Focusing On Tech Alone, You Miss How Autonomous Driving Will Change Society 477
Hallie Siegel writes The way that consumers interact with and operate cars will transform most functions in commuting, travel, communications, car ownership, and many other as-yet unknown ways. Dieter Zetsche, chairman of Daimler and head of Mercedes-Benz Cars, said at this year's CES in Las Vegas: "Anyone who focuses solely on the technology has not yet grasped how autonomous driving will change our society." Robotics watcher Frank Tobe writes about how imagination is overtaking the ethics debate around autonomous cars."
What an Embarrassingly Vapid Article (Score:5, Interesting)
Bottom line: we probably cannot imagine all the implications and collateral effects driverless cars will cause beginning early in 2020 for top-end and early adopters and progressively more widespread year after year until mid 2030 when these cars will be our major form of transportation.
That's it? That's your substance? Hell, why not try? Here are my own guesses:
These are all, of course, many years off. But it is starting to look more and more inevitable.
Re:What an Embarrassingly Vapid Article (Score:5, Informative)
I couldn't agree more re the vapidity. You only have to look back to old Heinlein stories to see someone making an actual content-filled prediction about the social impact of driverless cars (see for example, Between Planets)
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
You're right. I want my 3 minutes back.
Re: (Score:2)
I doubt the parking bit. Many people will choose to use a driverless cab instead of their own car for the commute (to save money). For the average commute, rush hour is spread out enough to allow the cab to do perhaps 3 journeys, saving 2 parking spots, and it can even park away from town during the day.
Even more parking can be saved if you seat more than one person in the cab of course. I bet we will see cabs with multiple entirely separated passenger cabins so the only inconvenience from sharing them is t
Re: What an Embarrassingly Vapid Article (Score:5, Interesting)
"Rush hour" will become an anachronistic misnomer, as driverless cars could move at open freeway speeds, even with (increasingly rare) high traffic density. This will make its first appearance in formerly-HOV lanes. I imagine watching cars travelling 65mph -- even when they're nearly bumper-to-bumper -- will make many logjammed drivers in the human/slow lanes think twice about their insistence on being in "control".
Re: (Score:3)
So far, increases in the efficiency of commutes have led directly to longer commutes. I would be surprised if actual traffic density decreases, but it will be interesting to see.
Re: What an Embarrassingly Vapid Article (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3)
So far, increases in the efficiency of commutes have led directly to longer commutes. I would be surprised if actual traffic density decreases, but it will be interesting to see.
Momentary density will increase but as the cars require a much smaller timeslot of the resource, the average time spent on the highway will go down and thus the number of cars at any given moment on the highway will be lower. This will probably result in longer commutes as the penalty is lower (living 1hr from the city will be tolerable since the commute can be used for work anyway), but the potential for optimized scheduling and ride-sharing is so large that even if half of the cars on the road were rides
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:3)
There will have to be a driverless car only lane, not simply HOV, or it will suffer from the same fate as HOV lanes and passing lanes today: 90% of traffic are willing and able to travel smoothly at a fast rate and a few cars are camped out in the left lane, driving well below the flow of traffic and refusing to yield.
Driverless cars will be great for people not wanting to spend their waking time operating a vehicle, but smooth traffic won't happen unless the traffic is segregated or all cars are driverless
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Speaking of long, boring trips, finally! No more one-handed driving!
Re: (Score:2)
"Rush hour" will become an anachronistic misnomer, as driverless cars could move at open freeway speeds, even with (increasingly rare) high traffic density.
No, no they can not. The reason is roads. To expand upon that, using roads as the infrastructure for self-driving vehicles only makes sense when you already have many roads. Obviously, that is the situation, but it is one which is far less than ideal. You don't want vehicles driving in close formation because of the risk of failure. If the vehicles were on rails, then the risk would be far lower, and safe failure modes far easier to design in. Even with vehicle-to-vehicle communications, and even assuming y
Re: What an Embarrassingly Vapid Article (Score:5, Insightful)
This will require a minimum requirement for braking and acceleration capabilities...because in that long chain of cars going bumper to bumper at 60 mph...its the slowest braking car that will determine the speed and bumper to bumper distance of a large number of cars behind it.
Think ISO standards for braking and acceleration capabilities.
Think, "this lane is accessible to all cars that implement the AMR (Acceleration Minimum Requirements) 2.0 standard"
Re: (Score:3)
It is impossible to synch traffic lights in both directions. I would have thought that was obvious. Computers can only do so much.
