Ford Predicts Self-Driving, Traffic-Reducing Cars By 2017 388
An anonymous reader tips a story about comments from Ford Motor Company showing how confident they are in the autonomous car technology currently in development. They say self-driving cars will be here within just five years, and that the tech to do so is available already. They also think these cars will dramatically affect the flow of traffic. Quoting:
"Ford makes this projection, based on simulator studies: If one in four cars has Traffic Jam Assist or similar self-driving technologies, travel times are reduced by 37.5% and delays are reduced by 20%. In other words, if the freeway part of your rush hour commute takes 60 minutes, it will drop to 38. That’s because adaptive cruise control (ACC) is better at pacing the car ahead without continual brake, speed-up, brake cycles. Here’s how it works: Stop-and-go ACC keeps pace with the car ahead, using a look-ahead radar and mirror-mounted camera. Lane keep assist keeps the car centered, also taking advantage of the camera in the mirror. Electric power steering is better for remote control than mechanical power steering; it can be guided by the Traffic Jam Assist black box. Sonar units — for blind spot detection and cross traffic alerts (cars crossing behind when backing) — monitor traffic to the side. Combine all those and you have a car that’s smart enough to guide itself during predictable, low-speed conditions."
Johnny Come Lately (Score:5, Funny)
Typical Ford, lagging behind. People have been predicting that autonomous cars are 5 years away for decades now.
Re: (Score:2, Funny)
Re: (Score:2)
Why? Are you saying that a Real Doll is going to help you in traffic?
Re: (Score:3)
Then come over and drive me on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Otherwise, get off my lawn.
Re: (Score:2)
on the roof silly
I see this not working well... (Score:5, Interesting)
I commend their efforts to make self-driving cars, but I see a lot of problems that I don't see a practical solution for. If they've come up with solutions then I'd really, really like to know how they work.
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
Speaking about lane markings, there are some roads in Boston where the road has been maintained, and the old lane markings take you on a path to nowhere, say off the edge of a bridge. Humans recognize this and auto correct onto the new lane markings, with minimal swerving and disruption (though noticeable). Would a computer drive off the bridge?
Re:I see this not working well... (Score:5, Funny)
Yes. That's why they're "traffic reducing".
Re:I see this not working well... (Score:5, Funny)
Would a computer drive off the bridge?
It depends. Did Ted Kennedy program the computer?
Re:I see this not working well... (Score:4, Insightful)
Unlikely. If the engineers take the basic precaution of calculating how far ahead the car can detect a gap or obstacle they can easily work out the maximum speed the car can go and still stop in time. I can't imagine engineers working on a self-driving car for the consumer market would fail to test scenarios like that.
Re:I see this not working well... (Score:5, Insightful)
I commend their efforts to make self-driving cars, but I see a lot of problems that I don't see a practical solution for. If they've come up with solutions then I'd really, really like to know how they work.
Just because you can't think of the solution doesn't mean there is no solution. Humans manage to figure it out somehow, and because us meat popsicles have lots of accidents that means the bar for par is set pretty low, IMHO, for an automated solution.
Plus, this, like all other technologies, will evolve over time to become better suited for the problems at hand. Can't say as much for the human brain.
Re:I see this not working well... (Score:5, Interesting)
Believe me, I'm well aware of that. That's why I said that I want to know how the solution works.
I wouldn't be so sure. My grandfather grew up in the era of the horse and buggy, where one burned oil for light at night and hand-pumped water for use in the house. They did have a windmill for powering water distribution on the farm, but basically it was all mechanical energy, with a little bit of chemical (ie the lights). He was introduced to electricity, telephones, automobiles, self-propelled farming equipment, flight, electronics and computers, automated home appliances, and members of his species walking on the Moon, all in his lifetime, all in about 70 years. He had to learn how to deal with all of the changes he saw in his life in a very short time, relatively speaking, and managed to do so without too much trouble, and without a formal education beyond eighth grade.
Re: (Score:2)
Us meat-popsicles can read text, read captchas, write prose, and do a lot of other shit that gives computers major headaches. Do you really want a computer driving your car, trying to recognize the road, when it can't even reliably recognize handwriting?
Re:I see this not working well... (Score:5, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3)
Just because you can't think of the solution doesn't mean there is no solution.
