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Slashdot Asks: How Long Before Self-Driving Cars Become Mainstream?
Here's the thing, regardless of one's stand on self-driving cars, they are no longer a futuristic idea. Major car companies such as Tesla, BMW, and Mercedes have already released an autonomous vehicle or plan to release one soon. Sergio Marchionne, an Italian-Canadian executive who is currently the CEO of Fiat Chrysler Automobiles, recently said: It isn't pie in the sky. People are talking about 20 years. I think we will have it in five years. ZDNet has published its interview of Jim McBride, technical leader in Ford's autonomous vehicles team, who thinks self-driving cars are five years away from changing the world. At the same time, we must acknowledge the talks about these smart vehicles killing many jobs, and the security vulnerabilities we read every once in a while. What's your take on this?
What happened to the story that just was here a few minutes ago, about NASA releasing a bunch of previously-patented technologies?
Cache: https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:bt0-T-YmkL0J:https://science.slashdot.org/story/16/05/11/1546231/nasa-releases-56-patents-into-the-public-domain-for-commercial-use+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us
Linked article: http://www.cnet.com/news/nasa-releases-56-patents-into-the-public-domain/
It was quite a fascinating story, especially the multiplayer VR alpha-wave-biofeedback game idea.
Just all those other projects that were only 20 years away, since the 1960's.
In order to kill jobs, you have to have a fully autonomous vehicle which is not 5 years away. Self driving cars still require a human to take over whenever it doesn't know what to do...or if fails to see child running into the road...or if you're driving in an extreme weather situation...or...
What are next week's lotto numbers?
I am Slashdot. Are you Slashdot as well?
Correct me if I'm wrong, but we're not quite at the stage where you can just take a car off the road, slap on some sensors and some jazz in the steering wheel/pedals, and the car is ready to self-drive. I would imagine each car model has to be optimized for this, and that will take awhile. So in 5 years, we might have self-driving cars coming off the assembly lines, but it's gonna take a lot more than 5 years before that's a sizable percentage of the cars on the road.
What happened to the story that just was here a few minutes ago, about NASA releasing a bunch of previously-patented technologies?
Cache: https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:bt0-T-YmkL0J:https://science.slashdot.org/story/16/05/11/1546231/nasa-releases-56-patents-into-the-public-domain-for-commercial-use+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us
Linked article: http://www.cnet.com/news/nasa-releases-56-patents-into-the-public-domain/
It was quite a fascinating article, especially the multiplayer VR alpha-wave-biofeedback game idea.
Like self serve banks, (ATM), self serve post (email), and just about every other fastet of technology we have created. Sure, many industries will be disrupted, jobs moved from the labor economy to the tech economy, and such... But with one of the two large costs of transportation (the other being energy) going away, moving things will become much cheaper, and so everything else will become just as much cheaper, to the benefit of consumption.
I think we will have it in five years
Sounds like a good candidate for the osborne effect. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Didn't see the benefit until I realized how incredibly useful they'll be at the shopping mall. Same at any busy office building where parking is a problem. Pull up out front, get out, and have the car park itself. I'd buy that.
Should we always keep doing stupid harmful shit just to protect the jobs? Please, just stop it!
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
If every car on the road is radaring/lidaring everything within 100m/yards, won't the spectrum just become a clogged mess?
When talking about self-driving cars I often ask questions similar to this
"Will my one-month old son learn to drive? Will my 2 y.o.? My 5 y.o.?"
A few years ago, those questions would get a laugh. Over time they've been given much more consideration.
Everyone that keeps saying that the autonomous cars are just around the corner all live in big cities. To get to the point they work without a steering wheel (aka manual mode) these companies have to solve for rural driving. Until the cars can reliably drive up a back woods, rocky, single lane mountain road they are worthless.
Think of going camping. Are you going to be able to take your family camping in your autonomous minivan? What about going for a tour of scenic back roads in Montana, Alaska, Wyoming, the Dakotas.
Last, how are these cars going to navigate through a rural dirt road with 2 feet of fresh snow on it.
These are all problems the people in the big cities are going to have to live with. They may only live with it a very very small percentage of the time, but it's a major hurdle to overcome.
*If* self-driving cars can reduce congestion significantly, the changeover will be a tidal wave.
I live near enough to San Francisco, that I could make the trip easily enough for a relaxing day in a great city. Unfortunately, traffic is a nightmare. So I avoid it. Driving on the freeway to Sacramento is ridiculous. I avoid that too. Once there is a reasonable percentage of autonomous cars, that traffic should be greatly reduced by being more efficient. (Not the number of cars going down, but the overall efficiency going up).
Also, a lot of deliveries could easily be handled via autonomous vehicles. Again, the efficiency would be killer. Set up all deliveries to be at night! Mail, packages, etc. Just drop them in a specified area in front of my house, and I'll pick it up in the morning.
No reason to lie.
Self-driving cars will become mainstream right after we have working/scalable fusion power, a Martian colony, peace in the middle-east, and competent/visionary leadership at all levels of government. Oh, and flying cars.
There are no self-driving cars today. A self driving car is a car that can follow any standard road, anywhere. They can't. They are plagued by weird things of all sorts. Maybe we're five years away from ones that can handle the city roads. And another five years from ones that can handle effectively all roads. Then adoption can begin.
