Again, you're just reaching for excuses, changing the assumptions as you go and definitely not doing a fair evaluation. That's your prerogative, but stop claiming that you're a typical case.
Are you being intentionally dim? If you're already shopping or eating out it actually takes less of YOUR time to hook up your EV than to stand around while pumping gas.
If you just don't want an EV, fine, but your excuses are just ridiculous.
What? You were talking about whether people could afford to put in electrical outlets in their garage. Installation pays for itself very quickly. You evidence this yourself when you claim that landlords can charge more than an extra $1000/yr just by having those outlets. Once again, this is a lame excuse.
A good driver absolutely would have avoided that collision.
I find this especially ironic because when a Google car caused an accident when a "good driver" didn't yield, the usual suspects were quick to blame Google and NOT the "good driver" who couldn't possibly be expected to be aware of his situation.
You keep saying "not souls", but then fail to come up with whatever it is that makes humans "aware", but self-driving cars not "aware." If you don't want to call this special thing only humans have "souls" then find another name for it, because you are trying and failing to come up with a meaningful distinction.
You're right that self driving cars don't know that that little girl in the middle of the street walking her dog is adorable, and that she is the daughter of the local minister. So what? It is aware that there are obstacles in its path and judges that it should avoid them. Aware, aware, aware. It doesn't need to know any of the details that you seem to think are important. That's another loaded word there, "judgment", that you use to muddle your biased opinion even further.
If you're not religious, to what do you attribute your inflated sense of your special humanness?
Of course you are talking about souls, because you are trying to tease out some semantic subtlety that differentiates what humans do from what self-driving cars do. Even your definitions don't support your position. Self-driving cars are aware, they have knowledge and they use that to make decisions. Just like humans.
A good driver absolutely would have avoided that collision.
Then there are no good drivers. Humans are fallible, even a driver who you might consider "good" will fail sometimes in this situation because of many factors.
The problem with computers is that they don't take into account that people will break the rules and do stupid things, a defensive driver assumes someone will do the dumbest thing possible....
Absolutely not true. Self driving cars are constantly evaluating whether someone is going to break the rules or do something dumb. They do this far better than the average driver, even now. Unlike the vast majority of humans they are indeed keeping an eye on other cars drifting out of their lanes, failing to stop at a stop sign/light, braking abruptly for no apparent reason...
A good driver learns to pick up on these cues.
Sure, but only because you are defining "good driver" as someone who does that. In reality, the number of "good drivers" is very small. Possibly just you and me, and I'm not sure about you.
I don't know of any self-driving software that has deployed such technology, but it's really not as advanced as you think. Detecting whether a car is weaving in its lane and might wander over is not that hard, other cues that every "good driver" might be more difficult, but this is a red herring. Simple defensive driving techniques, e.g. not being right next to another car on the freeway, combined with far superior reaction times make self-driving cars much better in these situations than most drivers are, and the software keeps getting better. Unlike humans.
Wrong, unless you mean that cars don't have souls and thus can't truly be 'aware' of anything. Other than that you're making a ridiculous semantic distinction. Self-driving cars are 'aware' exactly the same way humans are 'aware.' Cars are more 'aware' than humans for some problems and not as 'aware' at others.
Indeed. How many individuals "do the right thing" and pay extra taxes beyond what they are legally required to pay?
Many.
Nonsense. People don't intentionally pay more taxes, they do it out of ignorance or because the time and hassle is not worth the payback. If there were a checkbox that said "set up offshore account and instantly pay 10% less" almost every sane person would do that. EXACTLY the same as most corporations.
See this is why we can't have nice things.
This is a ridiculous game to play. What is the right and fair amount of tax for a corporation? Every company should just decide what they think is fair and add on a little extra to the legal minimum? No, the only sane and fair thing is to pay as little as the law allows.
You could make a case that corporations shouldn't lobby for tax loopholes, but if they exist, they MUST take advantage of them.
A small autonomous electric vehicle can be loaded with packages for a few blocks or a few miles, depending on the density. The customer is notified by smartphone that a package is available and when the customer is ready to pick up she responds to the message. The package will be in front of the house within a few minutes. Basically it's a mobile post office box (or Amazon locker).
This is just one of many solutions that would be far more efficient and useful for the customer than those of today.
