As I've learned that it is impossible to argue against someone who doesn't acknowledge your responses, I'm out.
Or - and I'm just throwing this out there - you could point out that I made an error, I could acknowledge that I made a mistake and we could continue the discussion.
You are presuming that bad driving is a proxy for stupidity. I submit that a person could be a brilliant rocket scientist and also be a terrible driver.
On a societal level, if we removed natural death,
There is nothing "natural" about a car accident.
I also feel researching immortality and life-extension techniques is immoral
Well, I don't feel that way. Any research that yields something like immortality would necessarily also attack the aging process - which would remove your objections.
Probably best not to do away with it, then.
We can't "do away with it". Natural selection is not something we can remove. We will all die someday. Many of us reproduce, and not all of our offspring survive. This will always be the case. If we outgrow our planet and billions of us starve to death, well, that is natural selection.
You do realize that Social Darwinism [wikipedia.org] relates to governement and economy and not live and death, right? You're thinking of Darwinism [wikipedia.org]
No, I meant Social Darwinism. You are talking about policy decisions based on natural selection theories.
For both colds and stupid people driving, the answer is yes. A cold without symptoms is just a parasitic virus. My modern diet has more than enough calories for a parasite here and there. If there are stupid people on the road, what do I care if they can't hurt me?
but any damage is the result of the infection.
No, sorry. Look up "inflammatory response". Your body can be an absolute bastard to itself.
So your solution is to do away with all drivers by automating the whole process?
Yes, why is this a problem? I don't see manually driven cars going away any time soon. It will just (eventually) be very expensive to insure them compared to the self-driving variety, and I suspect the highways will eventually ban them to improve capacity.
Let me lay it out for you: as the stupid take themselves and each other out, there will be fewer of them to take out the intelligent people.
Yes, I understand your argument. I'm familiar with natural selection. Social Darwinism and other such ideas have been tossed around for a long time. Sometimes "obvious" ideas are not so obvious after some careful thought and research.
Engineers care about costs. Costs are an engineering problem. We're saying the same thing.
Because, as already clearly stated (again...), I'm simply saying you were wrong about fuel being an issue.
Please re-read the thread. When I made the snarky "I'm sure it has enough fuel for that..." comment, I was replying to a post that suggested crashing it into the sun or sending into deep space. I stand by my statement - it does not have the fuel to do either of those things, unless "sending it into deep space" is defined so widely as to include orbits around the sun that will bring it back from deep space. This probe is stuck in the solar system.
10% is a big number when cars are lasting 10+ years. I could see 10% of new car sales, but these things are going to be expensive at first. I think the first autonomous cars are going to be big luxury vehicles, not normal consumer-level stuff. And what is "fully autonomous"? No steering wheel? Good enough for a commute in a typical urban/suburban environment? In snow?
So if we were betting (and I'm not), I would guess that a very high percentage of luxury cars (in the $100,000) range will be autonomous over the next 15-20 years. Then a trickle-down into less expensive cars as the bugs get ironed out and the liability and insurance benefits become clear. I can't even rule out a government mandate at that point. I imagine that you are right and commercial applications will be at the front of the line - commercial trucks, for instance. It'd be very interesting if the drivers were allowed to put them on a highway, safely engage the autopilot, and then go take a nap. But again, government regulation is a huge wildcard here.
For each, more lax, definition of "autonomous", bring the estimate in a little. The Q35 is somewhat autonomous on the highway right now. If you are some asshole who insists on texting while driving, that car will absolutely make you safer right now. You could probably read the paper if you wanted. Pretty much all of the luxury cars will keep a lane automatically in the next product cycle... and it will just keep getting incrementally more automated. I don't know where you draw the line and call it "fully autonomous" - for some people that day will come a lot sooner than for others.
I was wrong about smokers - it's drinkers. Smoking gets your immune system too fired up and it does more damage than in healthy people. Drinking seems to have the opposite effect.
There's no cure and taking something that subdues your body's natural response actually makes things worse.
That's not true. People with compromised immune systems (e.g. smokers) tend to suffer fewer cold symptoms. Most of the damage from a cold is your body's overreaction - it's self-inflicted.