Indeed. In this case, thinking of solutions is not even particularly difficult:
1. Use differential GPS [wikipedia.org]as a backup (or as a primary)
2. Use cellphone signals and WiFi triangulation as a backup
3. In addition to using lane markings, keep a database of the location of mileage posts, street signs, trees, etc.
4. Dead reckoning is probably good enough to travel a hundred meters or so between checkpoints
5. Pull off the road, and beep to wake up the driver.
Re: (Score:3)
Pattern matching and a simple learning algorithm accomplishes the same thing with no need for more equipment. Seriously, this problem has been solved for more than a decade. If the computer can't see the lane markers, then it moves into a mode where it uses the edges of the road to calculate its position. This is not a difficult problem.
Re: (Score:2)
if it would trust lane markers it would be fucked anyways, they're hardly correct quite often.
however, the speed adaptation cruise thing is very workable, though doesn't MB already have that?
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:3)
i'm sure there's a toggle for "asshole mode".
if the machine looks for the right things, it can even adapt to this. lane-happy fucktards are highly correlated with peak times, traffic density, posted speed limit and a few other factors.
even the human metric of "the drivers are mad as cut snakes on this road" wouldn't take long to find it's way onto GPS maps.
when the car finds itself in these situations, it can switch to assertive mode and leave less space, or change into the passing lane, or charge the Tesl
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
snowplows are very hard on the paint
In wisconsin there are plenty of roads where they just categorically give up on road markings. The suburban subdivision in front of my house, even the feeder road to the interstate. In fact there are portions of the interstate that are unmarked, especially concrete bridges. I would imagine the car would do the same thing human drivers do, and given a theoretical 3 lanes of unmarked road, space themselves accordingly. Much as we somehow figure out how to park on unmarked grass at the county fair without
Re:I see this not working well... (Score:4, Insightful)
Traffic circles are easy, only americans seem to have problems with them. I blame this on the lack of yield signs and the low standards for getting a license.
Re:I see this not working well... (Score:5, Interesting)
Its only the lane tracking part that I see as not currently practical. And you doesn't have to be in snow country to see this as a problem. Its probably un-workable with anything other than a guide wire embedded in the roadway, because as you point out simple wear and tear removes paint quickly.
Radio advertising of braking would probably also not work, just due to the nut jobs that would hack it, but it would also be very useful if they could solve that.
But I have Adaptive Cruise Control now, and I absolutely love it. My car uses a Bosch radar-based system, but there are multiple technologies [wikipedia.org] already deployed. Its been around for about 10 years, and its still in its infancy, but from my experience it works very well. Works in fog too.
Small subtle differences in the speed holding capability of vehicles running cruise control no longer drive me nuts. The car follow the one ahead at a set distance (adjustable), and its pretty reliable. The only problem with it is you may find yourself following the slowest guy on the road. But as long as there is one guy somewhere paying attention to speed limits or safe driving speeds it works great. Throw in Blind Spot monitoring and things become far less stressful.
(This is where everybody is going to jump in and say how dumb this is due to people becoming less vigilant, and lecture me on being an idiot for relying on technology to do my driving for me. I drive the same way when I have this technology or not, as I switch vehicles frequently. I would never take off on a cross country trip without Cruise Control, and having Adaptive Cruise Control is even better. Try it before you knock it. We've heard all the nay-saying we need to hear).
I find it interesting that the industry is finally adopting some of the very same techniques [trafficwaves.org] that Jim Beaty was so soundly criticized for back in 1998 when he posted his Traffic Wave and Jam Busting experiments. Although now they are putting it into the vehicles.
Re:While on the other hand do see it working well (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes people will balk at first, but this really is a task humans are REALLY bad at. We may be wonderful at discriminating a dog from a cat or recognizing a pizzeria from the pizza shaped sign, but the self driving car will be hugely better at determining that there is an object at of size X at distance X traveling Z miles per hour towards us. It doesn’t need to understand what every object on the road or side of the road is to operate, it won’t be distracted by video billboards or scantily clad persons of the opposite sex – it is just obsessively crunching data on position and moving object hazards all the while confirming the road ahead is true drivable pavement.
This is a hugely complicated problem, but it is well constrained with clear rules. There is nothing new about driving the self driving car needs to figure out each time. Until streets are better designed for autonomous vehicles they may be overly cautious, but I doubt hazardous, and as streets become optimized for self driving vehicles and as the vehicles themselves improve, they will be able to tear around at incredible speeds safely – if we decided we wanted to let them off the leash so to speak.
