That was a cultural prediction, which was silly because flying cars are useless. Technically quite possible, but utterly useless, the wing span would make them undrivable, and the mechanism to bring in the wings would make it so heavy that they’d have no load capacity as a plane. Mine is a technical prediction. This is a technology we want, we know it’s wanted. People have been working towards it for ages, once it’s possible it will take off in the market place. And we’ve now put together the technology to show it is VERY possible. When you get right down to it self driving cars are nothing more than data crunching, they need to “see” the world around them and react to it, the same thing we do. Data crunching is the area where technology grows the most predictably and consistently. We crunch more data faster every day. The smartphone in your pocket as 10 times as much data processing as Deep Blue. It’s not if but when, we WILL have enough computing power available small enough and cheaply enough to do this. Probably we already do, we just need to write the logic.
You’re living in the future, don’t be so grumpy. They’re amazing times if you’re willing to be amazed.
You may call me grumpy and maybe I am. I call it being a realist. I am also one of the most willing to embrace technological advances. For most of my life I was engaged in a field where each new year brought new tech to machines I would operate.
As those around me griped the machines were already good enough I became the early adopter of the new tech and soon I was able to do amazing things and reached the top of my field. The manufactures would seek my input on the latest changes they had made and bring me prototypes for me to use and critique.
This was all in the field of heavy equipment operation and a segment that would lend itself easily to self driving or autonomous operation. Through my nearly forty years in the field the hope was always to automate the operation. The furthest along this technology has come is high resolution GPS tracking.
I’m a professional driver and heavy equipment operator with vast and varied experience. The challenges to automating off road equipment operation are exponentially less than on road self driving challenges. One of the greatest challenges to on road operation are as Don Rumsfeld may say “the known unknowns, and the unknown unknowns”. Factor in blending self driving and human controlled vehicles the unknown unknowns become vastly more complex.
You made a statement that automating rail operations in the NE corridor was being stymied by union resistance, while certainly that is a component it is also a simplistic justification for looking no further into why block protection has not bee fully implemented as of yet. If the can’t even make that happen how can “they” assure safety of self driving vehicles on public ways?
That in a nutshell is why I don’t see implementation of autonomous driving in your rosy time line. The first time a self driving vehicle takes out a family in their mini van or god forbid a school bus the lawyers will descend like locusts. There is going to be much testing, development, prototyping and further proving before acceptance will occur in a majority of the motoring public.
You may have already seen the story just this morning of polling showing 80% of those polled not ready to accept this technology an 64% saying even after adoption human control to be essential.
We will see autonomous control of vehicles, of that I have no doubt. It will just not be fast tracked in a way you propose. Just “keepin’ it real”.