But that's a tangent. Let's take your analogy at face value. You are assuming that the technology for treating a cold will never improve. What happens when the technology improves to the point where taking medication can reduce the duration of a cold - will you still recommend not treating it? Because that is what is happening with automotive technology - it is steadily improving to the point where this stuff starts to sound reasonable.
Stop treating either condition and the effective symptoms worsen for a short period as natural defenses ramp up and take care of the problem in short order.
I'd be all for the natural selection route if it didn't risk the careful drivers as well. Hell, a lot of it is still drunks.
I was just anticipating the inevitable responses along the lines of, "Oh, yeah, what about xxx?" As you say, there are far more failures than successes, and no one is claiming that the telegraph would have been invented by adding electronics to a horse:)
"What do we want to do with the probe after the science program has ended? And lets make the plans general enough in case the program end date changes."
I'm not sure how that changes the argument. It's still an engineering trade off between more science vs putting it into a permanent, safe orbit somewhere.
Also, the 5-20 m/s delta-v for going into heliocentric orbit would be virtually the same as the delta-v used to hit Saturn
That may very well be true, but that's not what they are doing here. They already used the fuel to get closer to the moon. They are depending on another close encounter to sling the probe into Saturn. It may be true that they could sling it off in another direction, but I'm not sure they could guarantee that it would not eventually hit something else that could harbor life. Saturn almost certainly does not, and if it does it will almost certainly not be harmed by a probe that will effectively melt away in a part of the planet that could not support any kind of life because of radiation, heat, and pressure.
I am not imagining any kind of life on Saturn.
So then why are you arguing? If one is concerned about Earthly contamination of life somewhere, using the last bit of fuel to slam into Saturn is a pretty safe bet. What purpose would slinging it into an uncontrollable orbit around the sun serve?
No, the Huygens probe was fired at Titan, not into Saturn.
Yes, my mistake. The point remains - the damage is done.
Should you be posting with such confidence about the mission constraints if you aren't even familiar with the mission in general?
Why would you be wasting your time arguing with me if I'm such an idiot?
There is zero proof that all those deaths and injuries will be eliminated.
That's a very hard statement to refute! LOL, are you trying to put words in my mouth so that you have someone to argue with?
You 'humans are bad at everything' tech fanboys are pretty much the reason I hate reading any articles about self driving cars these days.
I don't think I said that, either. It is all speculation, of course, but it's pretty hard to imagine a scenario where machines suddenly stop improving.
You don't need to become an engineer to find programming useful. I'm amazed at the very cool things that artists are doing with micro-controllers now that they have been made more accessible. There are amateur-focused stock trading websites that allow fully-automated trading based on code that you write. A great number of the people that I know who are self-employed have their own website and have IT needs that would be trivial for someone with a light programming background to tackle. Debugging consumer electronics is much easier when you know how machines "think". As our world becomes more and more run by computers, I think the idea that everyone should have some idea how they work is at least worth considering.
From my experience with managers/executives who talk like that, they have little practical experience and will be gone shortly after their first spectacular failure. Slow and steady wins the race. You see some interesting counter-examples from startups, but in general just incorporating the latest technology into existing systems is the way to go.
Well, when you are retired you can drive around when no one else is on the road and actually have fun. For most of us, the bulk of our driving is our commute in traffic, and it sucks.
I've seen a thousand texters on the highway that are just as dangerous as that video. You can't cure stupidity, but a car that will automatically slow down before hitting the one in front is better than someone using their smartphone while driving without such a feature.
I'm all for improving public transit, but it takes a generation or so for everything to reorient itself to suit it. So, sure, I'm all for increased spending on public transit infrastructure. Then the 20 year buildout. Then another 25 before businesses and housing re-orient themselves around it. In the meantime you can improve other things without hurting that work. It's not fantasy or sci-fi - it's happening now and improving constantly.
What would be the point of standardizing on unpractical prototypes? If people did this with cars we'd be using tillers and combination throttle/brake levers. All computers would be programmed with jumpers.
They have some fuel right now, but not in 2 years after they've done many more experiments and maneuvers. The tradeoff would be to do less science.
