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”.
Self driving cars only need to be better than people, they don’t have to be perfect. More importantly they only have to be better than AMERICANS, some of the least trained least competent drivers in the civilized world.
There’s basically ZERO unknown unknowns. Driving is simply object identification. And you don’t really even need to identify most object, just identify how their movement could impact your intended movement. That’s it. We like to pretend it’s the horribly complicated thing, but let’s face it, 14 year old kids drive, not well, but they do.
There is no other reason block protection hasn’t been fully implemented yet. The unions are fighting it, and they’re fighting it in the most effective place: spending. Block protection is an expensive program, and very man hour intensive. By keeping the spending low, and the number of people on the job low, they keep the project from being completed, thus keeping their members in jobs. The system works, and the unions know it, so they fight it.
Automatic driving is being implemented RIGHT NOW. It’s not a “rosy timeline” it’s bothering to pay attention to current events. Google has put MILLION of self driven miles on the books. Dozens of companies are working on various solutions. This article is about a company that makes VIDEO CARDS entering the market. The fact that so many companies see a clear revenue opportunity here is proof that this is happening NOW.
That polling data actually supports me. It shows that 20% of the market is ready to buy a self driving car the minute one hits the market. Desktop PCs didn’t have anywhere near that level of buy in in 1980 and look how that progressed in the following 10 years.
You’re not keeping it real, you’re failing to learn from history. Look at how desktop PCs progressed. Cellphones. Smartphones. VCRs. DVDs. Streaming video. From introduction to the market place to having changed a basic element of society happens very quickly.