Re:What an Embarrassingly Vapid Article (Score:5, Insightful)
I doubt the parking bit. Many people will choose to use a driverless cab
Yes, many people will choose not to own a car. But even if that doesn't happen, parking problems will go way down. SDCs can park themselves, after the people are out. So they can park within inches of each other on either side, and they have cameras instead of side mirrors, so that saves another 6 inches on either side. They can also park head-to-tail, an inch apart, three or four cars deep. When a car is summoned, it requests the other cars to move out of the way. Finally, the lanes through the lot can be much narrower, since SDCs can navigate much more accurately. When you combine all of these factors, the capacity of existing parking lots can easily be doubled, and maybe tripled.
Re: (Score:2)
A driverless car can also just drive back home and spend the day there, coming back in the afternoon to pick you up from work.
Which means less need for parking downtown/at-work/wherever.
And it means less need for extra cars. Rather than one car per driver in a family,
Re:What an Embarrassingly Vapid Article (Score:5, Informative)
The handicapped, elderly, and young who are currently limited in terms of autonomy will have much better access to the world outside their home.
Every car could become an ambulance
Car ownership will take on looser terms: If I'm going to bed now, and won't need the car until morning, why can't it act as a taxi? If many people have idle cars acting as taxis, why do I need a car?
What effect with this have on mass transit?
Re: (Score:3)
Mass transit will only have a chance when it is faster than driving. Busses are likely to suffer a lot, but many trains can still do well -- possibly even better than today, because the last mile problem of train journeys disappears.
Planes should do great, except on the shortest routes. Saving most of the cab fare or the airport parking would make the effective ticket price a lot lower. I have had journeys where airport parking was almost as expensive as the flights.
Re: (Score:3)
I could see busses going away almost entirely... Or I could also see the car taking me to a park & ride, drop me off, have the bus pick me up, and again on the other side... and as you said, the last mile is solved. I could see the car loading itself onto a car carrier, and that carrier going somewhere. I could see automatic carpooling services, where if we were going to the same concert, and you were near my route to the venue, that it'd automatically pick you up along the way. There are so many possib
Re:What an Embarrassingly Vapid Article (Score:4, Insightful)
Agree too, but you've missed a couple factors that should be considered.
1. All the "You can have my steering wheel when you pry it from my cold, dead fingers!" people. America's love affair with the automobile is in part about "freedom," and despite some people, esp. in big cities moving away from private ownership of automobiles, there are a LOT of older folks out there who will NEVER trust a machine's judgement over their own. A car's maneuvering system could see farther, wider, and in more detail than I can, but I can tell what things I'm seeing ARE better than a machine. The human visual cortex can interpret something like a couple quintillion polygons per second, blowing every GPU ever built out of the water. Even if most of those polygons are determined to be irrelevant and never passed along to the cerebral cortex... photons reflecting off the objects (or passing through or being emitted by them,) are still passed into the retina and still got sent across the optic ciasma, so they count...
2. Not every place everyone will want to go is paved or mapped, and mapping is not 100% accurate, so you still need periodic human intervention, or you have an arbitrarily limited car, that many people will be unlikely to accept.
3. What happens when every pedestrian, cyclist, etc., knows that pretty much every car on the road, being automated, will run itself into a tree rather than hit you? How far is the urge to ride down the street on a skateboard and whack cars with sticks or newspapers as a prank to set off car alarms from the urge to jump in front of a car knowing you can force it to stop?
4. Conversely, how long from that point will high-end cars, built for paranoids and assholes are programmed NOT to stop for pedestrians, etc., but instead to knock them out of the way with a directed blast of sound or wind? Or a 'pain beam'? Or a water-cannon?
5. What happens when someone roots his car (or someone hacks cars) and directs them to run over pedestrians, or malware enters the car's systems and causes them to slam into each-other at freeway speeds?
6. How long until advertising takes the form of a car that's cheaper for you to own, but when you tell it to take you to Chili's, instead takes you to Apple-Bee's because Apple-Bee's is a partner of whoever made your car, and Chili's ISN'T? Or you tell your car to take you to Wal-Mart and it drives you to Target instead? ETC. ETC. ETC.? If you thought multi-colored blinking popup ads were annoying, wait until a destination POPS UP IN FRONT OF YOUR CAR!
7. Or how about when you want to go to the rally outside _______'s headquarters and your car takes you to a "black-site" instead, where you're locked up without trial for a few days, then released when it's too late for you to do anything, like join the protest that's now over, or VOTE in the election...
Here's the thing. People wetting their pants over the thought of Sky Net sending Terminators to kill us but feel relief at the unlikelihood of that scenario playing out in the near-term because it'll be a while yet before a machine with anything resembling the human capacity for malfeasance develops, are ignoring the fact that you don't NEED an artificial intelligence to misuse the trust we place and increasingly continue to place in machines. Human beings are perfectly capable of abusing and misusing that information provided by relatively simple, dumb-machines.
You know how freaked everyone gets because 150 people put their lives in the hands of pilots and copilots to go from A to B? What happens when millions of people entrust their lives to MACHINES to do that job on highways and byways, implicitly putting themselves in the hands of the people who own the technology?