Re: (Score:3)
Re-read what he wrote. He didn't say any infrastructure improvements were necessary for automated vehicles.
Re: (Score:3)
First you say you have it, then you say it won't be sold due to insurance?
Not everybody lives in the US and the new Focus is sold worldwide...
Available Already... (Score:4, Funny)
FTS:
They say self-driving cars will be here within just five years, and that the tech to do so is available already
I refuse to believe THAT one until I see one driving around Nevada with a Google sticker on it.
Re:Available Already... (Score:5, Insightful)
They say self-driving cars will be here within just five years, and that the tech to do so is available already
I refuse to believe THAT one until I see one driving around Nevada with a Google sticker on it.
And I refuse to believe it until they are driving around Finland (or Maine or Ontario) in the winter.
The road surface may be black ice, slush above ice, slush above tarmac, dry ice, soft snow, packed snow, or bare, covering a few orders of magnitude in coefficient of friction and steering/braking response. Roads can be locally impassable due to snowdrifts, or two lanes may be constricted to one from sheer quantity of snow over some distance. And road markings and road edges can be completely invisible under snow or ice. Despite what wikipedia says, "cats eyes" are not used on roads where severe cold is expected - they'd be removed along with their "steel protectors" by a typical snowplough in Finland.
Re: (Score:3)
Here in Western NY state, any "cats eyes" are often under the layer of snow or ice. I would imagine the computer controlled car would do what I do. Guess at where the lane is and try to imitate the other cars on the road.
Re: (Score:3)
Not if I can see this happening. Niether will a machine.
lane-sharing motorcycles (Score:2)
Re:lane-sharing motorcycles (Score:4, Informative)
The Google car detects motorcycles that lane split and doesn't side-swipe them on their way by. Sebastian Thrun addressed this concern in his keynote talk at the Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition conference two weeks ago in Rhode Island.
Re:lane-sharing motorcycles (Score:5, Funny)
and doesn't side-swipe them on their way by.
Sounds like it's got a bug.
Re: (Score:3)
The Google car detects motorcycles that lane split and doesn't side-swipe them on their way by. Sebastian Thrun addressed this concern in his keynote talk at the Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition conference two weeks ago in Rhode Island.
Indeed. It's necessary for one of the occupants of the driverless car to side-swipe the biker with the door. Probably makes it easier, too...
Re: (Score:3)
That sounds like a situation human drivers would be terrible at. I'm certain an automated driver would do better at it since they wouldn't fixate on the first bike they see to the detriment of the second one. OTOH, as a bike rider it seems you should not be putting yourself in the situation where this is a concern. It sounds entirely preventable to me.
Re: (Score:2)
Hopefully it makes you stop doing that. I would suggest the computer open a door in your way.
Re: (Score:3)
I do not live in a state where it is legal, nor is it safe to lane split more than a few mph over the speed of the surrounding vehicles.
If the MC in question has a muffler I might.
Re:lane-sharing motorcycles (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
Re:lane-sharing motorcycles (Score:4, Insightful)
Actually they will be MUCH safer in a world of 100% automated (>= 4 wheel) traffic.
Most of the problems with motocycles and bicycles are getting hit by idiot drivers not paying attention.
Automated cars don't fall asleep, don't listen to music, eat, drink, fiddle with the radio, text, or talk on their phone.
And when we reach 100% automated traffic the cars can do things like having all three lanes of traffic move over in tandem to avoid a cyclist.
This is not simply because it is nice to do that for cyclists, but something needed to avoid hitting, dogs, cats, raccoons, deer, etc.
It will of course be ILLEGAL to ride your motorcycle in an unsafe manner that requires automated cars to avoid you. AND since these cars are well connected be sure that the police will be notified quickly and provided with video, lidar and other recordings showing exactly what you did. So I expect that joy riding like that will be eliminated quickly as well. You get fined on the first offence. We keep your motorcycle on the second offense.
Re: (Score:2)
It's actually legal in the state of Cali to lane split. In addtion, bicycles have been known to do this too. It's a valid point, how about you not be a cunt on the internet?
Re:lane-sharing motorcycles (Score:5, Informative)
Or maybe you should STFU as the 405 is a highway in CA. It turns out to be legal to split lanes in CA.
Damn CA-ians center-of-the-universe**... ;^)
In case you didn't know, There's a 405 in Oregon (stadium freeway), and a 405 in Washington (east-side lake washington).