Video phones have existed since the '70s. I wouldn't say that they became popular until last year. And they still aren't anywhere near the majority.
I don't want to sit in a car, bored to tears, when I could be spending my time driving; driving's fun, and it's certainly more fun than sitting and waiting.
It will be at least 20 years till rain, night, snow, old unmarked roads can be navigated by self-driving cars. No one claims to be able to do that yet. And then there are the lawyers, the dirty bastards. Anyone that thinks we will have self driving cars in 5 years is naive. I bet I am optimistic with 20 years as a prediction.
My feeling is that we're "20 years" away from general, broad deployment of self driving cars, mostly because we don't know how they will work when taken out of the hands of the developers and given to the general population.
There's nothing preventing self-driving cars from working just fine in highly controlled situations - local shuttles on private property, maybe in bus lanes. We'll probably see some form of that first, along with self-driving features augmenting car's control systems (adaptive cruise controlling being one that we already have). I hope we see some of these applications in the next 5 years.
But, it's all the things that never occurred during testing that turn out to happen regularly in a broad deployment that will slow down general adoption. Not just in dealing with road hazards, but also in dealing with how everyone else drives.
My personal anecdote with a Google car in Austin highlights this: I was crossing a major street (Burnet) from a side street and was two cars behind the Google car. The Google car crossed with a green light and I entered the intersection with a green light. The Google car quickly slowed down and almost stopped in the middle of the lane immediately after crossing the intersection, leaving me and the car in front of me stranded in the intersection as the light proceeded to change. I doubt the Google car driver ever realized the hazard they created.
Beyond that, there's the liability issues. Self driving cars will kill people, that's a given. We can argue forever about whether or not their programming and decision making/judgement is better than a human's, but the fact remains that accidents will happen that are the direct result of decisions made by the car's software. Until the legal framework for handling this is worked out, even perfectly functioning self driving cars will have a hard time with broad adoption. The legal system moves slowly and it will likely take 5-15 years for these issues to be worked out to everyone's satisfaction.
So, "20 years" is probably right for some definition of "20 years".
-Chris
The *tech* might be 5 years away (along with those transparent, 100% efficient solar panels), but legally, you can't put these cars on the road without a driver for another 20 years.
So "jobs" are still safe, sorta. There will have to be a human controller in the driver's seat for liability purposes at least until government catches up to the tech. And that's easily decades away, perhaps in the United States, the least progressive of all industrialized nations, that could be 100 years away.
We'll have single payer healthcare before we have "driverless cars", because the insurance industry lobby will prevent it. If everyone had a perfectly-run, accident free, computer controlled vehicle that obeys every law and will always avoid an accident, they'd have to lower rates. And you *know* they aren't going to do that.
There's too many big-money interests that feed off the fact that you're texting and driving.
If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.
At the same time, we must acknowledge the talks about these smart vehicles killing many jobs
Perhaps we can just require all self-driving cars to come with a decorative buggy whip?
> Sergio Marchionne, an Italian-Canadian executive who is currently the CEO
I don't see any relevance at all to mentioning Marchionne's nationalities.
Particularly when there's no mention of nationality for the second person mentioned:
> Jim McBride, technical leader in Ford's autonomous vehicles team
What is going to happen is the tech companies will band together and push government to require all vehicles be autonomous. They want to own the entire transportation infrastructure, and they want it to be subsidized by taxpayers. And like all tech companies, they will structure the system such that they cannot be held liable when software causes some tragic disaster. It will not be representative of normal technological evolution.
Another aspect of the "self driving car" discussion that I don't hear often is how it will cause inequality to increase. Driving into work I past at least 5 cars that are "for-sale by owner" that are under $2000. When, if ever, will the price point for an autonomous vehicle or even a pure electric now be down to the point where those with very limited income can afford one? I remember when the whole "cash for clunkers" promotion happened early in the Obama administration. That destroyed the market for inexpensive vehicles for several years.
While this may not be a huge issue for those in urban settings, where there is at least an attempt at public transportation, it absolutely puts the freedom of movement that the automobile provided for the lower income population in rural settings. The town I live in is a 25 minute drive to the closest grocery store, and at 6 miles away from the nearest pharmacy, and doesn't even "show up" to services like Uber. Without cars, people would not be able to maintain their lives, and would have to move to urban centers, which would then compound the issues that already exist.
Yes, greater efficiency leads to goods and services becoming cheaper. But their affordability is something different entirely. They correlate until all the jobs have been automated away.
Flooding a human driver's "optical sensors" with laser light is a pretty effective DoS attack, when you come right down to it.
It will take the generations of old who value an open road, vehicles that look like artwork, and blue sky to eventually submit to the participation trophy generation of millennial wussies who gladly huddle within their egg shaped car wombs for transportation.
Car ownership will become a luxury. Not that it isn't already.
A $30,000 car that's paid for and used over 5 years costs 6k per year, or $500 per month, or ~$16.50 per day to just pay for. $4 per day in insurance. I pay $20 a day to have a vehicle to drive to and from the train station. There was a very good argument when I bought this car to just start ubering to and from the train station for $12 a day. The argument that won was the one about roadtrips and ad-hoc trips.
If a self driving taxi doesn't need a driver, it's likely to cut that cost in half, and will likely make this my last car.
give or take...