I'm wondering what kind of life you are imagining on Saturn that can withstand the intense radiation there, but cannot handle a foreign body slipping deep into the interior until it is melted by heat and pressure, then rapidly dispersing in the intense winds of the planet. I'm also going to remind you that we already fired the other half of this probe into Saturn - so the damage is done.
It's not that cars have gotten worse - you can, after all, still buy a car that gets you 38MPG. But in this case, Civics have gotten larger and more powerful. In 1992, your Civic weighed far less than 2500lbs and had a 1.5 liter, 100 HP engine with stick shift. Now, a Civic is pushing 3000lbs and has a 1.8 liter, 143 HP engine.
You can get yourself a Honda Fit and have a similar, high-mileage car (albeit with more power). Or you can jump over to a Ford Fiesta and get the SFE edition, which basically gives you a tiny 3-cylinder engine (but still more horsepower than your old Civic!) and good fuel economy.
Most of the high-mileage market has been usurped by the hybrids.
diesel may be 'dirtier' but their engines are more efficient than a gasoline engine
Correct, though they are not very much more efficient. Generally it is in the 10% range.
burning less fuel per mile
This is true, but misleading. Diesel is more energy-dense. It takes more crude to make diesel than it does gasoline. Apart from the 10% efficiency advantage, it does not burn much less petroleum.
add the fact that diesel cars tend to be smaller and lighter and therefore more efficient in that regard as well
I'm not aware of many (any?) diesel-only cars. A diesel car with similar performance will by definition be either (a) heavier or (b) a lot more expensive than a gasoline car.
we got 40-45+ mpg reliably in any driving condition in a 80s era escort always a 10 gallon fill-up always 400-450+ miles per tank even after 250k miles, and can't break 40 in a late model focus with 100k miles driving highway commutes in the country.
While that single example may be true, fleet mileage has gone up. Cars are, as a whole, more efficient than in the 1980s. Things have gotten better, not worse.
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As I've learned that it is impossible to argue against someone who doesn't acknowledge your responses, I'm out.
Or - and I'm just throwing this out there - you could point out that I made an error, I could acknowledge that I made a mistake and we could continue the discussion.
You are presuming that bad driving is a proxy for stupidity. I submit that a person could be a brilliant rocket scientist and also be a terrible driver.
On a societal level, if we removed natural death,
There is nothing "natural" about a car accident.
I also feel researching immortality and life-extension techniques is immoral
Well, I don't feel that way. Any research that yields something like immortality would necessarily also attack the aging process - which would remove your objections.
Probably best not to do away with it, then.
We can't "do away with it". Natural selection is not something we can remove. We will all die someday. Many of us reproduce, and not all of our offspring survive. This will always be the case. If we outgrow our planet and billions of us starve to death, well, that is natural selection.
You do realize that Social Darwinism [wikipedia.org] relates to governement and economy and not live and death, right? You're thinking of Darwinism [wikipedia.org]
No, I meant Social Darwinism. You are talking about policy decisions based on natural selection theories.
So symptoms are worse than illness, now?
For both colds and stupid people driving, the answer is yes. A cold without symptoms is just a parasitic virus. My modern diet has more than enough calories for a parasite here and there. If there are stupid people on the road, what do I care if they can't hurt me?
but any damage is the result of the infection.
No, sorry. Look up "inflammatory response". Your body can be an absolute bastard to itself.
So your solution is to do away with all drivers by automating the whole process?
Yes, why is this a problem? I don't see manually driven cars going away any time soon. It will just (eventually) be very expensive to insure them compared to the self-driving variety, and I suspect the highways will eventually ban them to improve capacity.
Let me lay it out for you: as the stupid take themselves and each other out, there will be fewer of them to take out the intelligent people.
Yes, I understand your argument. I'm familiar with natural selection. Social Darwinism and other such ideas have been tossed around for a long time. Sometimes "obvious" ideas are not so obvious after some careful thought and research.
No, it is an argument about cost vs. science,
Engineers care about costs. Costs are an engineering problem. We're saying the same thing.
Because, as already clearly stated (again...), I'm simply saying you were wrong about fuel being an issue.
