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Focusing On Tech Alone, You Miss How Autonomous Driving Will Change Society
Hallie Siegel writes The way that consumers interact with and operate cars will transform most functions in commuting, travel, communications, car ownership, and many other as-yet unknown ways. Dieter Zetsche, chairman of Daimler and head of Mercedes-Benz Cars, said at this year's CES in Las Vegas: "Anyone who focuses solely on the technology has not yet grasped how autonomous driving will change our society." Robotics watcher Frank Tobe writes about how imagination is overtaking the ethics debate around autonomous cars."
Bottom line: we probably cannot imagine all the implications and collateral effects driverless cars will cause beginning early in 2020 for top-end and early adopters and progressively more widespread year after year until mid 2030 when these cars will be our major form of transportation.
That's it? That's your substance? Hell, why not try? Here are my own guesses:
These are all, of course, many years off. But it is starting to look more and more inevitable.
My work here is dung.
Why do we *need* to travel at all? Autonomous transportation in many cases is simply very inefficient teleconferencing. At least this is true in business.
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
I don't have a car or drivers licence and would like to avoid learning to drive if I can.
Thank you, Bradley Manning, Edward Snowden and so many others, for courageously defending humanity, my freedom and more!
I like fluff. I like fluff with chunky peanut butter and some jelly. This article though, this isn't my kind of fluff. Its not even making real predictions, its stating the obvious and moving on. Autonomous cars could be HUGE.
DUI (or OUI in my state)? Thing of the past. Drunken crashes? Gone with them.
need to be 17 to drive? Why? Hell, put a parental lock on the car and designate the destination. Going to work? Bring a book for the ride! Shit, tell it you want a large latte, whole milk, no sugar from dunkies, and it can coordinate with the dunkies in the area to get you one the fastest with the least time off your route. In fact, maybe it skips the closest dunkies, because you will be there before the late is ready and nobody wants to wait.
"I opened my eyes, and everything went dark again"
It seems far too many people have too low of self control to follow traffic laws and speed limits.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Thank god for no fault insurance.
Awesome technology searching for a need. If not having to drive was such a big deal, but driving time was not then you would see much more carpooling.
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new jobs will open up for people who have to dig cars out of snowbanks
a new employment category autonomous assistants will "drive" the self-driving cars in poor weather conditions
With auto drive cars I see a who is at fault mess unless the gov makes some hard rules about that.
Now do you want to be the person hurt in accident with some kind of auto drive system with the health care bills racking up as the courts fight over who is at fault and who will pay the bills? Even you own health insurance may say why should we pay when you where hit by a Google car?
Health Care for all will make things easier in the part and lower costs by cutting out lots of middle men.
Also we will need some kind of basic income to cover people put out of work by automation.
The last thing we need is people trying to get in jail / prison just for room / board and Health Care that cover more then ER and does not come with the very big bill.
Can't drive, no problem the car will do it for you.
Insufficient self restraint to be responsible for your actions, same answer.
Self driving cars are great for removing the tedium of a part of life,
but as we get more dependant on them, we loose a bit more of what makes us great.
If there is an arsenal of democracy,
then technically these are a long term threat to national security.
Or, perhaps should have been posted yesterday?
Pedestrians will have to learn new skills to avoid careening out of control cars that do not recognize the pedestrians....
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new jobs will open up for people who have to dig cars out of snowbanks
a new employment category autonomous assistants will "drive" the self-driving cars in poor weather conditions
Yep that's right because once the pattern recognition has mastered the easy stuff -- which it seems to be close to doing -- they'll shut down all development on tackling edge cases and anomalies. That's how it works, right? We're still driving cars with shoe brakes and using regular picture framing glass so our bodies are cut up in an accident, right?
I mean, some of these problems like icy roads and snow might make for unsolvable problems but we already have cars that can detect loss of traction and go into traction control mode. Have you ever heard of ABS? Developments like that will likely come along for the special cases of autonomous driving. If they don't, it's certainly not a death knell on the technology. At this point, I'll accept a 95% solution.