In any case, I'll keep my goddamned steering wheel, thank you very much. I'm old enough to remember when there were very few computers. I have handled punched cards, I have used 8", 5.25", and 3.5" floppy disks, and remember the excitement that the new medium of CD-ROM's brought to
Re:What an Embarrassingly Vapid Article (Score:4, Insightful)
is in part about "freedom,"
No need for the scare quotes. Owning your own means of transportation that can go almost anywhere is an obvious boon to freedom.
Conversely, how long from that point will high-end cars, built for paranoids and assholes are programmed NOT to stop for pedestrians, etc., but instead to knock them out of the way with a directed blast of sound or wind? Or a 'pain beam'? Or a water-cannon?
This is assault, which is a felony for both the driver/owner of the vehicle and the business making the vehicle and it generates considerable potential for negligent homicide too. It's not going to happen in today's world.
How long until advertising takes the form of a car that's cheaper for you to own, but when you tell it to take you to Chili's, instead takes you to Apple-Bee's because Apple-Bee's is a partner of whoever made your car, and Chili's ISN'T? Or you tell your car to take you to Wal-Mart and it drives you to Target instead? ETC. ETC. ETC.? If you thought multi-colored blinking popup ads were annoying, wait until a destination POPS UP IN FRONT OF YOUR CAR!
If you bought it, you get the strings that come with it.
Re:What an Embarrassingly Vapid Article (Score:4, Insightful)
If you bought it, you get the strings that come with it.
If it's anything like software music and books, you won't be able to "buy" it, you will rent it or pay a usage license.
Car companies are not dumb, they'll soon see that having a regular income from captive users is much better than selling good products that last decades and can be sold used to someone else.
And self driving cars will give them the opportunity to make this switch.
Re: (Score:2)
2. Not every place everyone will want to go is paved or mapped, and mapping is not 100% accurate, so you still need periodic human intervention, or you have an arbitrarily limited car, that many people will be unlikely to accept.
if every car is equipped with GPS and other sensors, and they share the data they collect, then the quality of maps are going to improve by very quickly.
Re: What an Embarrassingly Vapid Article (Score:5, Insightful)
why is it when someone on this site makes a comment about technology not being a slam-dunk, sure thing, utopia producing panacea of goodness -- the first instinct is to call them 'old fashioned'?
My money would be on in the next 40 years cars will mostly be electric/hybrid, but the driver-less stuff will be relegated to delivery vehicles and DUI offenders. Not everyone is a tech evangelist, and while there's a huge selection bias on a tech website -- it's a bit premature to extrapolate that to the general public.
Re: (Score:2)
> the first instinct is to call them 'old fashioned'?
This is just a theory but do you think it might be because in this case the person had called HIMSELF "old" first ?
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
so you are trading the parking problem for increased traffic as the car now needs to continue traveling 10 minutes to its parking spot after it drops you off and then come back again to pick you up.
Re: (Score:2)
Your second point is a solved problem. Has been for well over a century. Public transport. Turns out people don't like long commutes whether they'd driving or not.
Re: (Score:3)
You cannot really compare the experience with public transport. With public transport you need to get to the first stop and from the last stop to your destination, and you likely need to change train/bus/whatever at least once in the middle. Working on a bus is most often impossible, so only the train part of the journey is useful. Subtract the time that you use to unpack/repack, and you are likely down to less than half of your commute being spent usefully.
Properly designed cars would be able to take you f
Re: (Score:2)
I guess you've never experienced good public transport. I have 2 bus stops within a 3-minute walk, the buses at the transfer points are pretty well synchronized (I often literally get off one bus and get into the other with no waiting), subways are a maximum wait of 7 minutes during the off hours, 3 minutes during rush hours, the connecting bus to my final destination is often either about to pull up or already waiting when I get out, and it drops me off at the corner I need to get to.
Sure, it takes a bit
Your problem is solved? (Score:3, Insightful)
The problem with public transport in the burbs is that they only provide timely service during rush hour.
If your shift is different, or if you have to go in early, or leave unexpectedly late, you could be waiting an hour or more for the bus, at a bus stop without a shelter, after an up to 30 minute walk to get to that stop, lugging a briefcase or a laptop bag, in inclement weather.
The reason this happens is because it costs too much to pay the bus drivers to keep the system running all day.
And on top of all
Re: (Score:3)
Your second point is a solved problem. Has been for well over a century. Public transport.
I can drive to work in 20 minutes. Or I can get there in two hours using public transit. That is not a "solved problem".
SDCs change this. They will make not owning a car a viable option. For many people, cars are the biggest expense after housing. So on-demand-SDCs will free up a huge amount of money that can be spent on other things. This will make the biggest difference to low income people.