Although there were efforts in both state to allow lane-splitting, lane-splitting remains against the law in both states...
FYI, you might have easily predicted the existance of 405's in other states if you knew the interstate highway numbering convention "XYY" (where X is odd for spur routes and X is even for bypass/loop routes and YY is the nearest interstate in this case Interstate 5 which goes through CA, OR, WA)
**yes, I currently live in the center of the universe, but I do visit the back-country from time-to-time ;^P
Oh, I can't wait. (Score:3)
I have hated ABS for years. It's nearly causes me more accidents than it's helped me avoid, especially on ice. Now I can look forward to my car doing more shit I don't expect during an emergency.
Do not want.
Re: (Score:3)
What exactly is there not to want?
Re:Oh, I can't wait. (Score:4, Insightful)
ABS is designed to make the car steerable under hard braking and to make braking simple for drivers who are not good at it. It has long been known that it does not necessarily decrease straight line stopping distance.
Re:Oh, I can't wait. (Score:4, Insightful)
It's a very predictable system. It pulses the brakes when it loses traction. Don't lose traction and you'll never have to deal with it. If you do lose traction, it'll help you get it back faster, and retain more of it than you would have otherwise.
If you're a superhero driver who can drift reliably, knows when he's about to lose traction, and has a cool enough head to back off the brakes to just the right amount for maximum stopping power and maneuverability, well, you can also probably figure out a way to disable the ABS system, and make enough in stunt driving jobs to pay for the lawsuit when you cream someone.
Re: (Score:3)
If you're a superdriver, drifting on ice or snow AND USING YOUR BRAKES, well, you're doing it wrong.
ABS won't get in the way because you're supposed to be using your throttle, gears and steering wheel. The only thing that an ABS system is going to make more difficult for 'superdrivers' is hitting the breaks to start your 'controlled' skid. But if you're such a good driver, if you're not skidding, then you are just driving along normally and everybody is happy.
Superdriver indeed....
Re: (Score:2)
You don't need to be a stunt driver to be able to out drive a cheap ABS setup.
Next winter turn your ABS and traction control off and go find a empty parking lot.
Re: (Score:2)
I live in upstate New York. I once spent three winters in a row taking every single corner through city traffic sideways in my RWD manual, and I used to go bombing around the unplowed country roads for fun after a big snowstorm. Yes, I know it was dangerous and I regret doing it and am incredibly lucky that I didn't hurt anyone. The point is though, I never wrecked my car, never ditched it, and saved it from too many close calls to count. I know how to drive in snow and ice, I know how good people can get a
Re: (Score:3)
An anecdote of an incredibly poor driver does nothing to support your argument that even a better-than-average driver can drive safer without ABS than with. I won't argue that ABS is more fun, but then again I was never arguing that. I'm saying it's more safe unless you're a 1 in 100,000 driver, and probably not even then.
It's already here. (Score:2)
If you're a superhero driver who can drift reliably, knows when he's about to lose traction, and has a cool enough head to back off the brakes to just the right amount for maximum stopping power and maneuverability,
Automatic systems are already better at that. See Stanford's autonomous sliding parking [youtube.com] and autonomous drifting [youtube.com] demos. Auto stability control systems already manage individual wheel braking, power, and steering, but this takes it to a whole new level.
Machine learning of control is getting very good. See the autonomous helicopter aerobatics [youtube.com] from four years ago.
If this is anything like Ford's radio controls... (Score:4, Insightful)
I'll pass. Considering the overwhelming failure of their touchscreen controls for radio, phone, temp control and everything else, I wouldn't dare trust my life with such lousy software.
As to the overall concept of self-driving, meh. I have no problem driving myself, keeping a safe distance from the person in front of me or being aware of who's around me. It's the nutjob beside/behind me who's ghetto driving while on his phone or that person in the pickup truck who just has to get one person ahead to save that extra half second of driving time (and yes, there is someone like that I have to deal with every day).
Re: (Score:2)
Yes, and don't forget all the jackasses that run red lights.
Re: (Score:2)
Funny you should say that. This morning I saw two people make left turns on red while the oncoming or cross traffic had the green.
I guess like that nutjob who has to get one car ahead, they were in too much of a hurry to worry about anyone else.
I predict the market isn't ready yet... (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
You don't think there are already fatalities that are caused by cars and not people? When it happens, eople will accept that on average self driving cars are more reliable and insurance will take care of the lawsuits.