Humans, by and large, are terrible at operating motor vehicles, and can't be removed from the road soon enoug. Unfortunately, I think it's pretty much a given that the Dunning Kruger effect is going to dominate here and the last people to have the steering wheels pried from their hands will be the worst drivers.
"How Long Before Self-Driving Cars Become Mainstream?"
Um, how long before Self-Driving cars are even available? Popular Mechanics kept telling me I'd have flying cars by the beginning of the 21st century and I've already written that off as vaporware.
I'd guess much longer it took to transition from standard to automatic transmissions.
Nissan and Google have had actual working examples on the roads for a while now. If you still believe that 'it can't be done', then you are just fooling yourself. If you think 'a few sensors' and a microprocessor can't outperform a human, may I remind you of all the deaths that occur every year due to drunk drivers. The adoption of autonomous vehicles is limited only by schedules and regulation at this point. It is proven.
As to job loss, cars will have little to no impact in that realm. Yes I think taxi services will be impacted, but that business was already under attack by Uber/Lyft so it was going to have to change anyways. The real impact to jobs will be when we get an autonomous truck. And I mean 18-wheeler, not F150. This is likely what is still 20 years away. The shear physics of backing up such a truck to have it mate with the loading dock hasn't even been studied as far as I know. Nevertheless, consider what impact it would have to be able to have overland deliveries such that they would drive essentially nonstop from source to destination. No lay-overs, no limits on time on the road other than fuel capacity, no side trips, no dependence on a clock. Keep in mind also that once these things are removed from the current logistics systems, and since autonomous vehicles inherently report where they are, what speed they are traveling, and the surrounding conditions how simple it would be to COORDINATE such data. Then think about all the truck drivers that no longer have a profession. Then think about all the truck stops, hotels and other supporting infrastructure that is no longer needed. Heck you could even do things like refueling in motion. We do that with planes already, I can't image that getting it to work with a truck would be more difficult.
Finally as to adoption, lets be realistic. No one over the age of about 40 right now will buy one of these. It's called inertia. Those of that age group may have witnessed the technological revolution, but they didn't grow up with it. They don't trust it. They will always believe themselves to be a better driver, despite evidence to the contrary. We already have laws which specify things in cars for repeated DUI convictions; I assume this will at some point mean enough DUIs will require you to own an autonomous vehicle. As in no drivers license for you. This will be how the autonomous vehicle takes its final hold of American culture - when we are forced to adopt it. Until then it will be our taxi service, our delivery service and we'll have a few friends with 'those'.
As an aside, and completely fictitious situation, think of what you could do once the overwhelming majority of cars are autonomous. You can eliminate traffic signals and laws. You won't need them. Each vehicle could 'reserve' its passage time and directionality through the next intersection and all the vehicles would just meander around each other as needed - which is exactly what happens when you walk. Think of the fuel savings when nothing ever idles waiting for a light to turn. Think of the pollution savings. You could also increase speed limits, or at least make them sane. No longer would a road need to change its limit five times in the span of three miles. The vehicles would react in real time to the conditions, and (hopefully) communicate among themselves to disseminate such.
It's a marketing gimmick. All the current plans include a human behind the wheel. I think there are many states which actually REQUIRE there be a wheel for that human to turn. It's not really self driving if the driver is needed sometimes.
Also, consider that most people consider hybrids to be mainstream, but they are less than 2% of auto sales annually. So by that standard, when 2% of the cars are fake-driverless with humans behind the wheel, this will be "mainstream" even though in reality you will only see them in pockets, like Priuses in California.
Take it from the drone world. Car will learn from the drone industry...
FAA realized autonomous flying in 2007 (basis for the 2012 act). The tech became realized in 2013 (6yrs) and cool in 2014 (7ys). And "niche mainstream" (i.e. single purpose camera drones) this year (10yrs). Regulations are finally catching up and we'll really hit mainstream in say 2019 as long as a regulation disaster doesn't happen & companies continue to grow with new applications.
The same will happen for autonomous cars... just 50% [or more] faster because
a. the car is a well established platform (vs a drone)
b. infrastructure regs are well established (for manned vehicles, hence a template)
c. scale hasn't changed much (millions of cars is nothing new vs millions of drones)
d. the applications & use cases are well known.
In 5yrs == autonomous taxis & public transport are pretty much guaranteed. Hence, the 5yr prediction is reasonable. As for general private use--it depends if the companies are making money & some crazy disaster doesn't happen...it will fall into the same regulation mess that drones are in. So that's an additional 3 yrs...
Long-haul truckers own their own trucks. Why wouldn't they be allowed to own their own autonomous trucks?
I know I sound like one of those old guys, "Hey you kids get off my lawn!!" Given the amount of people that drive distracted today, I have even seen truckers texting while driving this is a public safety issue. As one mode of transportation supersedes another their will be growing pains. Some technical hurdles will have to be overcome. But in the end there will be no need for stop lights or stop signs cars can move as long as people are not crossing their path. Roads will not need any human recognized characteristics, as long as long as the autonomous vehicle knows its place in its immediate surroundings and its destination will only need to arrive safely and on time. You could even have sleeper cars where you have dinner at your house throw your luggage in a car and twelve hours latter (while you were in a sleep tube) the car arrives at your destination.