Within a few years of SDC availability, public buses will be gone. Train ridership will plummet. Even short-
Re: (Score:3)
I think parking will be less of an issue. Think Uber/Lift with autonomous cars. This would be especially true in cities where parking costs can get ridiculous. The fleet would spread themselves out based on historical data and probabilities on where people are likely to request them from. I could see systems that will automatically call a car while you are waiting at the registers of stores so that by the time you are a the front door, a car is reserved and waiting there.
I think the biggest hinderance to fu
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
For example, image that the car as been put in a position where it needs to decide whether it is likely going to kill two people or kill one. Which path should it choose?
I imagine a future in which people stop asking this incredibly stupid question and recognize that the car will (a) be less likely to be in that position to begin with since it won't break the law regarding getting into those situations and (b) will simply follow the law, and won't make any ethical decisions whatsoever. It will drive into whatever is in its lane, but it won't drive in such a way as to erroneously drive into something in its lane to begin with — see point (a).
I also imagine a future in
Re: (Score:2)
First, if you believe /. would be embarrassed by the vapidity of this article, you haven't been paying attention to slashdot for a decade.
Second, while I feel the pressure for autonomous vehicles is mounting, I'm still wondering how we as a US society are going to resolve the unstoppable force vs immovable object issue of lawyers and liability. FWIW I fully agree with you that the *huge* bulk of accidents are human error and likely already the software error-rate (which isn't zero) is better than humans, co
Re: (Score:2)
Here is the problem win, loose, or draw a fully autonomous car with a mechanical failure that causes injury or death could be a problem for manufactures. In order to reduce liability and bad press they are going to require a warm body capable and responsible for overriding the autopilot in the event of a failure. Insurance companies will see this as an opportunity to continue business as usual. Will this change in the future? Maybe, but I don't expect to see fully autonomous vehicles this decade, they will
Re: (Score:2)
I think you hit the nail on the head regarding parking becoming a bigger business. Right now, parking near destinations is crucial for travel time from the parking spot to the destination by foot. With a driverless car, you could just have it drop you off at the destination and then park itself somewhere a few miles away. Or better yet, turn your driverless car into an Uber shuttle while you're at work and let it make you money.
Re: (Score:2)
So I have to wait for someone (something?) to pick me up? I can't just get in my own car and drive when I want to?
and only the truly well off will own their own, primarily to have a known nice clean vehicle.
Meaning more societal layering. "You don't have your own car? How quaint."
For some, that ride in to work would be work time,
Meaning working more for the same pay. Employers would be all for this.
Trucks could be s
Re: (Score:2)
So I have to wait for someone (something?) to pick me up? I can't just get in my own car and drive when I want to?
Correct. But you also don't have to walk to where you walked the car or spend time finding a parking spot. If you live in a rural area you probably still want your own car, because you likely have a garage and your job likely has enough dedicated parking. Not all are so lucky.
The waiting disappears if you schedule your journeys in advance of course, and in either case it will be much better than waiting for public transport. Millions of people use public transport daily.
Re: (Score:2)
I don't know what you're carrying in your trunk ...but mine just has an emergency/repair kit.
Also, your insurance premiums are going to suck you dry. Have fun w/your guzzler.
Re: (Score:3)
And yes, owning a car will become some hobby. It's not quaint not to have a car even now. A friend of mine made a point of not owning
Re: (Score:3)
It's not quaint not to have a car even now.
If you live in the USA, and you don't live in NY, then it's quaint to not have a car. It makes you a second-class citizen in a broad number of ways, and wastes your time brutally. It's easy to lose your shirt buying a car, but there's lots of cheap and reliable basic transportation options which are in fact cheaper to own than using public transportation for all but the most basic travel.
In countries with an emphasis on functional public transportation, reasonable rent control and the like, sure. You can re
Re: (Score:3)
The other poster made a good point...
It is also worth noting that from a financial point of view, a lot of homeowners should rent. Owning a house only makes sense for a part of the population. Those who move often or who lack reserves for repairs should be renting.
Many of them own. Why? Many reasons, which also will keep people owning cars even if it would be cheaper not to.
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
The instant you feel you have to call your debate partner "fuckface", you have lost. Just letting you know. Rei's correlary.
Re: (Score:2)
>Same place some of these statements came from - that futuristic dreamworld.
I must congratulate you on your diplomacy. Not many people would call the person they are arguing with's asshole a "dreamworld"
Re: (Score:2)
https://www.deere.com/en_INT/p... [deere.com]
autonomous lawn mower has been around for a while...
Re: What an Embarrassingly Vapid Article (Score:5, Insightful)
I wonder about uber driverless. Without a person, what prevents people from trashing the car?
The same thing that prevents people trashing buses, or train carriages. Most people simply don't.