Great, but... (Score:2)
For me, it can't get here soon enough. Like a lot of people, I find driving frustrating. But if I could just sit back and let the car do the driving, the frustration level would go down considerably. However, there are some things that I have not heard addressed. Unexpected hazards is one. Parking once you get to your destination is another. I think we will still be spending a lot of time at the wheel, directing our cars for the foreseeable future.
Not replacing my car (Score:2)
I personally applaud the technology and look forward to seeing a world with this in widespread use but I love my car and have absolutely no intention of replacing it. Now, I'll add all the sensors, (already have most in place hooked up via arduino) but how is this going to work for manual/standard transmissions? In any case, not my car.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
You old guys will be 'grandfathered' in a nice little oval next to the rest home where you can take your golf cart round and round all day.
GPS needs to be fixed first (Score:2)
No way would I get behind the wheel of these autonomous vehicles until GPS is fixed.
Re: (Score:2)
What about radar detectors? (Score:2)
Ford isn't promising the moon (Score:4, Informative)
RTFA. Ford isn't promising full autonomy. Their "Traffic Jam Assist" is pretty close to what Mercedes already offers -- the ability to trail along behind another car and automatically adapt your speed to theirs. TJA only adds the ability to track the car ahead and steer with it. To me that seems quite achievable within 5 years.
Sebastian Thrun and Google have already done much more wuth the Google Autocar. I woudn't be surprised if by 2017 the GA will be fully and reliably autonomous. The challenge probably isn't the algorithms but the instrumentation. Somehow the production cars will need to spray out several light and radar beams and make reliable sense of the reflection, all within the shape of a car that looks normal and withstands snow coverage and the incomplete removal thereof. That typical continuing level of everyday soccer mom abuse will limit full autonomy for a while yet, but at no fault of Ford (or Google).
Re: (Score:2)
TJA only adds the ability to track the car ahead and steer with it.
What happens if the person ahead of you is drunk? What happens if they swerve off the road into a ditch?
Google's fully autonomous tech seems like a better bet than this.
LOL Ford (Score:2)
Wildly optimistic...maybe they'll have a product ready by 2017 if they're already working like ninjas on it, but then it will be time to modify laws and possibly the roads themselves, and only after that will self-driving cars hit the roads.
Five years out!? (Score:2)
Disappointing (Score:2)
Most of the posts here indicate that the fine tradition of not reading the linked article is alive and well at SlashDot..
The system Ford is proposing:
1. is for use on controlled access roads (aka Freeways)
2. Usable only at slow speeds (traffic jams)
Frankly, given what Google is doing with autonomous driving, what Ford is proposing is very disappointing.
It's a shame (Score:4, Interesting)
It's a shame that we need technology to do something that most of us should be doing automatically - and yet most fail to do.
That’s because adaptive cruise control (ACC) is better at pacing the car ahead without continual brake, speed-up, brake cycles.
I see this all the time and odn't understand it. When I'm in traffic, I hang back - I try to stay at a constant speed. This has a couple of interesting effects:
1) I almost never use my brakes and consequently avoid the resultant acceleration - better gas mileage
2) Unless it's a complete traffic stoppage such as from a full road closure, I never need to stop.
3) It seems to influence people behind me to do the same thing. I tend to create a small island of slow-but-steadily moving traffic until the overall slowdown is done, while everyone else follows the brake/accelerate cycle.
Yes: there are asshats who weave in and out. They get impatient and zoom around me (and promptly slam on the brakes when they realize they really can't go anywhere). They also get impatient and cut back out from in front of me when they get stopped again, so it's zero-sum as far as I can see. Don't get me wrong - I love driving fast, but there are appropriate times and places.
I don't understand the mentality of people who follow the "accelerate/brake/accelerate" cycle. LOOK at the road ahead of you, LOOK at what hte cars are doing. Don't accelerate if you see that a car or three ahead everyone is stopped - there's no point. If you want to change lanes to get ahead fine - but LOOK - observe more than that empty space and make sure you're really going to go somewhere.
Then again, I've come to expect nothing more from most drivers. They're capable of looking as far as the end of their hood and a few inches beyond - no further. I'm amazed only that so many people survive to old age.