Please re-read the thread. When I made the snarky "I'm sure it has enough fuel for that..." comment, I was replying to a post that suggested crashing it into the sun or sending into deep space. I stand by my statement - it does not have the fuel to do either of those things, unless "sending it into deep space" is defined so widely as to include orbits around the sun that will bring it back from deep space. This probe is stuck in the solar system.
10% is a big number when cars are lasting 10+ years. I could see 10% of new car sales, but these things are going to be expensive at first. I think the first autonomous cars are going to be big luxury vehicles, not normal consumer-level stuff. And what is "fully autonomous"? No steering wheel? Good enough for a commute in a typical urban/suburban environment? In snow?
So if we were betting (and I'm not), I would guess that a very high percentage of luxury cars (in the $100,000) range will be autonomous over the next 15-20 years. Then a trickle-down into less expensive cars as the bugs get ironed out and the liability and insurance benefits become clear. I can't even rule out a government mandate at that point. I imagine that you are right and commercial applications will be at the front of the line - commercial trucks, for instance. It'd be very interesting if the drivers were allowed to put them on a highway, safely engage the autopilot, and then go take a nap. But again, government regulation is a huge wildcard here.
For each, more lax, definition of "autonomous", bring the estimate in a little. The Q35 is somewhat autonomous on the highway right now. If you are some asshole who insists on texting while driving, that car will absolutely make you safer right now. You could probably read the paper if you wanted. Pretty much all of the luxury cars will keep a lane automatically in the next product cycle... and it will just keep getting incrementally more automated. I don't know where you draw the line and call it "fully autonomous" - for some people that day will come a lot sooner than for others.
I was wrong about smokers - it's drinkers. Smoking gets your immune system too fired up and it does more damage than in healthy people. Drinking seems to have the opposite effect.
As long as it sends an Instagram... :)
There's no cure and taking something that subdues your body's natural response actually makes things worse.
That's not true. People with compromised immune systems (e.g. smokers) tend to suffer fewer cold symptoms. Most of the damage from a cold is your body's overreaction - it's self-inflicted.
But that's a tangent. Let's take your analogy at face value. You are assuming that the technology for treating a cold will never improve. What happens when the technology improves to the point where taking medication can reduce the duration of a cold - will you still recommend not treating it? Because that is what is happening with automotive technology - it is steadily improving to the point where this stuff starts to sound reasonable.
Stop treating either condition and the effective symptoms worsen for a short period as natural defenses ramp up and take care of the problem in short order.
I'd be all for the natural selection route if it didn't risk the careful drivers as well. Hell, a lot of it is still drunks.
I was just anticipating the inevitable responses along the lines of, "Oh, yeah, what about xxx?" As you say, there are far more failures than successes, and no one is claiming that the telegraph would have been invented by adding electronics to a horse :)
"What do we want to do with the probe after the science program has ended? And lets make the plans general enough in case the program end date changes."
I'm not sure how that changes the argument. It's still an engineering trade off between more science vs putting it into a permanent, safe orbit somewhere.
Also, the 5-20 m/s delta-v for going into heliocentric orbit would be virtually the same as the delta-v used to hit Saturn
That may very well be true, but that's not what they are doing here. They already used the fuel to get closer to the moon. They are depending on another close encounter to sling the probe into Saturn. It may be true that they could sling it off in another direction, but I'm not sure they could guarantee that it would not eventually hit something else that could harbor life. Saturn almost certainly does not, and if it does it will almost certainly not be harmed by a probe that will effectively melt away in a part of the planet that could not support any kind of life because of radiation, heat, and pressure.
I am not imagining any kind of life on Saturn.
So then why are you arguing? If one is concerned about Earthly contamination of life somewhere, using the last bit of fuel to slam into Saturn is a pretty safe bet. What purpose would slinging it into an uncontrollable orbit around the sun serve?
No, the Huygens probe was fired at Titan, not into Saturn.
Yes, my mistake. The point remains - the damage is done.
Should you be posting with such confidence about the mission constraints if you aren't even familiar with the mission in general?
Why would you be wasting your time arguing with me if I'm such an idiot?
There is zero proof that all those deaths and injuries will be eliminated.
That's a very hard statement to refute! LOL, are you trying to put words in my mouth so that you have someone to argue with?