More than the train/bus, there's probably a record of exactly who hired the car, and before/during/after CCTV pictures can be recorded.
Re: (Score:2)
I wonder about uber driverless. Without a person, what prevents people from trashing the car?
The increased use of surveillance, both inside the car and on our streets.
The real missed question (Score:5, Informative)
Why do we *need* to travel at all? Autonomous transportation in many cases is simply very inefficient teleconferencing. At least this is true in business.
Re:The real missed question (Score:5, Insightful)
Mostly because of idiot bosses that think they need to be able to walk up to you and poke you with a stick to make sure you are working.
A large number of jobs can be done at home over the network. Maybe someday we will start getting Executives and managers at businesses that have IQ's over 80 that will start allowing it or even require it.
Videoconferencing is trivial, always on high speed internet is getting to be common. There is zero reason for many people to go and sit in a cubicle for 8 hours a day to do work they can easily do at home.
Re:The real missed question (Score:5, Insightful)
Mostly because of idiot bosses that think they need to be able to walk up to you and poke you with a stick to make sure you are working.
A large number of jobs can be done at home over the network. Maybe someday we will start getting Executives and managers at businesses that have IQ's over 80 that will start allowing it or even require it.
While true a large number of jobs can be done over the network with little to no problem, that isn't the concern. Many people do not possess the self discipline necessary to work in an environment with that many distractions. The temptation to not actually work is too great. So the easiest solution for companies is to force people to come into the office.
Re:The real missed question (Score:5, Interesting)
As a software developer I like coming into my office to work.
Having other people just walk over and say have you seen this happen before? Or walk over to the hardware lab and say "Can you check the sensor", is very useful.
Plus I like most of my co-workers and enjoy working with them.
I have had jobs where that is not true but frankly not being in the office would not have make the situation any better.
Most jobs are not compatible with telecommuting (Score:2)
Mostly because of idiot bosses that think they need to be able to walk up to you and poke you with a stick to make sure you are working.
Frequently true. If you have every managed people you'll quickly find that many of them are very interested in a paycheck but not very interested in actually working for said paycheck. A bit of figurative poking is frequently necessary.
A large number of jobs can be done at home over the network.
And far more cannot be done at home over a network. Retail, medicine, manufacturing, freight, mining, farming, restaurants, refining, and many more are not widely compatible with telecommuting. Programmers and tech workers too often have this ridiculous notion that becaus
Re: (Score:2)
Since this thread is about autonomous cars...
Retail
stocking robots
medicine,
surgery robots
manufacturing,
factory robots
freight,
automated delivery robots
mining,
digging robots
farming,
plowing robots
restaurants,
serving robots
refining,
valve turning robots
Did I miss any?
Robots are not going to facilitate telecommuting (Score:2)
You seem obsessed with robots but also seem to have no actual experience with any of those industries. There is no such thing as a robotic hospital. Fully automated factories are science fiction. Just because some jobs in a particular industry can be automated/roboticized does not mean that most of the rest will be.
Do you think that warehouses suddenly will become fully automated just because there are some stocking robots available? Do you have even the vaguest concept of how much an ASRS (automated st
Re: (Score:2)
Retail, medicine, manufacturing, freight, mining, farming, restaurants, refining, and many more are not widely compatible with telecommuting
Wait, what? Retail is going away, being replaced largely with internet sales. You can telecommute to those jobs all day. Medicine is increasingly being performed via telepresence and an expert system can do a better job of diagnosing most conditions than a physician. You could get it in the mail, stick the probes in the proper orifices and your finger into a receptacle for blood draw, then mail it back. Your internet-of-things scale (looking forward to that, eh?) can integrate. Freight is going away; the ma
Re: (Score:2)
Why do we *need* to travel at all?...
Never optimize what should not have been done in the first place.
Re:The real missed question (Score:5, Insightful)
Why do we *need* to travel at all? Autonomous transportation in many cases is simply very inefficient teleconferencing. At least this is true in business.
Because sometimes there's real value in being there. Sure, most of the information you get from a conference or meeting could be found online, or you could watch a seminar remotely, but you don't necessarily get the same experience and make the same contacts that you would from a face-to-face meeting. Often times, you end up learning things at a conference that you didn't even know you were looking for.
Re: (Score:2)
Why do we *need* to travel at all? Autonomous transportation in many cases is simply very inefficient teleconferencing. At least this is true in business.
Because sometimes there's real value in being there. Sure, most of the information you get from a conference or meeting could be found online, or you could watch a seminar remotely, but you don't necessarily get the same experience and make the same contacts that you would from a face-to-face meeting. Often times, you end up learning things at a conference that you didn't even know you were looking for.
Sometimes? Yes. But the question of commuting is about *all* the times.
Re: (Score:2)
Why do we *need* to travel at all?
Because most people would regard never leaving their house as a sign of mental illness.