Case in point. You contradict yourself when you say that the best response is "HIT THE BRAKES". Doing that while going through a turn (or on ice or whatever) is often the last thing you want to do. A passenger not paying attention (or only casually) will cause a lot of accidents by such panic braking. Very different than a driving instructor who is supposed to be paying careful attention all the time.
Which means that a well-tested, robust set of driving algorithms should also be quite capable of determining if the advisory speed is too low, or did you miss the point that some roads are actually harder to drive at the posted (advisory or not) speed?
I didn't miss it, I just don't believe it. There is no physics model I can conceive of that makes it harder to drive a turn safely at a lower speed than a faster speed, other than a crazy highly banked turn, which probably doesn't exist on a normal highway. Acceleration is not the same as speed, btw. Care to point out an example of this phenomenon?
If your only point is that self-driving cars can monitor the road and give feedback to other self-driving vehicles and alert the powers that be to incorrect signage, then sure. Nobody is disputing that.
Minimum should be the ability for a human to cause the vehicle to come to a complete stop in an emergency; preferably, this should be a safe complete stop, at a safe spot...and not, for example, partially under a bus.
If your point is that self-driving cars are not ready for every road right now, well, sure. Again, nobody is disputing that. However, mandating that a panic button be installed when these cars are in wide deployment is silly and unnecessary. We don't mandate that for taxis or buses, why would we insist on such a thing in a much safer vehicle? Of course, you will always have the option to instruct the car to pull over to a safe area, just as you can a taxi driver. Big difference between that and a panic button.
I'd say both worlds are moving towards the center. The Chinese will never reach the peak of our excess and we will gradually move towards a more sustainable way of living, partly out of environmental concern, but mostly out of economic necessity.
Absolutely, and modern technology allows us to do this efficiently. A vehicle miles tax, congestion traffic pricing, parking meter fees based on time of day and congestion,... Every major city will move to this model eventually if they want to stay livable. Or they can be luddites like fluffer and ban uber, ban self driving, etc.
The advisory speeds are set intentionally low. Certainly all the cars I've owned can take the turns much faster in good weather and even rental cars that I've driven were fine at +10 if you know how to drive well. The point is self-driving cars can do so much better than the thousands of humans in that situation. They will know that different kind of cars can handle very differently and will use the advisory signs as just a guideline, basing speed on the characteristics of the road and the data from thousands of cars driven before it.
You think humans intuitively know those 50,000 rules? The difference is that you can program that rule one time on a computer and it will be able to deploy that to millions of vehicles, whereas you have to teach that rule to a human millions of times.
Come on. A lot of people love to drive when the circumstances are fine, but the reality is that most of the time they're not. How many times have you heard: "Great. Traffic is totally backed up. I get to drive even longer than I planned for!" Even then most people prefer to drive because they don't want someone else driving; knowing for certain that they are much better than average. Like you and me. We are excellent drivers and should get to fudge the rules, unlike other people.
Many people also want to be in control, at least most of the time.
The vast majority of time spent driving is tedious and annoying. The number of people who want to actively drive most of the time is actually small and will continue to get smaller. Lots of people claim they love driving all the time, yet these people don't seem to be around to drive me to the airport, even if I volunteer a few bucks to pay for gas.
The frustration you speak of actually comes from being in the position of being partially responsible for the vehicle, one with controls. Once you give up control, it doesn't matter that much that you are only going 65 in a 65 zone or that you're not passing other cars as much as efficiently as you would if you are driving. It's like having a chauffeur who is a stickler for the law (or a Japanese taxi driver). You learn to detach.
There certainly will be a transition period where many self driving cars have controls, but over time fewer and fewer people will have licenses and people will learn to trust the vehicles more than they do other humans. Driving yourself will be expensive and dangerous, a luxury only the rich will be able to afford.
I've been really curious to see if your approach, taking him seriously and being nice, could make any progress getting through to this nut. I can see that it hasn't worked, but I applaud you for trying.
I'll try again. You have the choice of either a bomb with a timer going off in 60 seconds or a pineapple. Which do you think is safer? You have a non-zero chance of defusing that bomb, so I'm guessing that's the one you would take.
Why doesn't every passenger in a plane or car have their own set of controls? Just in case? Seems that's what you're advocating.
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Again, you're just reaching for excuses, changing the assumptions as you go and definitely not doing a fair evaluation. That's your prerogative, but stop claiming that you're a typical case.
Are you being intentionally dim? If you're already shopping or eating out it actually takes less of YOUR time to hook up your EV than to stand around while pumping gas.
