack of walking could turn out to be more deadly than the lives saved through car accidents. At least with no-walking deaths it will be people doing it to themselves vs car accidents often killing other innocent people.