Re: (Score:2)
I think if I never left my house, I'd GO crazy.
Most people cannot telecommute (Score:5, Interesting)
Why do we *need* to travel at all?
Because lots of things have to be done in person. I run a manufacturing plant. I can assure you that you cannot run a manufacturing plant from your bedroom at home. It's a little hard to run a restaurant while telecommuting. Good luck operating a retail store while telecommuting. Farming? Mining? Medicine? Freight delivery? Most jobs aren't really compatible with telecommuting if you actually give it a moment's thought.
Autonomous transportation in many cases is simply very inefficient teleconferencing. At least this is true in business.
I assure you that that is quite false in the majority of cases. Autonomous transportation is basically like a very small flexible train system that does not require tracks. It's like riding the bus - someone else is doing the driving but you still have to get there for a reason.
Re:The real missed question (Score:4, Funny)
You can stay permanently at home, working on your computer and receiving food deliveries. It's called "house arrest". Why would anybody want that?
You're new here, aren't you?
Why even learn to drive? (Score:2)
ugh....fluff (Score:2, Funny)
I like fluff. I like fluff with chunky peanut butter and some jelly. This article though, this isn't my kind of fluff. Its not even making real predictions, its stating the obvious and moving on. Autonomous cars could be HUGE.
DUI (or OUI in my state)? Thing of the past. Drunken crashes? Gone with them.
need to be 17 to drive? Why? Hell, put a parental lock on the car and designate the destination. Going to work? Bring a book for the ride! Shit, tell it you want a large latte, whole milk, no sugar from dunkie
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
Yes, the autonomous cars will have bugs, and there will be situations where they just crash in a literal sense. But so do humans, and they do it fairly often. An autonomous car will not be drunk driving, and it will be not getting an heart attack at 65 mph, and it will not be distracted by that phone call or the children on the backseat getting into an infight.
Re: (Score:2)
Because a *human* driver will handle that situation perfectly! *eyeroll*
A fully automated highway will likely avoid you like a flock of birds. Police already on their way.
And change it for the better. (Score:2)
It seems far too many people have too low of self control to follow traffic laws and speed limits.
Re: (Score:2)
It seems far too many people have too low of self control to follow traffic laws and speed limits.
Because far to many states, cities, and towns, have to little self control to use the rules for safety, rather than as revenue streams.
My favorite is when the speed limit is reduced right at the bottom of a steep hill, usually with the woods being allowed to grow right up to the edge of the road to minimize the visibility of signs until you are practically on top of them.
If they wanted you to be going 25MPH at the bottom of the hill, than they would post the new speed limit BEFORE the hill instead of leaving it 45 or 55. They don't want you going 25MPH at the bottom though, what they clearly want is to ticket you for still being at 35 10ft past the 25 speed limit sign because you elected not to send every object in your car flying thru the windscreen by slamming the breaks when the sign first became visible.
Then there are all the 60MPH zones on 8 lane wide inner states in perfectly flat Northern Ohio where there are no visibility limitations or even really enough traffic to justify roads that large. The surrounding municipalities have things posted at 70 or even 75 in WV. Cleveland and Cuyahoga County know though nobody is going to do only 60 because there is no safety problem going 70 or 75, but hey its a nice revenue stream.
Supply side tomfoolery (Score:2)
Awesome technology searching for a need. If not having to drive was such a big deal, but driving time was not then you would see much more carpooling.
Re: (Score:2)
Carpooling is a pain because you don't have the car with you during the day. If something unexpected happens and it isn't you driving that day, you are in trouble. With driverless cabs this problem disappears -- you will most likely have to accept a delay when you request an unscheduled cab and possibly a higher price, but you are not stuck.
Re:Supply side tomfoolery (Score:5, Insightful)
Carpooling is a pain because you don't have the car with you during the day. If something unexpected happens and it isn't you driving that day, you are in trouble. With driverless cabs this problem disappears -- you will most likely have to accept a delay when you request an unscheduled cab and possibly a higher price, but you are not stuck.
You forgot the most annoying part about car pooling, you must be on schedule like a clockwork. At work I have to be there certain "core hours" of the day, while mornings and evenings I have a bit of flexibility as long as I get my total hours done. Can't find your keys in the morning? Need to leave an hour early? Work an hour late? Should have stopped to buy milk on the way home? Heck, even those who take the bus can mostly catch one leaving half an hour later. You get the door-to-door service, but it's the least flexible solution. If any of you are the least bit sloppy and unorganized, chances are big they'll either be annoyed with you or you'll be annoyed with them. It's not all of my friends I'd carpool with, to put it that way.
how autonomous driving will change our society (Score:2)
.
new jobs will open up for people who have to dig cars out of snowbanks
a new employment category autonomous assistants will "drive" the self-driving cars in poor weather conditions
Yep Problem Solved, Shut Down All Further Research (Score:2)
Pedestrians will have to learn new skills to avoid careening out of control cars that do not recognize the pedestrians....