If you just don't want an EV, fine, but your excuses are just ridiculous.
What? You were talking about whether people could afford to put in electrical outlets in their garage. Installation pays for itself very quickly. You evidence this yourself when you claim that landlords can charge more than an extra $1000/yr just by having those outlets. Once again, this is a lame excuse.
Considering that each EV will save $500 to $1000 in fuel costs per year, this is not a rational excuse.
Your response is clear evidence you don't even understand the point he was making. As usual.
A good driver absolutely would have avoided that collision.
I find this especially ironic because when a Google car caused an accident when a "good driver" didn't yield, the usual suspects were quick to blame Google and NOT the "good driver" who couldn't possibly be expected to be aware of his situation.
Because there IS nothing there, your posts are completely vacuous. That's the point I've made all along.
You keep saying "not souls", but then fail to come up with whatever it is that makes humans "aware", but self-driving cars not "aware." If you don't want to call this special thing only humans have "souls" then find another name for it, because you are trying and failing to come up with a meaningful distinction.
You're right that self driving cars don't know that that little girl in the middle of the street walking her dog is adorable, and that she is the daughter of the local minister. So what? It is aware that there are obstacles in its path and judges that it should avoid them. Aware, aware, aware. It doesn't need to know any of the details that you seem to think are important. That's another loaded word there, "judgment", that you use to muddle your biased opinion even further.
If you're not religious, to what do you attribute your inflated sense of your special humanness?
Of course you are talking about souls, because you are trying to tease out some semantic subtlety that differentiates what humans do from what self-driving cars do. Even your definitions don't support your position. Self-driving cars are aware, they have knowledge and they use that to make decisions. Just like humans.
Aware = having knowledge
Knowledge = facts, information, skills
A good driver absolutely would have avoided that collision.
Then there are no good drivers. Humans are fallible, even a driver who you might consider "good" will fail sometimes in this situation because of many factors.
The problem with computers is that they don't take into account that people will break the rules and do stupid things, a defensive driver assumes someone will do the dumbest thing possible....
Absolutely not true. Self driving cars are constantly evaluating whether someone is going to break the rules or do something dumb. They do this far better than the average driver, even now. Unlike the vast majority of humans they are indeed keeping an eye on other cars drifting out of their lanes, failing to stop at a stop sign/light, braking abruptly for no apparent reason...
A good driver learns to pick up on these cues.
Sure, but only because you are defining "good driver" as someone who does that. In reality, the number of "good drivers" is very small. Possibly just you and me, and I'm not sure about you.
I don't know of any self-driving software that has deployed such technology, but it's really not as advanced as you think. Detecting whether a car is weaving in its lane and might wander over is not that hard, other cues that every "good driver" might be more difficult, but this is a red herring. Simple defensive driving techniques, e.g. not being right next to another car on the freeway, combined with far superior reaction times make self-driving cars much better in these situations than most drivers are, and the software keeps getting better. Unlike humans.
Wrong, unless you mean that cars don't have souls and thus can't truly be 'aware' of anything. Other than that you're making a ridiculous semantic distinction. Self-driving cars are 'aware' exactly the same way humans are 'aware.' Cars are more 'aware' than humans for some problems and not as 'aware' at others.
Indeed. How many individuals "do the right thing" and pay extra taxes beyond what they are legally required to pay?
Many.
Nonsense. People don't intentionally pay more taxes, they do it out of ignorance or because the time and hassle is not worth the payback. If there were a checkbox that said "set up offshore account and instantly pay 10% less" almost every sane person would do that. EXACTLY the same as most corporations.
See this is why we can't have nice things.
This is a ridiculous game to play. What is the right and fair amount of tax for a corporation? Every company should just decide what they think is fair and add on a little extra to the legal minimum? No, the only sane and fair thing is to pay as little as the law allows.
You could make a case that corporations shouldn't lobby for tax loopholes, but if they exist, they MUST take advantage of them.
A small autonomous electric vehicle can be loaded with packages for a few blocks or a few miles, depending on the density. The customer is notified by smartphone that a package is available and when the customer is ready to pick up she responds to the message. The package will be in front of the house within a few minutes. Basically it's a mobile post office box (or Amazon locker).
This is just one of many solutions that would be far more efficient and useful for the customer than those of today.
