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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."
30 minutes more sleeping?
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Why do you think cops care about that money? Municipalities may care about that money, but the cops couldn't care less (they don't get a cut, after all). But cops do try to avoid hearing "how come everyone else writes more tickets than you do?" So they make a point of writing tickets. But they really don't care about revenues, per se.
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.
People are willing to endure a risk orders of magnitudes higher of crashing by human error than by machine error.
Much as they're okay with the risk of dying from flu every year by not vaccinating, but not the comparatively negligible risk of a terrorist attack.
That's the problem.
Currently, they're looking at data for autonomous vehicles in a complete vacuum.
I'm quite sure that having such cars on the roads in percentile quantities will yield their own sets of unique fatalities sooner or later.
In the mean time, I'm not an quadriplegic. So I'll choose to drive my own damn car.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
Yeah, but your boss can't expect you to work on your commute. This is really about adding 10 hours a week to your workweek.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
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
And when you plow into a pedestrian in your Audi A4 while checking a Facebook message, better call Saul!
Public Transportation: A great way to get from someplace you don't live to someplace you don't work.
This topic has been discussed here several times now, but one thing I haven't seen brought up is insurance. If my vehicle is driving itself and causes an accident, then what driver is to blame? The person sitting behind the wheel? Why would my insurance company want to pay for an accident caused by a piece of software when they can go after the company that produced the software? Or what if they will only insure Ford cars and not Chrysler because statistics show that one auto-driving system performs better than the other? If my car's autonomous system just flat out runs over a little girl playing in the street and kills her, could I be charged with manslaughter because I was behind the wheel reading the newspaper?
Think back a few years to the Toyota "auto acceleration" issue, and the lawsuits and government testing, etc, etc that was going on over that one issue. And that was possible hiccup in a single system that merely relayed user input to the engine. It wasn't even remotely as complex as a vehicle actually driving itself.
There's going to be a whole lot to figure out in the legal, insurance and liability areas that makes the technical challenge and development look like child's play.
Better known as 318230.
That's it. There will never be computer driven cars for the masses. It will always be cheaper for them to drive their own.
Not when the insurance companies artificially jack up the rates for human driven cars. They will force the majority into this, guaranteed.
Not all economic activity benefits society. Perhaps the most well known demonstration is the parable of the broken window:
The parable of the broken window was introduced by Frederic Bastiat in his 1850 essay Ce qu'on voit et ce qu'on ne voit pas (That Which Is Seen and That Which Is Unseen) to illustrate why destruction, and the money spent to recover from destruction, is actually not a net-benefit to society. The parable, also known as the broken window fallacy or glazier's fallacy, demonstrates how opportunity costs, as well as the law of unintended consequences, affect economic activity in ways that are "unseen" or ignored.
The productivity gains failing to make it to your level are arguably a problem of inequality of the distribution of wealth, not lack of economic activity.
Except that a johnny cab done today would report your travel plans to the local police dept, insurance company, and any other institution that has a vested interest in judging your behavior. No thanks. I'd rather walk.
Preach on, bro! You'll also never see GPS for the masses, it will always be cheaper for them to open a map. Or power windows. Or automatic transmission. Or...oh, wait.
I think it's a wonderful idea - maybe because I'm older. It would allow my in laws, for example, to continue being mobile in their late 70-s and 80's, whereas now they can't drive. It would allow me more mobility too, since I can't really drive due to health reasons. I can imagine automatic-only roads, where the speed limits are increased and traffic flow is automated - no more traffic jams, traffic lights would result in faster trips and more efficient fuel use.
Of course I like driving as much as the next guy, but I wouldn't mind if it became relegated to a "hobby" as opposed to an unavoidable daily chore.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
If you want to drive recreationally, on a closed course, I expect you'll be able to do that indefinitely in more or less whatever format you prefer. But there's no reason you need to endanger others with your manual driving just to scratch your recreational itch or satisfy some nostalgic idea of "freedom" (via dependence on the auto industry, the oil industry, and public roads).
Where this is going to get interesting is when nearly all the cars on the road are autonomous and the last remaining hold outs will be preventing many other cool solutions that only work when you have 100% autonomous such as eliminating traffic lights. Eliminating traffic signs such as one way, speed, stop, etc signs. Eliminating speed limits. Even eliminating things such as lanes.
Basically the last manually driven cars will be seen to be a homicidal menace and high cost nightmare.
If humans are the cause of more accidents there's nothing artificial about it.
More realistically, I expect most people a generation from now will find the higher vehicle cost to be easily offset by not having to get a manual driving license, freeing up driving time, lower fuel consumption and using the car even when disabled, too young or otherwise not able to drive manually for whatever reason.
Trust the Computer. The Computer is your friend.
I don't think it'll necessarily put cabbies out of work, because unless i'm mistaken the primary reason people would take a taxi other than drinking, is either they lack a car (by choice, or a family with only one car, where the wife or husband needs to get somewhere while the car is out), or there is no parking at the destination. It would seem that autonomous cars wouldn't benefit people in either of these cases.
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 :-)
I can't imagine a future population truly being happy with this either.
Really? You don't think that people would rather be playing games on a mobile device or texting, than having to pay enough attention to their surroundings to avoid harm to others and themselves?
If you work 2 h during commute, then you work 6 h in the office. That is all.
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 too find it difficult to believe that a vehicle using sensors with centimetre precision on nearby obstacles and penetration through rain and fog, direct feedback from the wheels as to current grip levels, the ability to control the angle of the wheels to a single degree or better, and sub-millisecond response controller times, could possibly be better than a human.
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