.
new jobs will open up for people who have to dig cars out of snowbanks
a new employment category autonomous assistants will "drive" the self-driving cars in poor weather conditions
Yep that's right because once the pattern recognition has mastered the easy stuff -- which it seems to be close to doing -- they'll shut down all development on tackling edge cases and anomalies. That's how it works, right? We're still driving cars with shoe brakes and using regular picture framing glass so our bodies are cut up in an accident, right?
I mean, some of these problems like icy roads and snow might make for unsolvable problems but we already have cars that can detect loss of traction and
Re: (Score:2)
what about basic income and Health Care for all (Score:2)
With auto drive cars I see a who is at fault mess unless the gov makes some hard rules about that.
Now do you want to be the person hurt in accident with some kind of auto drive system with the health care bills racking up as the courts fight over who is at fault and who will pay the bills? Even you own health insurance may say why should we pay when you where hit by a Google car?
Health Care for all will make things easier in the part and lower costs by cutting out lots of middle men.
Also we will need some k
Re: (Score:2)
Many countries have that already. Not many countries have self driving cars.
That being said, one of the biggest cause of unemployment is the inability to efficiently get people from where cheap housing exists and where jobs are plentiful, because generally jobs are in expensive areas.
Better transportation options helps a lot with that.
*IF* autonomous driving ever happens (Score:2)
Still a pretty big "if" there.
The things that scares the bejeesus out of me... (Score:2)
...is that people like this don't realize the implications of technology on his 'fantasy' of how things could be.
I don't want my autonomous car talking to ANYTHING that I don't control/manage/filter. I don't care what some unknown car reported, I don't trust that car. I'm no member of the tinfoil hat brigade, but I do work in software security and I assure you - IT IS INSANE to presume that ANY automaker is going to produce software that isn't trivially easy to pwn in the next decade. They all roll their
Blah blah blah ... futurist babble ... (Score:2)
This article tells us nothing, and as usual, it's someone gushing about how technology which isn't widely available yet is going to be super awesome and change our lives. Hell, it boils down to two quotes
It's the usual babble from futurists and other people who claim to be Really Sure that this is what we'll all be doing in a few years.
It reads like it was written by an excited cheerleader, and is about as substantial.
I remain highly skeptical that anything but a small fraction of people will ever own an a
Um... How will it change society? (Score:5, Insightful)
Not a single word in the article about HOW an autonomous car will change our society in a tangible way. You can safely skip TFA, because it actually says nothing about what the title implies. Instead, the author seems to needlessly hand-wring about the "ethics" of these cars.
These cars won't really deal with ethics, per se. Rather, they'll have goals and rules, and these will essentially encapsulate the ethics in an indirect manner. I'm betting these cars will have reasonably simple priorities for safety, like (I just came up with this on the spot, so don't get hung up on the details):
1) Never knowingly drive the car off the road for any reason.
2) Keep the car in the correct lane unless a collision is unavoidable, otherwise allow emergency lane changes.
3) If necessary, allow movement across the entire roadway, but only if it is otherwise unoccupied and can't cause a collision.
4) If all else fails, slow down or stop and tell the human to make sense of the situation
The trolly-switch dilemma [wikipedia.org] that people keep bringing up is so ridiculously contrived that I just don't see it having a bearing on the reality of day to day driving and safety of the vehicle for a couple of reasons.
First, autonomous cars are much less likely to be surprised by someone cutting in front of them or other obstacles. They don't have blind spots, and their reaction times are many thousands of times faster than a human. As such, the choice of "hit A or B" is much less likely to come up in the first place, because the car would have been following a safe distance behind and would have hit the brakes at the first sign of trouble. So in the vast majority of cases, the car starts braking before the human occupant even realizes there's a problem. No accident at all, or a survivable collision at 10 or 20 mph instead of 70.
Second, in the rare situation an accident is inevitable, the priorities will be straightforward: protect the occupants of the car first within the constraints of keeping the car on the road, and if possible, in it's own lane. That simply means avoiding collisions if possible. If that's not possible, the car will simply attempt to brake as much as possible before the collision to protect the occupants. There will likely be no "swerve to miss the human and hit the bus instead". The car will brake as hard as physically possible, but if it can't safely swerve, it really has no choice but to continue forward in the safest path for its occupants.
I think people are making more of this than is actually necessary by constructing ridiculously overly-complicated and completely hypothetical scenarios and saying "how would an autonomous car deal with this?" Humans are almost never put into a situation where they have to make such a complicated choice in a split second. I'm not sure why we expect our machines to properly make choices that *we* could never make it in real time either. They're going to be better than humans in almost all situations that really matter, such as concentration, navigation, and reaction time in emergencies.
