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Musk Says Drivers May Become Obsolete, Announces Juice-Saving Upgrades
Lucas123 (935744) writes During a discussion at a Nvidia conference, Elon Musk predicted that in the future, consumers will not be allowed to drive cars because it will be considered too dangerous. [Note: compare Lyft CEO Logan Green's opposite view] 'You can't have a person driving a two-ton death machine,' he said. Others agree. Thilo Koslowski, a vice president at Gartner, said instead of laws dictating drivers must cede control to their car's computer, we may someday someday just pass signs requiring drivers to activate auto-drive functionality for certain particularly treacherous stretches of roadway. Kowlowski said fully autonomous vehicles won't be ubiquitous for another 10 to 15 years, but the government could spur that on by offering tax incentives as it does today with all-electric vehicles and hybrids. Related news: it may not be fully autonomous driving, but Tesla S drivers are promised an upgrade a few months from now that gives a taste, with the addition of automatic steering features. And though it's perhaps anti-climactic as a solution to "ending range anxiety," Musk also announced today that Teslas will get in the next two weeks a software upgrade that will greatly upgrade the cars' routing software, integrating "near-realtime" lists of available supercharger stations, and keeping drivers apprised of whether one is within range.
when you pry it from my cold, dead hands.
Which may very well occur when autonomous vehicles can't decide what they should do and come to a stop, causing others to plow into them.
More likely, just like older folk that insist on hand-writing letters, having a land-line, and banking in person, you will not be forced to give up your driving. Instead, your costs will go up, while other more inexpensive or convenient options will become available for those who don't care to drive to get from A->B.
Feel free to yell at those folks from your porch to stay off your lawn as they blissfully ignore you.
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... that work on the new holy grail, autonomous vehicles. Somehow, the level of confidence in this new technology seems to be inversely proportional to the distance to the nitty-gritty details of actually doing this. Can someone please tell me, exactly, how this is supposed to be done? Without using the phrase "how hard can it be".
Let's take the simplest of all the detection problems. How many lines of code does it take to reliably and safely detect the lane markings of a road? Nobody knows, because nobody has done it yet. Yes, there are prototypes that can handle some sub sets of all cases. The best I've seen handles 90% of the cases. That takes 1 MSLOC and still counting. How expensive will the last 10% be? How many hours of recorded video data does it take to verify the last 10%? The last 1%? The 90% takes a room full of TB harddisks and thousands of units parallel verification.
But yeah, how hard can it be to make a fully autonomous vehicle? I'll bet we'll have the fusion, flying car and AI analog: constantly 30 years in the future with winters interspearsed.