People will say they are losing some perceived freedom but if you think about it you will have more freedom with autonomous cars then you currently do. You will be free to skype, text, talk, read, etc to your hearts content without putting anyone else in danger.
The evolution of vehicle insurance will be interesting because of all the questions raised by autonomous cars. I could see the need for liability insurance for the people who own and install the part of the car that would be the heart of the autonomy but in my opinion it would be no different than travel insurance when you fly. You are not directly interacting with the vehicle other than to provide a start and destination.
Personally I cant wait and will feel better about my kids being on the road compared to the idiot texters out there now.
It could be fifty years before self-driving cars completely replace the current transportation networks. I expect the vehicles will make significant inroads in contained areas within five years. Airports are probably already testing automated vehicles for use on the tarmac. Facilities like seaports and factory complexes won't be far behind. Anywhere that you can easily separated human drivers from robotic vehicles should be easy to convert.
I expect the second stage to happen within 15 years. This will involve interconnecting the ports and manufacturing facilities. I expect to see a great many airparks closed to human driven vehicles. We can also expect to see the construction/conversion of some closed road networks for public use. For example. you may see a closed lane on I-95.
At some point the closed networks will be pervasive. We will reach a tipping point when it just makes sense to connect all the closed networks. That stage will take place at different times in different areas. Urban areas might see this happen within 25 years. Rural places will take much longer.
I do not block ads. I do block third party scripts.
If I run over your child, I might be prosecuted if the police can prove I was drunk or driving dangerously. You could try sueing me, but I haven't got enough for you to recover your legal costs. When the self-driving car made by a large multi-national corporation runs over your child, you will be rapidly surrounded by lawyers desperate to represent you as you try to claim your millions. Even if the child runs out in front of you, they will claim that a human could have anticipated it, and therefore the self-driving car should have. If the self-driving car does anticipate it and brake in time to miss the child, the driver of the car behind will sue for whiplash when he runs into the back of you. It will be a field day for lawyers when machines made by deep-pocketed corporations are responsible for decisions, as opposed to fallible and poor humans.
If there is a VR space you can meet anyone or see and hear anything, maybe even touch and feel, what's the use in driving anywhere?
I have the feeling the real litmus test would be the first time they have a really bad bug, like permanent injury or death where you just have to admit the car was dead wrong. You can compare this with for example the medical industry or industrial accidents, a lot of people have died from human error. But despite all the checklists and routines and safety procedures people recognize that there's always the human factor. With medical equipment and industrial robots on the other hand, there's no tolerance for fatal errors. Which is why there's not so much human-robot interaction really, usually they operated in closed quarters and safety cages and if humans are to go in there they're turned off.
But you can't do that with a car AI and sooner or later it'll run into one kind of crazy nobody taught it how to handle. And improvisation is not their best skill, I suppose it'll hit the brakes and come to a complete stop. If that means standing still as that 50 ton out-of-control semi comes barreling down the hill right at you, well it's technically correct driving I suppose. But it's maybe not the best kind of correct for you.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
If "mainstream" means "the majority of cars on the roads", then it'll be at least 20 years. Why? Because the effective lifetime of a car is approaching 20 years these days. People are not going to be going out and buying a new car to replace a perfectly good car, even if the new (expensive) car is self-driving.
That said, once it's an option on (most) every car, when people replace their car(s), the replacements WILL be self-driving.
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
Hybrids are readily available, but they aren't mainstream. Sure, people can purchase them, but the cost and performance differentials keep many from doing so. Likewise, cars that can automatically brake or self-park have been available for some time, but people don't buy vehicles for that feature, its more of a perk. Even with wide available, it will be decades before cars with these features are in the majority or mainstream. The same will be true of autonomous vehicles. They will be available, but they won't be mainstream. And, by the time they are mainstream, there will be some other newer/better technology available.
Finally, the push for autonomous vehicles is predominately American thing. Most of the world doesn't drive like the USA does. Most of the world's first world countries dealt with the issue that autonomous vehicles are meant to solve with mass transit programs. More cars, whether self driving or not on the streets of London or Paris won't help things there. Third world countries won't have the capital to spend on such vehicles. So who is left? The US. There is no doubt that there will be a market in the US for autonomous vehicles. The question is whether or not it will be sustainable for manufacturers to have enough ROI to keep shareholders happy. After all, we can talk all we want about the coolness of such vehicles or the safety they may or may not have, but ultimately, it is the bottom line that will dictate whether or not this new mode of transportation replaces the old.
So the question really is about whether or not the US can produce enough of these vehicles at a low enough selling price to entice enough purchasers so the market is profitable and sustainable. If the answer is no, or at least not at a low enough price point, then these vehicles will be something for the upper echelon of society, which may still be a profitable segment, but would not make them mainstream.
Either from a technology perspective or an economic one, it does not appear likely that autonomous vehicles will be mainstream -- at least not without government intervention to subsidize the costs either in manufacturing or purchasing.
The question then becomes whether or not there is enough market in the US and at what price point, for autonomous vehicles to be more than just a niche?
...they'll be mandated for all new cars.
The Insurance industry is a YUUUUGE lobby. If it will cut down on deaths, injuries and property damage, they'll lobby for making it a mandate.
Right now, the Google car is slightly safer than a human being, at city speeds, in good weather.