You 'humans are bad at everything' tech fanboys are pretty much the reason I hate reading any articles about self driving cars these days.
I don't think I said that, either. It is all speculation, of course, but it's pretty hard to imagine a scenario where machines suddenly stop improving.
You don't need to become an engineer to find programming useful. I'm amazed at the very cool things that artists are doing with micro-controllers now that they have been made more accessible. There are amateur-focused stock trading websites that allow fully-automated trading based on code that you write. A great number of the people that I know who are self-employed have their own website and have IT needs that would be trivial for someone with a light programming background to tackle. Debugging consumer electronics is much easier when you know how machines "think". As our world becomes more and more run by computers, I think the idea that everyone should have some idea how they work is at least worth considering.
You get out of the car and tell it to go park itself. Who cares where it goes?
From my experience with managers/executives who talk like that, they have little practical experience and will be gone shortly after their first spectacular failure. Slow and steady wins the race. You see some interesting counter-examples from startups, but in general just incorporating the latest technology into existing systems is the way to go.
Well, when you are retired you can drive around when no one else is on the road and actually have fun. For most of us, the bulk of our driving is our commute in traffic, and it sucks.
I've seen a thousand texters on the highway that are just as dangerous as that video. You can't cure stupidity, but a car that will automatically slow down before hitting the one in front is better than someone using their smartphone while driving without such a feature.
I'm all for improving public transit, but it takes a generation or so for everything to reorient itself to suit it. So, sure, I'm all for increased spending on public transit infrastructure. Then the 20 year buildout. Then another 25 before businesses and housing re-orient themselves around it. In the meantime you can improve other things without hurting that work. It's not fantasy or sci-fi - it's happening now and improving constantly.
Let me know when Google makes their car available for sale.
What would be the point of standardizing on unpractical prototypes? If people did this with cars we'd be using tillers and combination throttle/brake levers. All computers would be programmed with jumpers.
seems like an awful lot of effort to remove a steering wheel.
Yeah, who needs to reduce the 1.24 million deaths and millions more injuries suffered?
It's a good thing it's not a fashion contest.
They have some fuel right now, but not in 2 years after they've done many more experiments and maneuvers. The tradeoff would be to do less science.
I'm wondering what kind of life you are imagining on Saturn that can withstand the intense radiation there, but cannot handle a foreign body slipping deep into the interior until it is melted by heat and pressure, then rapidly dispersing in the intense winds of the planet. I'm also going to remind you that we already fired the other half of this probe into Saturn - so the damage is done.
It's not that cars have gotten worse - you can, after all, still buy a car that gets you 38MPG. But in this case, Civics have gotten larger and more powerful. In 1992, your Civic weighed far less than 2500lbs and had a 1.5 liter, 100 HP engine with stick shift. Now, a Civic is pushing 3000lbs and has a 1.8 liter, 143 HP engine.
You can get yourself a Honda Fit and have a similar, high-mileage car (albeit with more power). Or you can jump over to a Ford Fiesta and get the SFE edition, which basically gives you a tiny 3-cylinder engine (but still more horsepower than your old Civic!) and good fuel economy.
Most of the high-mileage market has been usurped by the hybrids.
I'm sure it has plenty of fuel for that...
diesel may be 'dirtier' but their engines are more efficient than a gasoline engine
Correct, though they are not very much more efficient. Generally it is in the 10% range.
burning less fuel per mile
This is true, but misleading. Diesel is more energy-dense. It takes more crude to make diesel than it does gasoline. Apart from the 10% efficiency advantage, it does not burn much less petroleum.
add the fact that diesel cars tend to be smaller and lighter and therefore more efficient in that regard as well
I'm not aware of many (any?) diesel-only cars. A diesel car with similar performance will by definition be either (a) heavier or (b) a lot more expensive than a gasoline car.
we got 40-45+ mpg reliably in any driving condition in a 80s era escort always a 10 gallon fill-up always 400-450+ miles per tank even after 250k miles, and can't break 40 in a late model focus with 100k miles driving highway commutes in the country.
While that single example may be true, fleet mileage has gone up. Cars are, as a whole, more efficient than in the 1980s. Things have gotten better, not worse.
Just proves that spell check can't fix ignorance.