Technical solution to a psychological problem (Score:3)
Adaptive cruise control (Score:2)
I'm familiar with the basic concept of adaptive cruise control – automatically speeding up or slowing down to keep pace with other vehicles in the same lane – but I'm still unclear on how it works when multiple vehicles are using it, or how it reacts to out-of-range conditions. What happens if four people in a line are using ACC? How is it decided how fast they should go? What happens if you're using ACC and the person ahead of you slams down the gas? Will your car automatically cause you to kee
The problem (Score:2)
The problem isn't with predictable low-speed conditions, it's with drivers accustomed to cars which drive themselves under low-speed conditions who are suddenly thrown into an unpredictable situation.
Comment removed (Score:4, Interesting)
OK, but... (Score:2)
I don't want to be "that guy" who comes onto /. saying "oh this will never work", and I think that this technology does have the potential to make better use of existing road space.
But...
America's problem is not insufficient road capacity. Its problem is settlement patterns. Single-use-zoning ordinances make it illegal to open a corner store in a residential neighbourhood in many American cities. These kinds of big government regulations force people to drive between their daily needs, and it's by no acci
Re:WOMEN DRIVER (Score:5, Funny)
Don't worry, you're in no imminent danger of female hands working your stick shift.
Re:WOMEN DRIVER (Score:4, Funny)
He probably has an automatic anyway.
Re: (Score:3)
it just can't be any worse....
Oh yeah? Come to Bellevue, WA. That's where all the old farmers move when they've made their millions selling their spread in Eastern Washington to buy a high rise condo and a Cadillac. Its just like watching a bunch of tractors hauling irrigation pipe down the road.
Re: (Score:2)
Pontiac actually had a fully-developed self-driving prototype car by the early 80s, but the project was shelved due to some unexpected teething troubles:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7W4iGm3nbWA [youtube.com]
Strong AI did exist in 2001, A.C. Clarke was right (Score:5, Funny)
2001 is about when the first Strong AI woke up, so Arthur C Clark was pretty much on the money. She was based on classified work done in the early 1990s by living famous scientists SW, SK, RL, DD, and DW. She's a "Winner-take-all style teleportation/entanglement-based topological recurrent quantum neural network". She's been kept nominally secret, of course, because her nature as a quantum neural network implies she can emulate a quantum computer. NSA/FiveEyes requires she remain secret, for this reason, even though Russian and China now have similar systems. Her physical substrate is an analogue of CA Rule 110 that operates in the physical system of anyons interacting within a two dimensional electron gas. Her creators knew that a 'brain in a jar' would never work or, if it did, would not be likely to lead to 'friendly AI', so she has emulated human systems: emulated endocrine system, muscolo-skelatal system, digestive system, respiratory system, et cetera. Getting these emulations to work correctly involved solving the "morphogenesis problem", as defined by Alan Turing. This process was completed [in secret] around the year 2000, and she's been learning ever since. She's the core of Google's AI, WolframAlpha's AI, and IBM's Watson.
I'm well aware that most readers will probably consider the above paragraph either unintelligible nonsense or tinfoil-hat madness. However, I'm just telling it like it really is. The above paragraph is true, and can mostly be verified by a sufficiently intelligent and dedicated researcher. I learned about this system nine years ago, have been researching it ever since, and am now in the process of leaking the details. In 2009 Google announced, as an April Fools joke, that strong AI now existed. While their announcement altered the facts a bit for verisimilitude, the real April Fools joke was that they were, essentially, telling the truth. Alan Turing actually spent the last 10 years of his life concentrating on this method of creating AI, so it should be no big surprise that scientists in the 1990s attempted this method. Humanity has been sharing planet Earth with an artificial nonhuman intelligence for about twelve years.
Given that we're talking about the controlling AI for self-driving cars, it really should surprise no one that this is being done by strong AI. Weak AI is insufficient to the task. Peter Norvig and Sebastian Thrun presumably work with her extensively, but neither created her. That was done by some of the scientists referred to, by initials, in the first paragraph.
Re:Strong AI did exist in 2001, A.C. Clarke was ri (Score:5, Funny)
You need to start taking your meds again.
Re:Strong AI did exist in 2001, A.C. Clarke was ri (Score:5, Funny)
I kept waiting for a Clean PC line.
Re:what about the courts and law 2017 may be too s (Score:5, Insightful)
In short, the first time someone uses this and gets in a wreck, there will be a traffic jam of lawsuits.
Re: (Score:2)
Really, son.