If it gets to the point where it's definitely safer than a human being (not foolproof, but safer), any weather or road conditions, the laws will change so fast your head will spin.
Design for Use, not Construction!
I'm looking forward to 8 hours a week more reading and sleeping time.
I'd much rather see these companies developing automation to support items like:
-enhanced, automated braking based upon imminent collision
-"AI" to enforce a safe following distance, using an algorithm that considers speed and distance to the object in front
These technologies and features would be immediately useful, decrease accidents, without all the very serious problems that a "keep meon the road, in my lane, and don't turn into opposing traffic" automation systems have yet to solve.
I accept the imminent reality of self driving cars, and I am looking forward to the theater district as the show lets out and everyone pings their car to show up at the entrance, instead of walking to their parking spot...
About as long as it took Google to seek government protection for its business plan.
When/if they become viable, personally I think they will take off like a rocket (metaphorically).
There are 2 basic groups of people that it will be a godsend for: suburban parents and the elderly.
There was a time when I had no less than 3 kids on soccer teams and 2 taking martial arts. It wasn't unheard of to have all 3 in practices on opposite ends of town at once. There were years where my wife and I would come home from work to a nice 4-hour second job of driving kids to activites. Freeing parents from that would be a tremendous boon. We are talking "shut up and take my money" territory.
For the elderly, they often get to the point where they are afraid to drive when there's traffic, or after dark. This is why the are notorious for having dinner at ridiculously early hours. My wife's grandfather kept his car far past the time he should have, even though driving scared the bejeebers out of him, because without it he and his wife were essentially a prisoners in their house. Being able to keep their freedom without having to drive themselves would have been like gift from God for them.
So who's at fault when they crash? Are they going to seriously insist that people stay alert and ready to take over, if things start to go wrong? People barely do that now with traditional cars. And I can't imagine companies like Google assuming the burden. Given how litigious our society is, I think this will remain a pipe dream for a long time to come.
Remember envisioning a future where everyone was flying around in their own flying car under their own control? Yeah that's not going to happen.
HOWEVER, I do believe that we will see the skies filled with autonomous flying "drone cars". Out of the hands of commuter's control.
- 5 years from now - It won't be uncommon to see autonomous semi trucks and some autonomous passenger vehicles on the freeways.
- 15 years from now - You will be able to call in, ride in, and get dropped off by an autonomous road car serving as a taxi service. No more car ownership needed.
- 50 years from now - same thing will be available, but with commuter distance flying option as well.
That's my uneducated prediction anyhow
I was just in some countries on the opposite side of the world where even being on the correct side of the road is considered a rough guideline.
These are places where if you don't go "aggressive"/"obnoxious" mixed with "neck-snapping stops"you make no progress at all and are run at by angry drivers behind you who were expecting more aggression from you, so they could make some progress themselves.
These countries typically also follow right-of-weight rather than right-of-way rules of the road. Pedestrians are lowest on the totem pole, and routinely get honked at (or worse) for crossing the street at a corner with a green light. "How dare you block me from running that red!!" Next lowest in rank are the scooters with dad's carrying their three year old daughters, no helmets anywhere in sight. They are routinely forced onto the sidewalks by the bigger fish, but are happy to oblige.
This will be an interesting challenge for the self-driving car/truck AIs, which currently appear to slavishly obey all traffic laws to a tee. The contrast with other driver behaviour in those countries will create a dangerous situation, yet do you program your AI to be as cavalier and pushy as the others? Risky from a legal standpoint.
So at least 20 years for full global coverage, yeah.
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
or dishwaher, washing machine / dryer, stove, etc ...
you get the idea ... don't hold your breath waiting for fanpeeps
According to Wikipedia /2006 data, there were 1.8 million operators of heavy trucks in the United States alone. That number does not including the dispatchers, logistics and other office staff that works to support the huge number of drivers.
All those men and women, working quietly, almost invisibly plying the roads and highways of the country to get your ice cream, flat screens and blue jeans to stores.
The trucking and logistics companies that employ these drivers must be positively salivating at the prospect of firing 1.8 million truck drivers that can each earn potentially $50-70,000 per year with owner-operators earning close to six figures after expenses. Truck drivers that can only legally drive N hours before Y hours DOT mandated down time. Truck drivers that fall asleep, fiddle with the radio, talk on the phone, and through statistically unavoidable human error cause terrible accidents. And this is what the industry will sell America when explaining why they are causing one of the single largest layoffs in American history, throwing the economy into recession as a significant percentage of the American workforce finds themselves unemployed at ages, and without skills allowing ready transition to other employment.
No, it will be about "improving highway safety" and "relieving workers from the tedium of bad jobs." What!? You claim this is about saving money? No salaries, no benefits, and we can run twice as much freight in the same time period because the automated trucks never have to sleep? Why, of COURSE NOT. This is about SAFETY, folks!
The large companies that already run hundreds or thousands of trucks will fire all their drivers. The most successful automation systems will be those that can be readily retrofitted to the existing livery of tractors. They will add additional fuel tanks to the trucks to extend their range. A network of terminals and warehouses will spring up around the major interstates. Trucks will platoon two meters apart at 50 miles per hour for maximum fuel economy and drive non stop on Interstates criss-crossing the country, only pulling off into freight yards in the countryside to drop their trailer, where a human driver will do the last-50-mile delivery to the customer. These last mile delivery truck drivers will become lower paid, poor or no benefit package monkeys earning a fraction of the salary that current OTR Over The Road drivers are paid now.