Case in point. You contradict yourself when you say that the best response is "HIT THE BRAKES". Doing that while going through a turn (or on ice or whatever) is often the last thing you want to do. A passenger not paying attention (or only casually) will cause a lot of accidents by such panic braking. Very different than a driving instructor who is supposed to be paying careful attention all the time.
Which means that a well-tested, robust set of driving algorithms should also be quite capable of determining if the advisory speed is too low, or did you miss the point that some roads are actually harder to drive at the posted (advisory or not) speed?
I didn't miss it, I just don't believe it. There is no physics model I can conceive of that makes it harder to drive a turn safely at a lower speed than a faster speed, other than a crazy highly banked turn, which probably doesn't exist on a normal highway. Acceleration is not the same as speed, btw. Care to point out an example of this phenomenon?
If your only point is that self-driving cars can monitor the road and give feedback to other self-driving vehicles and alert the powers that be to incorrect signage, then sure. Nobody is disputing that.
Minimum should be the ability for a human to cause the vehicle to come to a complete stop in an emergency; preferably, this should be a safe complete stop, at a safe spot...and not, for example, partially under a bus.
If your point is that self-driving cars are not ready for every road right now, well, sure. Again, nobody is disputing that. However, mandating that a panic button be installed when these cars are in wide deployment is silly and unnecessary. We don't mandate that for taxis or buses, why would we insist on such a thing in a much safer vehicle? Of course, you will always have the option to instruct the car to pull over to a safe area, just as you can a taxi driver. Big difference between that and a panic button.
I'd say both worlds are moving towards the center. The Chinese will never reach the peak of our excess and we will gradually move towards a more sustainable way of living, partly out of environmental concern, but mostly out of economic necessity.
Absolutely, and modern technology allows us to do this efficiently. A vehicle miles tax, congestion traffic pricing, parking meter fees based on time of day and congestion, ... Every major city will move to this model eventually if they want to stay livable. Or they can be luddites like fluffer and ban uber, ban self driving, etc.
The advisory speeds are set intentionally low. Certainly all the cars I've owned can take the turns much faster in good weather and even rental cars that I've driven were fine at +10 if you know how to drive well. The point is self-driving cars can do so much better than the thousands of humans in that situation. They will know that different kind of cars can handle very differently and will use the advisory signs as just a guideline, basing speed on the characteristics of the road and the data from thousands of cars driven before it.
If you don't think we can afford better lawyers than you, you are badly misunderstanding silicon valley.
You think humans intuitively know those 50,000 rules? The difference is that you can program that rule one time on a computer and it will be able to deploy that to millions of vehicles, whereas you have to teach that rule to a human millions of times.
Come on. A lot of people love to drive when the circumstances are fine, but the reality is that most of the time they're not. How many times have you heard: "Great. Traffic is totally backed up. I get to drive even longer than I planned for!" Even then most people prefer to drive because they don't want someone else driving; knowing for certain that they are much better than average. Like you and me. We are excellent drivers and should get to fudge the rules, unlike other people.
You stole my idea! And I say stole ironically because it is pretty frickin' obvious to anyone who isn't actively trying to kill self-driving vehicles.
Many people also want to be in control, at least most of the time.
The vast majority of time spent driving is tedious and annoying. The number of people who want to actively drive most of the time is actually small and will continue to get smaller. Lots of people claim they love driving all the time, yet these people don't seem to be around to drive me to the airport, even if I volunteer a few bucks to pay for gas.
The frustration you speak of actually comes from being in the position of being partially responsible for the vehicle, one with controls. Once you give up control, it doesn't matter that much that you are only going 65 in a 65 zone or that you're not passing other cars as much as efficiently as you would if you are driving. It's like having a chauffeur who is a stickler for the law (or a Japanese taxi driver). You learn to detach.
There certainly will be a transition period where many self driving cars have controls, but over time fewer and fewer people will have licenses and people will learn to trust the vehicles more than they do other humans. Driving yourself will be expensive and dangerous, a luxury only the rich will be able to afford.
I've been really curious to see if your approach, taking him seriously and being nice, could make any progress getting through to this nut. I can see that it hasn't worked, but I applaud you for trying.
I'll try again. You have the choice of either a bomb with a timer going off in 60 seconds or a pineapple. Which do you think is safer? You have a non-zero chance of defusing that bomb, so I'm guessing that's the one you would take.
Why doesn't every passenger in a plane or car have their own set of controls? Just in case? Seems that's what you're advocating.