Posted on 08/16/2017 8:27:55 PM PDT by Lorianne
Over at Tesla, Google, and Uber — and now the contagion has reached Ford, General Motors, Chrysler and beyond — the smartest guys in the room are talking autonomous vehicles. Over at every hedge fund, venture-capital and wealth-management shop in the universe, the smartest guys in the room are throwing money at the concept. Why? Because it’s the Next Big Thing, that’s why. Billions of dollars are in play.
Which is why we are seeing an avalanche of faux-news stories about the coming era of driverless cars, how they’re on the streets now, how well they are doing in testing, how soon there will be nothing but driverless cars on all our roads. And all this chum in the financial water has served its purposes: the hedge fund sharks, and the Masters of the Universe they serve, are in a feeding frenzy; and the gullible public is giddy with anticipation.
Meanwhile people with a lick of common sense are saying, wait a minute, doesn’t this sound oxymoronic, like clean coal, or safe sex? In today’s world, people with licks of common sense do not get funding to answer their questions, and therefor the skeptical questions you might have about “driverless cars” are almost unanswerable. Until right now, right here:
Is there such a thing as a “driverless car?” Not yet, there isn’t. The conditions for allowing “driverless cars” on the public roads in a few states unanimously specify that the driverless car has to have a driver who is ready to instantly take control of the vehicle. Moreover, what they are driving and testing are prototypes and jury-rigs; no one has yet built an autonomous vehicle. (Tesla cars offer “auto-pilot,” but it isn’t.) So almost all the stories you have read and seen about “driverless cars” on the road are fake (some fastidious journalists write about testing cars that are capable of becoming autonomous, but most people read right through the fastidiousness).
How are the potentially driverless cars doing in their testing? Awful. For example, in the first week of March, Uber’s 43 test cars in three states logged some 20,000 miles on public roads. Their drivers had to intervene and take control away from the software, an average of once every mile. Critical interventions, required to save lives and property, were counted separately; they occurred every 200 miles. Which makes your life expectancy, as a passenger in a truly autonomous car, approximately four hours.
SNIP
>The self driving stuff will keep improving over the next decades I am sure. But getting them to the point they can safely be driver-less in 20 years seems about as likely as flying cars being common in the year 2000 (which didn’t happen btw). My guess is we will get more enhanced breaking/cruise control/driver supplemental type stuff over the next 20 years.
Have you seen the Telsa autopilot? It’s pretty amazing.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3yCAZWdqX_Y
Your, You are, You’re you r write..
The Etak amazed tech enthusiasts in the 80s. By the 90s we were expecting the in vehicle nav market to explode....and it kept not doing that....until smart phones eith gps aroind 2008 or so. It takes longer than ya think.
“The market does NOT want driverless cars...most importantly is the threat to individual liberty.”
I love the feeling of getting in a car and heading down the road.
I recently had the chance to drive from the West Coast to Colorado. I didn’t do anything special; just went from point A to point B. Well, I did have a nice dinner when I stopped for the night.
It was the best time I’ve had in years. Lake Tahoe, pine forests, mountains, salt flats, Salt Lake, alone with the scenery and my thoughts...It allowed me to leave all my cares behind, for just a couple of days.
When cars are “autonomous,” we will only be able to go where the government says we can go.
I'm not so sure... when I left Michigan in 1973 the aerospace company I worked for built a test track for driverless cars - back in those days (four decades ago!!) the technology was buried wires in the road for cars to follow.
The whole silicon revolution since, with small cameras (from cell phone technology), advanced GPS (the govt. let civilians get more accuracy), faster computer hardware (from better computer games?) and advanced scene recognition (again, gaming technology).
These all were unheard of in the 70’s and are here now, with the possible weak link being software good enough to bet peoples lives on. I give it less than a decade to get fully driverless, and maybe sooner with enough players competing for the goal.
I would buy one so I can drink more than one IPA when I go out in the evenings...:^)
PS. The test track from 1973 is gone along with the aerospace company. The site is now the location of the U of Michigan's “M City” for testing driverless cars in simulated city environments.
It’s a nice dream. My biggest concern is safety. From what I’ve seen of GPS, it’s not yet reliable. And in terms of safety the tolerance for error is extremely high.
On thing for sure: I don’t want my tax dollars going to headless cars.
Sadly, a remote computer will issue the citation electronically, take a picture of the violation and send out the bill.
I completely agree about the tax dollars!
That is another HUGE concern. I’m not sure there are any good answers.
Examples:
If an accident is inevitable and unavoidable and there is a choice between hitting one person or hitting two people, the “obvious” choice would be to hit one person, thus minimizing the damage. But what if the one person is in the car and the two people are on the road (a mother holding a child who has suddenly jumped into the street)? Should the car crash itself into a brick wall and kill the passenger or hit the two people in the street?
Who gets to decide?
If it were me in the car, I might (*MIGHT* - depending on additional circumstances) be willing to sacrifice myself. But if it were my child in the car, I’d want to save my child instead of the irresponsible person who jumped in front of the car.
IOW...it's not a hardware issue (such as a light bulb) it's a programming issue. It's infinitely more complex.
The car WILL have a driver. It just won't be you.
So you’re driving down the freeway.. Excuse me riding down the freeway and some a hole hacks the computer system controlling all the cars and all these so called computer driven cars crash..
How is that..
So’s machine manufactured, and yet...
Except there won’t be a centralized system. And they will have to get smart and not let the control system be exposed to the outside.
The Trolley Problem is easy, and half the video games out there already have a variant in them. Distance. If force to hit A or B you “aim” for the one that’s further away, giving you more time to slow the vehicle, thus doing less damage giving whatever you hit the highest chance of survival.
Oh no, the market wants them. Even the most negative surveys they’ve done show that they’ll have a higher market penetration than motorcycles.
I think it’s obvious that this will be something within the next 20 years. What it is, I don’t know.
You know what my concern is? Car sickness.
I’ve never been able to ride in backseats of cars without feeling sick. As I’ve gotten older, that’s started to intrude on the passenger side. When I’m driving, I’m fine.
So, is comfort and ease worth the barfing?
While I do not want one as I enjoy driving but I think everyone would want a safer car. Driver assists are already being added, such as braking assistance, rear camera lane changing assistance with certainly more improvements to come. Over time the question is will cars mold into a driverless mode.I talk with someone recently who bought a Honda Civic that had the ADAS System.He was happy it with and I was impressed. Time will tell.
” in a new Civic, a 25-mile drive can be made with the driver’s hands off the wheel and his foot off the gas so long as lane markings are visible and another vehicle is in front of the car, according to the WSJ. The Civic can sense when it should slow down, veer, or brake.”
http://fortune.com/2016/03/14/self-driving-car-honda/
Good examples.
What if the choices are:
A) Sideswipe another car off the road/cliff
B) sacrifice crash your own vehicle
C) attempt a driving maneuver that would avoid either A or B
- maneuver requires skill level A
- maneuver requires skill level B
- maneuver requires skill level C…
- maneuver not possible now due to weather conditions
- maneuver not possible due to driver mental alertness condition
D) Other car contains two killers fleeing a murder
E) Other contains a family of five
And on and on. My point is that even if you could quantify and program for all variable, which is impossible, driving still involves moral decisions and value judgements.
Humans make these, machines cannot. Machines can implement them, but not make them.
I don’t want Lord Google making them for me.
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