Posted on 11/02/2017 12:33:27 PM PDT by ProtectOurFreedom
Let one speck of dust get into the computer system and yeehaw! You either come to a dead halt or it sends you careening straight into an 18-wheeler.
I won't care.
I plan on ordering a replacement q-jet this evening for the 1979 K5 Blazer that I have been playing with when I can.
“In fact I’ll switch to a motorcycle first.”
I hadn’t thought of that. I wonder if motorcyclists will be safe around driverless cars?
Now-—YOUR personal driving record dictates how much you will pay in premiums.
IF one of these ‘vehicles’ hits me, WHO am I suing???
The (un)safety record of automobiles made their adoption very controversial. The butcher’s bill is enormous; it’s just that the upside of the automobile quickly produces unstoppable momentum for the pervasiveness of automobiles which is the very air we breathe.But in reality, that butcher’s bill is still going on, and in consequence the safety of autopilot driven cars doesn’t have to be perfect to for them to be adopted - in only has to be two or three times better than that of human drivers - and promise to become ten and even a hundred times as good in the foreseeable future. And if Moore’s Law becomes at all applicable, that is a realistic goal of the “Iron Mike” driver.
Traffic lights are century-old technology; they are basically clocks which communicate with human drivers via optics. The information which they communicate is at an extremely low rate. Just as the information from traffic signs is. Now suppose that traffic signals are converted from big, expensive signs to cheap microchips two-way communicating with each car. Possibly microchips embedded in the paint of the lane-demacation road stripes.
If Moore’s Law starts slashing the annual butcher bill of auto accidents a way will be found to insure autopiloted automobiles. No human driver has perfect attention and perfect concentration. If the safety record of Iron Mike transcends your safety record by an order of magnitude, and then two - you will pocket the savings in your insurance bill - and cheerfully sit down in a backward-facing recliner and zone out while you are safely and rapidly transported to your destination. It will be faster, because the idea of stopping at an intersection to wait for nothing but a clock ticking in a traffic light, or for an arbitrary stop sign, will remind you of the limitations your grandfather lived with rather than daily reality. Kids will look at traffic lights in museums - and giggle when their function is explained to them.
Are they safe around cars now?
Looking ahead - autonomous vehicle becomes self aware, turns suicidal.
“Possibly microchips embedded in the paint of the lane-demacation road stripes.”
This was the way “intelligence highways” were conceived 20 to 30 years ago. The idea was to make the highway itself intelligent and communicating with vehicles. This was endlessly researched and never went anywhere because the cost was immense and not all roads could be upgraded. This approach was eclipsed by moving the intelligence into the vehicles themselves and leaving it out of the roads.
In a way, this is similar to the evolutionary path of communications. Initially you had monstrous central switches doing all the switching of phone calls. Then packet switching took over with highly distributed routers with packets containing information about where they wanted to get to.
How many years, how many doublings of performance/price ratio, since then???Cell phones are an obvious example of a technology which was easily envisioned - and easily dismissed on price grounds - long ago. Now every Tom, Dick, and Jane has a computer in his/her pocket, and the cost proposition looks quite different.
It’s precisely all those doublings of price/performance that made it possible to build the distributed intelligence into vehicles. NVIDIA and Velodyne focused their companies heavily on autonomous vehicles. The computing power of the NVIDIA systems going into each vehicle are staggering.
Look at the upcoming swarms of UAVs. They are soon going to be looking like flocks of birds. There is no way a central controller can possibly do that. The distributed intelligence in each UAV (or in each auto) makes it possible.
Where do I sign up?
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