My work here is dung.
People actually like to drive. And, I doubt the randomness of destination will be able to be replicated by an autonomous vehicle. That is to say, it won't be able to drive anywhere. There is also a tremendous social good to the population interacting with each other by driving. That positive will disappear if autonomous cars were to take over. But they never will. It is once again naive science fiction-ism perpetrated by those who desire to make money off a forced change for no good reason. Now, planes flying themselves, that would be good considering recent headlines.
E Proelio Veritas.
Still a pretty big "if" there.
SJW's don't eliminate discrimination. They just expropriate it for themselves.
The basic idea of autonomous cars from a user's standpoint: "I get in the car, indicate where I want to go, the vehicle moves, and I do my own thing." While I can see driverless cars being pretty interesting and "wow-that's-cool" for the first few years, it will eventually become as interesting as power lines and will become what many other countries mostly use: mass transit.
...is that people like this don't realize the implications of technology on his 'fantasy' of how things could be.
I don't want my autonomous car talking to ANYTHING that I don't control/manage/filter. I don't care what some unknown car reported, I don't trust that car. I'm no member of the tinfoil hat brigade, but I do work in software security and I assure you - IT IS INSANE to presume that ANY automaker is going to produce software that isn't trivially easy to pwn in the next decade. They all roll their own solutions (or have someone produce a custom solution) and using cryptography as an example - don't roll your own, even if you *really* know what you're doing, you're likely to regret it.
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Why do we *need* to travel at all?
Because lots of things have to be done in person. I run a manufacturing plant. I can assure you that you cannot run a manufacturing plant from your bedroom at home. It's a little hard to run a restaurant while telecommuting. Good luck operating a retail store while telecommuting. Farming? Mining? Medicine? Freight delivery? Most jobs aren't really compatible with telecommuting if you actually give it a moment's thought.
Autonomous transportation in many cases is simply very inefficient teleconferencing. At least this is true in business.
I assure you that that is quite false in the majority of cases. Autonomous transportation is basically like a very small flexible train system that does not require tracks. It's like riding the bus - someone else is doing the driving but you still have to get there for a reason.
If a car is forced to make a decision, which do you have it choose?
A. Plow into another vehicle on the road
B. Plow into someone on the sidewalk
I would think that those in vehicles on the road have consented to being in a dangerous situation. Whereas the person on the sidewalk is innocent.
But I'm assuming the article it touching on things such as picking your kids up from school; having your car drive to the store to pick up an online grocery order; etc.
This article tells us nothing, and as usual, it's someone gushing about how technology which isn't widely available yet is going to be super awesome and change our lives. Hell, it boils down to two quotes
It's the usual babble from futurists and other people who claim to be Really Sure that this is what we'll all be doing in a few years.
It reads like it was written by an excited cheerleader, and is about as substantial.
I remain highly skeptical that anything but a small fraction of people will ever own an autonomous car. I'm betting for the foreseeable future it will remain the plaything of the wealthy and tech companies, but in the end nobody cares enough to spend their own money on one.
This is flying cars, Mr Fusion, space taxis, and every other thing which has sounded cool at the time but never actually went anywhere.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
Not a single word in the article about HOW an autonomous car will change our society in a tangible way. You can safely skip TFA, because it actually says nothing about what the title implies. Instead, the author seems to needlessly hand-wring about the "ethics" of these cars.
These cars won't really deal with ethics, per se. Rather, they'll have goals and rules, and these will essentially encapsulate the ethics in an indirect manner. I'm betting these cars will have reasonably simple priorities for safety, like (I just came up with this on the spot, so don't get hung up on the details):
1) Never knowingly drive the car off the road for any reason.
2) Keep the car in the correct lane unless a collision is unavoidable, otherwise allow emergency lane changes.
3) If necessary, allow movement across the entire roadway, but only if it is otherwise unoccupied and can't cause a collision.
4) If all else fails, slow down or stop and tell the human to make sense of the situation
The trolly-switch dilemma that people keep bringing up is so ridiculously contrived that I just don't see it having a bearing on the reality of day to day driving and safety of the vehicle for a couple of reasons.