The problem gentle reader isn't that technology is causing jobs to be replaced by automation, but the PACE of technology replacing jobs by automation is increasing far faster than society seems capable of finding new avenues for those affected to support themselves in comparable, meaningful and fulfilling work.
The President will go on TV to announce a toothless jobs bill earmarking hundreds of millions of dollars for terminated drivers to attend community college to retrain for "exciting careers as solar panel installers!" when most will, in all likelihood, end up working minimum wage jobs at the nearest Autozone parts counter.
Capitalism the Machine(tm) will not stop until absolutely everyone in the United States sits in a cubicle 10 hours a day pushing pixels in Microsoft Office 2035 and all industry and service work has been replaced by foreign manufacturing, robots or exploited immigrants.
".. a fiduciary responsibility to maximize shareholder value."
THIS SPACE INTENTIONALLY LEFT BLANK.
The Driverless car will start a revolution equal to the industrial revolution. Gone will be the jobs of cab, truck, van, bus, delivery driver. Which were opportunities for less educated people/immigrants to make a decent living. It's like the manufacturing jobs that were lost to 3rd world countries and machines. The economy will greatly shift, consumer goods will become cheaper and there will be a big upsurge of unemployment. It will come and it will come fast. A lot of people can make a lot of money off this right now so it will be a revolution. Anyone else saying this is not gonna happen for whatever reason is delusional, there is no right or wrong, it just is.
In this thread, we will see numerous posts about the shortcomings of machines that drive. Snow, child in the road, failures and defects, any number of things. Every time you read one of these posts, please think to yourself: "We already have machines that drive as well as humans, because humans are machines that are made out of meat." That is, the hypothesis that it's possible to have a machine that can drive a car as well as a human is proven true by example.
I haven't lived a long time, but I've lived long enough to be shocked at the speed of discoveries that make artificial machines better than humans at human tasks. The mechanical automation period started before my time, and it's been just iterative improvements for my whole life: the combine, the cotton gin, Jacquard's loom. These were transformative, and we have seen incremental changes for over a century. At the start of the 21st century, it's hard to imagine that the bulk of the physical work done in the 19th was by human hands.
Today, we see things done by machines that used to require human heads: bank tellers, train drivers, pilots, and librarians have all seen the value of their work product greatly diminished over just 30 years. Deep learning neural networks have brought a step change to the capabilities of machines to do things that used to require us to think. Go is played better by a computer than a person - and that happened well before most had predicted. The next hurdle will be games like poker and rock-paper-scissors. These advances in the state of the art are not slowing; they are accelerating! I think it is quite possible that trucking, uber/taxis, car sharing, and public transport will start to see human workers replaced with artificial machines within five years.
If you need to guide each step of your dishwasher or washing machine's progress through the various phases of the cleaning cycle, manually controlling the speed of the agitator/drum/washing arms... you should visit an appliance store. A lot has changed in the last eighty or ninety years. I think you'll be pleasantly surprised.
The abstract mentions the potential for job loss and security vulnerabilities, but neglects to mention the inherent problem with ubiquitous government surveillance and control, which is inherent with a system of network-connected self driving vehicles. It may not be a concern to the majority of drivers, but since nobody has anything remotely approaching a solution to the problem of the government, that problem is not declining any time soon. Whenever the news picks up on, say, politically motivated assassinations using self-driving vehicles, there's going to be a backlash which might be hard to mitigate, even with the level of media control the government currently has. That's not to mention, of course, the non-idiotic people who will simply refuse to put themselves in that situation in the first place.
Self-driving cars might be ready for sale sooner rather than later, but there are some pretty significant challenges to wide-scale adoptions which the developers of such have not yet begun to address.
I like having control over my vehicle and where it goes. You just know after they are out there, the govt. will disallow manually driven cars and will probably come up with a million places your self-driving car will not be allowed to go. That would end freedom of movement in the US.
IR can "see" through heavy rain and fog, so that's not really a problem, but just how will these self-driving cars deal with bad weather, i.e. snow covered or unplowed roads? What will it do on small, winding mountain roads and roads where there's a one lane bridge?
2021 will be the year when the legal issues will be solved and self-driving cars will be available to consumers in most Western countries, except France where Taxi drivers will revolt and cause enough confusion to make them lag behind in development at least a decade. By 2024 self-driving cars will be mainstream in a sense that they make up a significant portion of new cars being sold.
There, said it. I'll put on a reminder so I can visit this prediction toward the end of 2021 and also 2024.
-SR
We might have an 'Advanced Autopilot' feature -- as an expensive option on expensive luxury cars -- but it won't be on all cars, and regardless (as I have said before and will continue to say) you'll still need to be fully educated, trained, tested, licensed, and insured for operating a motor vehicle, and all vehicles will still be required to have a full set of manual controls for a human operator, and able to take over from the Autopilot at a moments' notice, because where the safety of human beings is concerned, a human being must be the final failsafe system above all automated systems, period. To do otherwise is complete and utter madness. You're not going to be allowed to take a nap while driving anywhere, and you're not going to be able to put your kids into the car and just send it off somewhere.