Human fallback (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Given it took about two decades for anti-lock braking systems to become widely available on cars (and that is a relatively simple technology compared to autonomous driving systems), most of us will be dead and buried before there is a significant percentage of self-driving cars on the road. First, we'll see "super-cruise control", where the driver can engage a partial system on a highway but the system will revert back to the driver if certain tolerances can't be met (e.g., weather, traffic levels). You'l
Re: (Score:3)
What I meant by "super-cruise control" would be that it would handle acceleration AND steering, as long as the car was travelling at a fairly consistent speed with little traffic around it.
There are cars with that now, too. The only thing preventing them from driving the car with your hands off of the wheel is regulation.
Why even have a car? (Score:3, Interesting)
There will certainly be some people that will need to have a dedicated vehicle based on the cargo they are carrying, but for the most of us, why have a car at all? Thing about the space savings if you didn't need to park all of those cars downtown and during the day they could drive themselves somewhere else and drive someone with a different schedule, sort of like a driverless Uber, where everyone just shares the cost of the fleet of cars based on usage.
What's up with the unseparated gas-break pedal? (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
I'll make one prediction right now: No car of the future, clever or dumb, will be accelerated and decelerated with a single pedal oval, the right half of which does the former and the left half does the latter.
I think we'll get a single pedal which controls speed, and the vehicle will simply act to prevent us from crashing into things. We'll have a brake pedal there to make us feel better, but we won't need to use it. EVs are already heading down this path.
Mass unemployment (Score:5, Insightful)
The #1 job for men in the United States is.. driving a truck.
It pays well.
Those two things make it ripe for disruption as there is a clear economic incentive; autonomous trucks don't need to stop. It's not clear even if you'd ever have to turn them off, save for regular maintenance. That is a huge economic motivator.
Trucks also follow well defined routes that are easier for the autonomous systems to deal with right now.
The Teamsters will of course freak out; but change, it is a comin'.
Re: (Score:3)
Future #1 job for men in the US?
Cargo guard to ride along in the autonomous truck and protect it's cargo.
Re: (Score:3)
The ethical issue is that it's still a car (Score:3)
This does not solve the problem of pollution when millions of individual cars are manufactured and operated. Nor the impact on environment when habitable land is consumed by sprawling suburbs rather than compact cities. With sensible urban planning, buses and subways can solve the same problem much better.
Self-driving cars can make incremental improvements to safety and pollution levels, but are just delaying the changes achievable with older technology in wide use in many places in the world.
At least it will be safer for motorcycle riders (Score:2)
And those of us who enjoy driving? (Score:3)
Will we be legislated off the roads as hazards to society? Anyway didn't Google just say that they are nowhere near being able to handle winter conditions. Yet we keep hearing that by 2020 these will be on the roads. tick tick....
lots of changes from autonomous vehicles (Score:4, Interesting)
I can see things that aren't really cars as well. an autonomous motorcycle with no room for a rider, but with a very large tool chest, so a plumber (for instance) doesn't need his own truck. The drone meets him at his work destination, unlocks and lets him access the tools of his trade.
A similar motorcycle acts as a delivery van. covered with drawers, each of which can lock or unlock independently. It goes to a destination, sends a message to the people inside the building and waits ten minutes. after the person inside authenticates with their cell phone (maybe by taking a picture of the drone) the drone unlocks the one drawer, and waits for the person to remove or add a package.
Make emergency vehicle drones and put them in strategic locations all over the city. call 911 and one of these drones pops out of the police box and could be there long before a human response, Then it could provide SOME assistance while waiting for the rest of the emergency team.
The party drone opens into a full tailgate bar. Flash mob raves.
Yes it probably will happen - someday (Score:2)
People actually like to drive.
People like to ride horses too but you don't see many of those around these days do you? For most people cars are an expensive tool and little more.
There is also a tremendous social good to the population interacting with each other by driving.
Not really following the logic of this. Yeah people like cars but there are plenty of ways to be social that do not involve cars.
But they never will. It is once again naive science fiction-ism perpetrated by those who desire to make money off a forced change for no good reason.
No good reason? How about tens of thousands of auto fatalities per year? How about drunk driving or texting while driving or sleepy driving no longer being an issue? How about the lost opportunity cost of the billions of man-hours
Re: (Score:2)
People like driving, some of the time would be the more accurate statement. Lots of folks enjoy a Sunday drive, or even a road trip, relatively few enjoy their morning commute. We like driving our cars when its on our own terms we don't have to be someplace and we have some ability to avoid aggravating situations like high traffic areas and needing to be someplace by 7:30 etc.
This is much the same way we like ridding horses when its not cold, or raining, or for such great distances we get saddle sore, et