First, autonomous cars are much less likely to be surprised by someone cutting in front of them or other obstacles. They don't have blind spots, and their reaction times are many thousands of times faster than a human. As such, the choice of "hit A or B" is much less likely to come up in the first place, because the car would have been following a safe distance behind and would have hit the brakes at the first sign of trouble. So in the vast majority of cases, the car starts braking before the human occupant even realizes there's a problem. No accident at all, or a survivable collision at 10 or 20 mph instead of 70.
Second, in the rare situation an accident is inevitable, the priorities will be straightforward: protect the occupants of the car first within the constraints of keeping the car on the road, and if possible, in it's own lane. That simply means avoiding collisions if possible. If that's not possible, the car will simply attempt to brake as much as possible before the collision to protect the occupants. There will likely be no "swerve to miss the human and hit the bus instead". The car will brake as hard as physically possible, but if it can't safely swerve, it really has no choice but to continue forward in the safest path for its occupants.
I think people are making more of this than is actually necessary by constructing ridiculously overly-complicated and completely hypothetical scenarios and saying "how would an autonomous car deal with this?" Humans are almost never put into a situation where they have to make such a complicated choice in a split second. I'm not sure why we expect our machines to properly make choices that *we* could never make it in real time either. They're going to be better than humans in almost all situations that really matter, such as concentration, navigation, and reaction time in emergencies.
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
Once autonomous vehicles become common/accepted I see individual ownership going away. It doesn't make sense. Why would you want to own something you use so little? It makes much more sense for such things to be shared. The primary difficulty is the same with all communal things: How to keep people from being destructive?
My guess about the future: You pull out your phone/watch and open the "call car" app. Choices are type of car, pick up time/date, and location (find me or specific location). At the appropriate time a car "finds" you based on the location of your phone/watch or it pulls up at the designated location. You hop in, ride to where ever, and get out never thinking about the car again. The cars upkeep and fuel are paid via taxes. Maybe there is a camera in the car so they can see who damaged the interior. People riding in the cars can now work, watch movies, sleep, and possibly even eat. Maybe there will be a "restaurant car" which arrives with some food in it that the rider requested.
Liability/fault will be assigned to either the car manufacturer if the default is due to design or to the company who controls the maintenance contract.
Mostly because of idiot bosses that think they need to be able to walk up to you and poke you with a stick to make sure you are working.
Frequently true. If you have every managed people you'll quickly find that many of them are very interested in a paycheck but not very interested in actually working for said paycheck. A bit of figurative poking is frequently necessary.
A large number of jobs can be done at home over the network.
And far more cannot be done at home over a network. Retail, medicine, manufacturing, freight, mining, farming, restaurants, refining, and many more are not widely compatible with telecommuting. Programmers and tech workers too often have this ridiculous notion that because it can work well for software development that it makes sense for every other job which is easily and demonstrably not true.
People actually like to drive.
People like to ride horses too but you don't see many of those around these days do you? For most people cars are an expensive tool and little more.
There is also a tremendous social good to the population interacting with each other by driving.
Not really following the logic of this. Yeah people like cars but there are plenty of ways to be social that do not involve cars.
But they never will. It is once again naive science fiction-ism perpetrated by those who desire to make money off a forced change for no good reason.
No good reason? How about tens of thousands of auto fatalities per year? How about drunk driving or texting while driving or sleepy driving no longer being an issue? How about the lost opportunity cost of the billions of man-hours spent driving instead of doing something else even marginally more productive? How about the fact that a huge percentage of the driving public is demonstrably incompetent at driving?
There are TONS of good reasons to automate transportation. If you can't think of any then you really haven't given the matter any real thought.
Now, planes flying themselves, that would be good considering recent headlines.
Quite a few planes are already highly automated. Big airliners aren't far from being able to handle the entire flight without a pilot actually being technically necessary for routine flights. Autopilot and navigation has been routine for a long time now and a lot of the technology for drones is easily transferable to manned flight. Heck the space shuttle and most space flight is essentially fully automated - the "pilot" is mostly just a backup system.
