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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?
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?
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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.
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!”
I pulled it because we had already run it a week ago. A few readers submitted it today (actually, plenty of outlets have run the story today), hence the confusion.
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.
*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.
Are we actually trying to keep dupes off the front page now? Wow times they are a changin.
Thanks for letting us know.
Minimum threshold fixed. Thanks!
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.
OT I have a feeling /. got better recently. Articles got little bit more interesting and strangely the inflow of obscenities from disturbed users (or their bots) decreased slightly. I hope the trend holds on.
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
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.
Forget about the rural dirt roads with snow - those are easy.
What I want to know is how they will handle my urban dirt (and paved) roads (yay Michigan!) whose pothole topology changes daily. And these are not small holes, but knock-your-fillings-out-destroy-your-suspension holes.
"There are a dozen opinions on a matter until you know the truth. Then there is only one." - CS Lewis (paraprhase)
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.
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.
70+% of Americans live in cities or suburbs. And they produce almost all the GDP. So it's hardly "worthless" if driverless cars have a problem with places that people rarely need to be.
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.
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.
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?
You've been doing a good job, manisha.
You are welcome on my lawn.
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.
Pulling it is the worst thing you can do, even if it's a dupe, because *comments*.
If you can't detect dupes before putting them up, don't bother.
At the bottom of the
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.
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
I'm saying that the "rarely" is the problem. Until that is solved you have to:
a) Own a separate car that is rarely used just to go out for those rare events.
b) Rent a car to go out into the boonies. This may or may not be feasible to do on a whim.
c) Don't go.
"a" is a huge financial hurdle. "b" has limitations on spontaneity. "c" represents a freedom I'm not wiling to give up.
I can see that self driving cars will be a lot better than I am at avoiding potholes, and the car in front can warn others behind of any tricky ones.
I imagine that at least initially the cars might refuse to drive in some conditions (like 2 feet of fresh snow); while this might well irritate people, way too many drivers overestimate what they and their car can do in those types of conditions. AWD cars with all season radials aren't magic...
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?
Phoenix and it's suburbs have a lot of dirt roads. And no snow, but the streets flood every 10 years or so to 50cm deep. (Rain is so rare there that most places do not have sewers for drainage, but it's usually gone in a day).
...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!
Or you could just leave the manual controls in the self-driving car. There was some story about Google proposing to not put steering wheels in its cars, but I don't think anybody seriously things the first self-driving cars aren't going to have manual controls.
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...
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?
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.
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.
If it saves you $8/day assuming you have 1 day off/week
365 - 52 = 313 * 8 that's a savings of $2504/year
The highest estimate I found was about $250/week for a rental car so if did the math right you could take 10 1 week trips a year in a rental car with the price difference.
Each trip is 500 miles round trip? so let's assume 20 mpg =25 gallons of fuel @ $2.00 gal $50 brings it to about $300/week for rental
Still good enough for 8 1 week trips/year after accounting for fuel. Accidently take 1000 mile trips ? 7/year.
I only get the chance to take a trip that requires an overnight stay anywhere 2 times or less/year and pretty much never lasting longer than 1 week.
How did owning a vehicle win out on road trips and ad-hoc trips? Do you take that many or am I missing something?
Minimum threshold fixed. Thanks!
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."
If you own a steering wheel free self-driver, I'd imagine that getting a manual vehicle would still be easy. Using an app on the latest device, you decide which vehicle you want to rent. Then, if it's capable of self-driving, you simply step out your door at the appropriate time and it's waiting for you and your camping gear.
If it's not capable of self driving, you load up your stuff, and your car takes you to the manual drive lot, that might actually be just outside of the park where you need manual drive. You move your stuff over, your car parks itself in the spot where the manual car was, and you're good to go. Or maybe it drives itself home for the weekend.
Lots of options.
I don't read AC A human right
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
What are you talking about? I lived in Phoenix for 12 years; there's no dirt roads there anywhere, unless you're talking about alleys in the older neighborhoods, or places on the reservations nearby. But yes, street flooding is definitely a problem, and it's not just every 10 years, it's pretty regularly, whenever there's a big rainstorm (but it's usually only select locations).
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.
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-...
Way north Phoenix, Sunnyslope and also northeast and Apache junction...some of the suburbs of Phoenix, parts of Mesa, Carefree and especially Cave Creek. I've lived there on and off since the early 70's. There are still farms within city limits.
The typical person who can afford a 70k car with autopilot isn't you, who go on with this smart economic calculation. For someone who is able and willing to pay for a 70k car, autonomous driving, in some form, is already present. For someone like you who nickel and dime over some dollars per day, it'll take 10-15 years.
And NO self driving taxis in no way obsolete ownership the same way most people don't welcome strangers in their home to eat at their table and sit in their sofas.
A car is not just a fucking, utilitarian transport device. It's also a private space. Privacy is something some people appreciate. An Anon should know better.
What? That transition took around 50 years.
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.
I don't completely agree with you, because potentially truly driverless cars can eliminate a lot of problems like drunk driving, which is responsible for a lot of fatalities. Drunk driving is already illegal yet happens. Possibly there could exist a technology other than driverless car that would eliminate it, like some sort of compulsory breathalizer test combined with other anti-tampering methods, but that would not be easy.
In winter where I live they don't always plow the roads, almost never down to the pavement in order to save on blade costs. The ruts that remain can turn a car sideways if they are not driven through properly and they rarely match up with the lane. I'm not clear on whether an automated car will actually analyze the ice contour of the road and driving according to that instead of according to where the lane is. Not that the lane matters because the markings are under the ice anyway. The car will have to navigate this while anticipating correctly where the other cars will go as they also deal with the ice.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
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.
You have no idea how tempting it is to hit the "Post Anonymously" box and dispel you of any such notions. But, you're probably right and I'm really not the ass people seem to think I am.
Hmm... No, still tempted... *sighs* You win this time, internet!
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
Do you honestly believe that the comments here are really so worth preserving that a few can't be lost for a story that was deleted as a dupe?
Come on, man.
You are welcome on my lawn.
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!
What if all the comments are just "Hey, this is a dupe, pull it"?
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.
If the comments all said you should jump in a river would you do it?
At the bottom of the
If it was a reasonable request, I probably would. I would consider my situation first. Am I being chased by Bees? Then no. Am I on or at risk of being on fire? Then yes.
If we have a situation where we actually have a duplicate story, and all the comments are "Hey you have a duplicate story, pull it" then how would pulling it be wrong?
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