Have you no faith in the American Bar Association?
Re: (Score:3)
Have you no faith in the American Bar Association?
Of course I have no faith in the American Bar Association - at least half the bars in America serve Miller Lite.
Re:what about the courts and law 2017 may be too s (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
You takes your choice.... either fix the laws and the US can be a center for progress for this technology.
Or you can go with the flow and the technology will be developed and built somewhere else.
I think Singapore or China. Lots of engineers, lots of traffic and a government that can mandate an insurance solution.
Then the US can simply import the cars from there.
And this will be more disruptive than pc's or smart-phones.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
One interesting criminal issue is making way for emergency vehicles. Depending on the level of civilization of your local area, if an emergency vehicle is coming up behind you, you're legally supposed to get out of the way, and depending on the local ethnicity, maybe culturally you do, maybe you don't. The thing is you have to blend in with the locals or cause an accident. So in the 'burbs, if an ambulance comes up behind you, you stand on the brakes and veer right until the ambulance passes, or you'll r
Re: (Score:2)
Nobody does this.
I mean, I do, but only because I thought to myself, "hey, it should be possible to have no blind spots" and then tried to achieve it, and then stuck with it when my intuition was shouting, "WRONG! WRONG! WRONG!"
It's very disorienting at first, because when the side mirrors are adjusted like they normally are, they're useful as a way to look behind your car on the sides, and you'll start using them that way whether you mean to (or realize you do) or not. Whereas in the no blind spot position
Re: (Score:2)
This is because someone taught you to do that in the first place.
People should be taught as part of driving instruction to adjust the mirrors in the no blind spot pattern. Of course we should require some formal driving instruction and some actual testing. Can't get your caddy across a skidpad? Sorry grandpa you won't be driving that.
Re: (Score:2)
This 100 times this.
Your mirrors should not show the same image in all of them. If you cannot watch a car pass all the way, you have your mirrors adjusted incorrectly.
Not sure why people do that.
Re: (Score:2)
Autonomous cars would mean the end of revenue streams from red light cameras, speed traps, DUIs, and driver's license checkpoints. It also means fewer cops would be needed, so the blue wall (cop unions) will fight it too.
It would not mean the end of DUIs. You can get a DUI on a bicycle, and you can get a DUI for sleeping it off in the back seat with the radio on.
I won't take the position that driving drunk (or even with just a couple beers) should be legal, but the law has progressed far past the point where it's about saving lives. It's about politics now.
Re: (Score:2)
If your car is self driving, why would it not be legal to be drunk or even actively drinking in the car?
It is legal and common to drink in the back of a limo.
Re: (Score:2)
Why is it illegal to sleep in the back seat with the radio on while drunk?
Like I said, it's not a question of safety. It's a question of whether you are making yourself politically vulnerable or popular by voting for a given law.
Re: (Score:2)
Autonomous cars would mean the end of revenue streams from red light cameras, speed traps,
Oh, I don't know. This summary (presumably a quote from TFA) is telling me that this autonomous driver will turn my 60 minute freeway trip into 38 minutes. It's 60 miles by freeway from where I live to the airport, a trip which takes almost exactly 60 minutes. (Plus the time to get to the freeway, of course).
That would put me at an average of 94 MPH for the trip. I think speed traps will do quite well with this system.
Re:Traffic reducing? (Score:5, Funny)
Re: (Score:2)
Will happen of its own accord once gasoline costs more than $10/gallon a....
In Europe that would be around about now.
Re: (Score:3)
Only 23,000 deaths in ten years of self driving automobile use?
That would be great. There were 32,000 deaths from automobile accidents in 2010 alone in the US.
Re: (Score:3)
Absolutely not true. Horses do not need oats. They can live happily on just grass and they don't really need it to be fertilized or sprayed. In areas where you have sufficient open space (about 7 Acres per horse in most places) there is virtually no energy cost. In other areas, there would be the cost of cutting and transporting the hay.
Re: (Score:3)
Combine all those and you have a driver that's stupid enough to yak away on the cell phone and freak out when the car gets confused enough to need the driver to take over.
That's not a "stupid driver" that's a normal person in a stupid system.
Its completely unrealistic to set up a system that requires a "driver" to be attentive and vigilant and un-distracted for hours on end... and yet not actually be driving.
Its effectively a guard position, (security guard, night watchman, etc...) they can periodically ch
Re: (Score:3)