When you live in a rural state as I do, losing your license is generally means you lose you ability to live independently. Older folks who are otherwise capable of living alone but have no family close are force to leave their homes when they lose the ability to drive to the doctor's office or supermarket. Autonomous cars would allow these folks choices about lifestyle and living arrangements they wouldn't currently have. Choice is almost always a good thing. Now if we could only get cars that fly themselves :)
I think we're always going to need to rely on a human operator fallback as a fail-safe and we'll never be able to stop enthusiasts from manually operating their vehicles. If that's true we'll still need to be licensed, insured, sober, and mostly paying attention. There are alternative solutions to human operator fallback issue. The car manufacturer or software group could have a central hub where the cars ping a human overseeing multiple cars for the appropriate action to take. To deal with mixed autonomous and manually operated vehicles we could have designated roads / lanes for such activities.
Imagine something worse than being in a passenger seat while your SO/mother in law is driving.
The problem with public transport in the burbs is that they only provide timely service during rush hour.
If your shift is different, or if you have to go in early, or leave unexpectedly late, you could be waiting an hour or more for the bus, at a bus stop without a shelter, after an up to 30 minute walk to get to that stop, lugging a briefcase or a laptop bag, in inclement weather.
The reason this happens is because it costs too much to pay the bus drivers to keep the system running all day.
And on top of all that, it has been shown that there is a non-zero chance that you could be sitting next to an ax-crazy murderer.
Public transport really, really sucks in the burbs - it's why we all have cars, even if we don't like to drive them.
There will certainly be some people that will need to have a dedicated vehicle based on the cargo they are carrying, but for the most of us, why have a car at all? Thing about the space savings if you didn't need to park all of those cars downtown and during the day they could drive themselves somewhere else and drive someone with a different schedule, sort of like a driverless Uber, where everyone just shares the cost of the fleet of cars based on usage.
ABS doesn't work in all driving conditions.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
I'll make one prediction right now: No car of the future, clever or dumb, will be accelerated and decelerated with a single pedal oval, the right half of which does the former and the left half does the latter. We might all think that's completely obvious, but look at the interior photo of the prototype. Even Steve Jobs would think it's suicidal.
ABS doesn't work in all driving conditions.
And yet almost every car has it. Why is that? Oh, because it's a practical solution to an open ended problem. Sure, you could be driving on frozen hydrogen for all we know and ABS won't work at all on that. Still you'd probably rather have it than say "It doesn't even work on the surface of Pluto!"
The #1 job for men in the United States is.. driving a truck.
It pays well.
Those two things make it ripe for disruption as there is a clear economic incentive; autonomous trucks don't need to stop. It's not clear even if you'd ever have to turn them off, save for regular maintenance. That is a huge economic motivator.
Trucks also follow well defined routes that are easier for the autonomous systems to deal with right now.
The Teamsters will of course freak out; but change, it is a comin'.
..don't panic
You seem obsessed with robots but also seem to have no actual experience with any of those industries. There is no such thing as a robotic hospital. Fully automated factories are science fiction. Just because some jobs in a particular industry can be automated/roboticized does not mean that most of the rest will be.
Do you think that warehouses suddenly will become fully automated just because there are some stocking robots available? Do you have even the vaguest concept of how much an ASRS (automated storage and retrieval system) costs and how inflexible they are? Every one of your examples is a tiny little niche within a much larger industry. There is a place for robotics and automation but it isn't going to suddenly allow everyone to start telecommuting to work.
Robots are NOT going to replace people in most jobs any time soon for both economic and technical reasons. For a robot to replace a human worker it has to be both A) less expensive and B) equally or more flexible. And in some jobs even if the robot were cheaper people would reject it anyway. I will happily invite you to my company. We manufacture wire harnesses. The most basic machine that can do the simplest products we make will cost $1 million each which makes zero economic sense given the volumes of products we make. Most of the products we make cannot be economically automated at all and probably won't be in my lifetime. And even if they could be automated I would still need people on site to tend to the machines.