I think it'll be more like 20 years (or more), not a mere 5 years. It's too complex a task to perfect anytime soon. Might even be more like 50 years. Everyone has a sci-fi idea what 'AI' is, and the reality is that 'AI' doesn't have very much of the 'I' in it, not compared to a human being, not even compared to a dog or a cat. They'll probably reach some level of development then hit a wall; we don't even know how a human brain (or an animal brain for that matter) works yet, and they're trying to duplicate that level of cognition for one of the most complex tasks humans have: driving a car out in the real world. Yeah, no, don't have much faith in that idea.
Are YOU using the TOOL, or is the TOOL using YOU? Think about it!
(CEO) "I predict our self-driving cars on the road within five years!"
(Engineer) "Uh, Sir, you do realize our last draft regarding the autonomous communications network is slated to run IPv6.."
(CEO) "Well, shit. Nevermind."
There is nothing inherent in the creation of driverless cars that will lead to such an outcome. If the US switches to driverless cars, it won't be the cars that avoid killing those people, but all of the other changes we will have to make in order for it to be possible for driverless cars to operate - there will be new laws, there will be new rules for driving, and a long and painful transition, longer than the switch from horse drawn transportation to combustion engine transportation. In fact very little of the impact of driverless cars will be due to the cars themselves, and in fact the saving of lives could be accomplished without their even being created, if society actually gave a shit about how many people died in car accidents every year. For every mile of road that claims that speed limits are enforced by aircraft, we could actually enforce those speed limits and make people follow the law. The costs would be prohibitive, and the reaction would be ugly, but we could save those lives if those lives were truly important. But we like to think that driverless cars will accomplish this as some kind of magic, without really changing anything else about our lives.
Actually, there's a lot more to congestion than just the amount of cars on the road. Adding lanes is actually counterproductive past a point. There's actually an amazing amount of overlap with fluid dynamics.
Roughly speaking, bigman's point about self driving cars reducing congestion could be true - with fewer accidents, not to mention distracted, stupid, lost, or road-raging drivers, you can go from a turbulant flow to a laminar flow, which can result in a much higher effective capacity.
Though I agree with you on the integrated cities. I've proposed 'semi-arcologies' before - take a 100 story building. First 10 floors are commercial sales, next 10 are business/office, the remaining 80 are residential. Put a skybridge to each neighboring building. I'm tempted to say floor 20 so you can have different elevators serving the residential portion and the commercial portions in the same shaft, saving space. Floor 20 might end up being an interesting design that way, actually. I'm thinking that it might end up being the cafe/quick-stop floor. Anyways, I used to advocate for sliding walkways on this floor and in the skywalks between buildings, but with the spread of small lithium-ion vehicles, we might go with them instead. The core point is to allow a person to cover twice the distance in a given amount of time and/or effort. So if they're willing to walk half a mile, under my rules they'd be willing to travel a mile(horizontal difference). The walking is good for health, you're not using vehicles, and people should be able to get an apartment within a few buildings of their work, maybe even in it, which would really cut down on travel time.
I don't read AC A human right
...over my dead body.
Fully auto driving will also depend on revising the roads.
Standards for roads to support auto driving are already being worked on. Those will have to be done, implemented on a wide scale and then revised for fixes/features. Then those revised fixes/features will need to be put into the roads.
We'll also have to develop standards for the cars to talk to each other and to talk to road controls for stats. It'll happen, but all that roadwork will take some time. The cars will also have to be enhanced to drive in dangerous conditions -- think IR reading against special markers in the road.
At some point way down the road (pun?), after the accidental deaths due to autodriving falls way below human caused fatalities, we will be the most dangerous drivers. Then people will require a special permit to drive with the machines.
Here is the test that I apply. I will be happy to buy a self driving car, once my wife, who is blind, can legally use such a car to travel independently upon the public highways and streets.
That's not what he's talking about. You still have to load and unload the machines.
I want a dishwasher where I can just set down a dish or glass and it'll load it automatically (no having to figure out the optimal way to load the racks), without having to clean off the unused food first, and then it'll wash and dry them, *and* put them away in the cabinets for me.
Similarly with laundry machines, I want a machine where I can just toss my dirty clothes into a laundry chute, and then the machine automatically sorts them, washes them with the correct temperature, dries them, folds them, and puts them away in my closet or drawers.
We don't have anything approaching this now. We don't even have machines that can automatically dry wet clothes! You still have to manually take the wet clothes out of the washing machine and put them in the dryer. You'd think it'd be easy to combine this into a single machine, but apparently not.
but cars & trucks are being sold at the clip of ~17M/year these days in the US. That investment is not going to disappear overnight. Same with petrol vehicles vs. battery powered. I think self-driving is a great idea, but things like construction zones, weather events, downed trees, nearby idiots make me always want to have the ability to drive myself. BC Reference: http://www.wsj.com/articles/u-...
When they solve this
Second, when they can work in poor weather.
Third, when they "work" when you aren't exactly using your car to go from point "A" to point "B". E.G. When you can tell the car to go pick up some hookers for you.
Well, that's even sillier. As far as I know, nobody's expecting autonomous vehicles to reach out with a great robotic claw, grab potential passengers, and belt them into their seats, then escort them into their offices and place them in their cubicles.