I'm sure folks have already discussed hacking a car for a targeted killing. How long before someone hacks all the same models (or software versions) to turn hundreds of thousands of cars into hunter/killers? I can see a 13 year old doing it as a prank.
I bet 0 out of 100 people saw Maximum Overdrive as a thoughtful, nuanced view of the future.
This does not solve the problem of pollution when millions of individual cars are manufactured and operated. Nor the impact on environment when habitable land is consumed by sprawling suburbs rather than compact cities. With sensible urban planning, buses and subways can solve the same problem much better.
Self-driving cars can make incremental improvements to safety and pollution levels, but are just delaying the changes achievable with older technology in wide use in many places in the world.
With all these vehicles on the road performing in a consistent, safe style rather than hare-brained petrolheads in their Subarus and Peugeots changing three lanes at once, it will be a lot safer to ride a motorbike - especially if 'White Van Man' is also history.
Just say "No" to driverless cars.
ABS doesn't work in all driving conditions.
The best ABS is better than the best human drivers in all driving conditions. Sadly, not all cars have the best ABS. All ABS in the USA since 2011, however, is at least marginally aware of its situation, because that's when yaw control became a mandatory feature. That's why all mass-production autos in the USA now have 4-wheel ABS. However, not all ABS is clever enough to do things like deliberately lock up a wheel to build up snow or gravel in front of the tire, so even if it knows where it is, it may not be able to do anything about it.
Even when ABS won't let you stop a car, it will still let you control it. Even very old ABS will do that on ice and snow. Only very good drivers will do better, though that is a case where you don't need to be superhuman to outwit the computer. That's not an indictment against ABS, however, only against cheap implementations.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Some rather cheap chain-link fence, cheap climb sensors, and maybe some cameras could go a long way toward solving the pedestrian problem, if required.
On the other hand, recognizing an object in the road that *isn't* another car is all that's required. Especially if all of the cars can communicate w/each other.
Why can't all fpga/microcontroller manufacturers just release free optimizing compilers???
In the cases where I would have though traction control would have been most useful (hill start with a manual on hard packed snow) it seems to be pretty damn worthless. I have found it to be better just to switch it off temporarily, spin the rear wheels and just grind down to the pavement. That is not to say in more normal cases it isn't useful when you have an unexpected loss of traction or wet roads but it seems to be pretty worthless on ice or hard packed snow.
Time to offend someone
Will we be legislated off the roads as hazards to society? Anyway didn't Google just say that they are nowhere near being able to handle winter conditions. Yet we keep hearing that by 2020 these will be on the roads. tick tick....
You seem obsessed with robots but also seem to have no actual experience with any of those industries.
Having watched *millions* of jobs in the US and even more globally disappear at the hands of automation in the past 30 years, it is pretty laughable to insist that somehow the trend will stop and/or reverse itself any time soon. You are right that there will always be a need for a certain number of humans in any given physical operation, but that number is constantly going down and it will not stop going down until it's at 1. Keep on thinking that "most of the jobs are safe" and sure, they might be safe in your lifetime, but they are not safe for very long in the bigger picture of urban planning, which is the crux of this article.
That's how society will change. The self-driving ANFO delivery service will be born.
the growth in cynicism and rebellion has not been without cause
The way that consumers interact with and operate cars
This sentence is scary.
I'm not a consumer, I'm a driver!
I want to interact with my car by operating a steering wheel, 3 pedals and a shifter.
Please refrain from adding electronics other than basic safety (I personnaly think ABS is useful, as long as it triggers at the limit).
If you don't like to drive and find it a chore, please use public transport.
I personnaly use the subway to go to work even if I love to drive. Even? I'd say that I use the subway BECAUSE I love to drive a car, so that it remains a pleasant activity, and I don't want cars to be banned (so if we all keep usage to a minimum it won't be necessary to ban them). But I know I'm dreaming right there...
Try it! Library of Babel
Personally the only time ABS doesn't help is when I drive in deep snow. I almost hit a deer that had fallen on the road because of ABS. But on the other hand I don't think autonomous will work in snow anyway.
Star Trek, there maybe hope.
I can see things that aren't really cars as well. an autonomous motorcycle with no room for a rider, but with a very large tool chest, so a plumber (for instance) doesn't need his own truck. The drone meets him at his work destination, unlocks and lets him access the tools of his trade.
A similar motorcycle acts as a delivery van. covered with drawers, each of which can lock or unlock independently. It goes to a destination, sends a message to the people inside the building and waits ten minutes. after the person inside authenticates with their cell phone (maybe by taking a picture of the drone) the drone unlocks the one drawer, and waits for the person to remove or add a package.
Make emergency vehicle drones and put them in strategic locations all over the city. call 911 and one of these drones pops out of the police box and could be there long before a human response, Then it could provide SOME assistance while waiting for the rest of the emergency team.
The party drone opens into a full tailgate bar. Flash mob raves.
Seriously, these will be the first to have major repercussions.
In particular, Trucks that run from a train to a business, esp. during nighttime, are IDEAL for initial starting points. As such, companies like BNSF would be smart to buy the trucks and do this themselves.
Likewise, taxis for vacationers that run from say airport to hotels, are ripe to replace.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
"Rush hour" will become an anachronistic misnomer, as driverless cars could move at open freeway speeds, even with (increasingly rare) high traffic density.
Why the assumption that rush hour will disappear? If everyone continues to go to work at roughly the same time then the roadways will be crowded. Automation *might* alleviate this somewhat but I really cannot envision it disappearing entirely. The cars still take up physical space and the safety margins required won't be drastically less then they are now. Plus populations continue to grow so any efficiency gains are going to mitigated by larger numbers of people on the road over time. The human population has nearly doubled in my lifetime with little indication it is slowing.
I imagine watching cars travelling 65mph -- even when they're nearly bumper-to-bumper -- will make many logjammed drivers in the human/slow lanes think twice about their insistence on being in "control".
Do you think the laws of physics will be repealed as well? Traffic density will have a minimum largely dictated by the traction of tires to the road. Ice will still be slippery and stuff will unexpectedly cross the road and potholes will still pop tires, etc. Computers can have faster reaction times but that doesn't mean cars can stop or maneuver instantly. Several thousand kilograms isn't super maneuverable no matter who is driving. The tighter you pack traffic the more accidents *will* occur, with or without a driver.
I think driverless cars have huge potential benefits but I think touting them as the solution to traffic congestion is rather over-sold.
First thing I'll do for my errands is to tell my car to drive around until I call it instead of paying a fortune for the parking in the city.
On second thought, I'll stay at home and just send the car to pick my stuff up.
Also, it can drive itself to the car wash and maintenance.
Damn, I just found out I don't _need_ a car.
I missed where we solved the various AI problems needed to make autonomous objects that can perform a wide range of options over areas that are not prepared in advanced. When was this done?
Leaving aside the liability free-for-all this technology will have in the US at least, who will be able to afford the quality of hardware and software that can do the AI (assuming we CAN do the AI)? This is NASA-quality at least, as those sitting on a bomb (basically) understand their risk. Those reading while driving to work have different expectations...
I've been in situations where ABS has stupidly allowed all 4 wheels to freewheel because it was almost all ice, and it doesn't react re-enable the brake fast enough when you hit a small patch with some traction potential. My only choice the last time was to accelerate through a red light (w/o abs I would have been able to stop).
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
Probably not in any way. We don't know what the adoption rate will be, what the legislative changes will be. Personally, as an older Network Security guy you'll never find me with a car that communicates in any way, shape or form with the Cloud so no, there's no self-driving vehicle in my future. How other people will react is a guess we have no valid data for.