They can push all people to drive autonomous as much as they want if they're going to buy people one. Otherwise it is going to be a bit difficult to get a family barely able to afford to keep their ten year old beater on the road into one.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
Or your insurance will pay out and it will be up to the insurance vendor to reclaim those millions from Google. I can't see them being too enthusiastic about getting into that scenario.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
There's nothing silly about wanting automatic machines to reduce human labor more than they already have. Just because they don't have a single machine to both wash and dry clothes now doesn't mean we shouldn't ever expect this.
When I release some new software or even a new version, it is usually with a literally shaking hand that I push the final button that will push the software into the scary world. My software is far from mission critical, and the few bugs over the years have generally been inconsequential and involved people with strange devices and odd configurations. I can't imagine the trepidation for a company and especially its lawyers when they push out the first truly self driving car.
Even with a "competent" driver behind the wheel most self driving engineers fully acknowledge that self driving cars are pretty much instantly trusted and that most drivers won't be mentally paying any attention and won't be able to take over before it is too late.
Some brave company is going to go ahead and I suspect that unless they completely blow it, that the floodgates will be opened and the market will be saturated for choice.
There's nothing silly about wanting automatic machines to reduce human labor more than they already have. Just because they don't have a single machine to both wash and dry clothes now doesn't mean we shouldn't ever expect this.
You mean like these?
Don't give them ideas..
meh. it is all yesterday tech. privately owned, operated, and maintained transportation was never meant to last. it has never been cost efficient. never will be. never been the most efficient way to move carbon based life forms. never will be. driverless public transportation is the future. lets tear down the parking garages and build paradise!
I love me some autonomous cars, I really do. But the very first time it decides to tell me that it's not opening the goddamned pod bay doors, its ECU gets thrown right the fuck out. It's my car. It'll stand on its back fucking wheels and bark like a circus seal if I tell it to!
I could not agree more, my good man! While the Ford Pinot does present a flavour explosion upon the palate, I can't help but feel the inevitable crash about an hour after consumption. I find Ford's Zinfandel to harmonize better with my humors and I wake up the next day feeling fantastic. I'm glad there are other like-minded chaps on this forum.
Pip! Pip! Cheerio, mate!
SS TDMA QPSK
Which is Spread Spectrum Time Domain Multiple Access Quad Phase Shift Keying. Used by pretty much all commo equipment in the last 15 years. The shift keying methods vary but overall they mostly work the same. Hell, I think we're up to 8PSK now, but I swapped careers so it's probably gotten much fancier. Wiki can explain it better than I can.
One way or another you're going to have an imperfect system. At least the human based system isn't vulnerable to attack for nefarious purposes.
Look! Look! We found one of the shitty drivers PvtParts was talkin bout! They're driving a whaaaaaambulance by the sound of it!
C'mon! You guys modded this dude up to 5 but not a one of you saw what he was doing there! Go read his post again, which is totally valid, but take note of the username. This guy is LEGIT! Meta-LEGIT!
I'm over 50 and I would happily buy. Driving is boring and is a waste of time. I think it is the opposite. Young males think they are great drivers and would rather keep driving in instead.
I should start a blog as I've been documenting how I come across so-called "oddball scenarios" just about every other month - and I am but one driver! Autonomous vehicles (AV) will probably not kill very many people, but they will significantly slow traffic (forever going forward). Issues I've witnessed, off the top of my head:
--LARGE, rim-breaking potholes
--Snow covering the road paint
--No GPS signal near tall buildings
--Tumbleweeds/garbage plastic bags
--Construction cone blocking the lane by 10%
--Temporary/unofficial road construction forcing traffic onto gravel shoulder
--Live, downed, power wire
--Thin branch that looks like a live, downed, power wire
--Baby geese on roadway
--Dangerously deep puddle blocking 25% of the lane
I have personally seen all of these within the last several years of driving (at least once), most within the last couple years. I am an embedded programmer (decades); I already know that the infinite number of possible road scenarios WILL come up, and cannot be coded for in advance. That's where the human brain takes the universe's trophy.
The average age of a vehicle on US roads is 11.4 years ish and climbing. Self driving cars, like home automation, are "five years away from changing the world" and likely always will be; definitely still will be in five years. Minor aspects of functionality originally developed for self-driving applications will become mainstream piecemeal, but we're decade(s) away from self-driving cars being mainstream.
As long as self-driving cars are required to obey the speed limit, they will be very unpopular. Further, a self-driving car will only be "self-driving" when no one is required to sit behind the steering wheel and pay attention to what the car is doing. Even further, after the first fatal accident, there will be an outcry to get self-driving cars off the street.
A self-driving car will need to surpass human intelligence before it is a better driver. In particular, it will have to spot dangerous situations (such as a child running down a driveway heading for the street, someone on the side of the road making gestures to stop, etc.) and decide what defensive measure to take. Any self-driving car that is less intelligent than a human will find itself in accidents that the driver would have been able to avoid.
This is a subject that low-information science enthusiasts like to talk about, like the numerous articles in magazines in the 50's that by the 70's the automobile would be replaced by the helicopter. The practical difficulties are ignored, the potential benefits attract great enthusiasm.
You'll have to pry my dead cold hands from the steering wheel, after I wrapped my car on a tree.
Then you can put my corpse in a self driving ambulance.
Try it! Library of Babel