By the looks of it, Mercedes doesn't get it either. Four bucket seats? Please! I'm already dreaming of how I'll lay down in the back seat of my autonomous car, sleeping, reading, or whatever. Give me a nice bench seat, at least in the back, and if I ever feel like sitting up and staring straight ahead at the road, I'll do so.
-- sudon't
Air-ride Equipped
My conjecture has always been that it may usher in a new era of semi-mass transit. Instead of owning a car you can just open your app for your favorite taxi service, tell it whether or not you're OK sharing the ride and it tells you how much and when it'll pick you up. If you're willing to ride share it could be much cheaper than owning your own car.
What would follow from that would be a resurgence in moderate density living. If you don't own a car you don't need a garage, or driveway. And the downside (parking) of "downtown" living goes away. So why not choose that nice apartment a block from that beautiful park instead of that fixer upper house with the huge and incredible weed problem?
So you refuse to fly anywhere ?
Not in intermittent driving conditions -- at least, not decade-old ABS systems. I can't speak for the newer ones.
I almost rear-ended someone two nights ago because, while I was braking, I went over a pothole and my ABS system kicked in. (I was doing about 20 mph, coming up behind someone stopped at a stop sign.) The extra stopping distance required when the ABS is going ate up -all- the distance I had planned to leave between myself and the car when stopping, but for maybe a centimeter or two, and put extra wear and tear on my nerves as I "shit, shit, shit!"ed my way to a stop. Without the ABS, I would have come to an uneventful, routine stop with about a yard between that guy's bumper and mine, even with the pothole taken into account.
But hey, at least my tires weren't locked up, am I right? %P
"Oh, hey, my passenger turns out to owe child support from 30 years ago! Recalculating for the nearest police station."
This will revolutionize society even more than the Segway!!
Without the ABS, I would have come to an uneventful, routine stop with about a yard between that guy's bumper and mine, even with the pothole taken into account.
Or without approaching at speed (which you shouldn't do) and driving through a pothole (which you shouldn't do, especially at speed) you would also have come to an uneventful, routine stop.
I like to drive fast too, but don't blame the ABS. It only triggers when it detects that a wheel has locked up. If you're not threshold braking, you're not going to encounter that problem in ordinary driving.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Basically what the title said -- vehicles of the future will look like mini pullmans. Why stick to the roads? Might as well put wings on them ==> UAVs.
The police (and other government agencies) WILL want some kind of kill switch or even "drive that criminal into the jail" feature and they WILL force manufacturers to implement it. In most stupid and 'secret' way. Now the trouble is that we see the pattern repeating during last decades: hackers are always ahead of technology and police. So they WILL get access to that 'feature' and then we'll see lots of kidnapping, robberies and other fun stuff. Just stop a victim in dark place and then send him the other way as far as possible. And no, you won't be able to press gas pedal and drive away from that mugger.
A few crimes of this kind on TV and the public will refuse any car with significant amount of intelligence.
I want to own my passenger compartment and have it all mine. My seats, my stink, no need to clean it up or clean up after someone else. Mine.
However, I don't want anything to do with the engine; fuel, breakdowns, steering it around; all of that stuff sucks.
I want to contract with a fleet of small autonomous engines! I want to schedule a pickup, climb in my passenger cab, and have an engine come and automatically hook up to it and haul it to my destination! The best of both worlds! I want to own the buggy, not the horse!
Just imagine someone setting up a fleet of autonomous cars, all linked to Uber. A taxi drivers nightmare.
I just realised the other day that the silent electric cars are currently in the hands of wrong/unsafe drivers. Pulling out of a car park requires the utmost attention of the driver as well as general purpose driving. I'm not saying that silent electric cars are bad, just that they are currently in the wrong hands.
With self-driving cars I expect parking will become like having valet parking everywhere. Think of how guests arrive and leave at a large hotel. There will need to be a reasonable sized area where cars can come and stop to pick up and drop off passengers and their stuff. Once empty, the cars will go and park themselves in high-density fashion. Your typical Safeway parking lot will need to be reorganized to accommodate this.
There will be an opportunity to reduce the space allotted to parking at many places.
Not at all, because Jumbo jets don't automatically talk to each other and make autonomous decisions on that data. You can, at certain times during the flight, engage aspects of such systems but they require human interaction.
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When one of these self driving cars goes wrong, (and it will), and kills someone in an accident, who is at fault? The owner of the car? The manufacturer of the car? No one?
Remember those fun car games on PC where you could drive in a certain way to fool the computer into taking moves that made the opponents crash?
Well, in a eminent crash situation, an autonomous car would have to judge how to handle the situation, and if you are playing "chicken" with it, how will it know?
This just begs for someone to exploit it. Before we know it the first murder will take place by fooling the car into killing it's occupants to save another car that was never in real danger.
Self driving cars is cool and all that, but I am still weary of getting in one myself.
I'm looking forward to the invention of the autonomous Winnebago.
Imagine having a small living space that can move around while you are in it doing other activities. Get up and have a shower while your Winnebago drives you to work, so you can step straight out into your workplace.
Want to go on a sight-seeing trip? Have your autonomous Winnebago drive around while you are asleep in it, so each morning you wake up right next to your activity for the day.
Combining various tedious personal maintenance activities that are usually dealt with at home (daily grooming, eating, sleeping, ...) with travel time would be far more interesting than spending just as much time in transit but getting to watch a TV show on the way.
Yeah. My insurance company dropped its discount for ABS. They said that studies showed that basically ABS systems were a wash as far as safety and/or costs were concerned (I don't remember exactly--it's been a few years).
His ignorance covered the whole earth like a blanket, and there was hardly a hole in it anywhere. - Mark Twain
Why would the Google Bus ever park? With land in finite supply but road access a sunk cost of the license, every startup will just have a bus. Corporate meetings in parking lot, or just let down the gangway at low speed and hop aboard your collaborator's bus. You'll know which companies are old and stogy because they'll be "in buildings".
As VR steadily improves and eventually becomes ubiquitous and wireless and more and more virtual environments of real and imagined places are established, you'll find the need for transportation of all kind trending downward. Therefore, it is quite likely that VR and autonomous cars will be a one-two punch for driving accidents, and VR itself will help maintain or lower road congestion and parking issues.
As VR steadily improves, goes completely wireless and proliferates, and as as more and more virtual environments of real and imagined places are created, there will be a lessening of all modes of travel. VR and autonomous vehicles will be a one-two punch for auto accidents, and ubiquitous VR itself will maintain or lessen traffic congestion and parking difficulties.
Your car is not going to tell my car to scoot over and let it park. Not when it is my gas/electricity that has to be consumed to move it. I know I'm not the only asshole who thinks this way.
I know guy! I used to like fucking little kids but I'll be damned if society didn't make my pastime -MY PASSION- goddamned illegal. It's a slippery slope alright people!
What a silly thing to say. I wouldn't know how to create a shoe if you paid me. It's a skill that takes years to master and it is relatively useless in the modern world. 99.9% of all driving is for getting to work or to chores. If you can do without adding another stressful and annoying task to the mix, by all means do!
The places you can explore by car are severely limited. There needs to be a road there. For exploring, learning to fly a plane, navigate a boat, and ride a bike are much more useful skills; and of course keep yourself in good enough shape that you make good use of hiking boots. If I could take back all those tens of thousands of hours spent driving a car and spend them on actual exploring I would do it in a nanosecond. I hardly knew my environs outside of walking distance when I was driving there, when I started riding a bicycle for distances under ten miles I was gob-smacked at all the cool things I'd missed when speeding by.
Wait until the first big snow storm when all the driverless cars stop in the middle of the road because it's too slippery and they aren't programmed for anything else.
An engineer who ran for Congress. http://herbrobinson.us
even when they're nearly bumper-to-bumper
Driver's Ed teachers always told their human students to maintain a two-second following distance. With the much faster reaction times of autonomous vehicles, a safe following distance can be redefined to a much shorter value.
This is going to tremendously increase the carrying capacity of the existing highway system.
That that is is that that that that is not is not.