Posted on 10/23/2017 8:28:31 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
On my fourth day in a semi-driverless car, I finally felt comfortable enough to let it stop itself. Before then, I’d allowed the car — a Volvo S90 sedan — to steer around gentle turns, with my hands still on the wheel, and to adjust speed in traffic. By Day 4, I was ready to make a leap into the future.
With the car traveling 40 miles an hour on a busy road in the Washington suburbs, I pushed a button to activate the driverless mode and moved my foot away from the brake and accelerator. The car kept its speed. Soon, a traffic light in the distance turned red, and the cars in front of me slowed. For a split second, I prepared to slam on the brake.
There was no need. The cameras and computers in the Volvo recognized that other cars were slowing and smoothly began applying the brake. My car came to a stop behind the Ford ahead of me. I began laughing, even though no one else was in the car, as my anxiety turned to relief.
If you’re anything like most people, you’re familiar with this anxiety. Almost 80 percent of Americans fear traveling in a self-driving car, a recent poll found.
When a friend saw me in the Volvo last week and I explained that I was test-driving it for work, she asked which roads I’d be using — so she could avoid them. Another friend asked if driverless cars could be hacked. Colleagues said they feared semiautonomous cars lulling people into ignoring the road.
Driverless cars tap deep into the human psyche. We want to be in control, or at least to give control to trained professionals, like doctors. We don’t want computers to be in charge.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
I smell a rat, and it’s not the car.
You realize all commercial jets are essentially driverless. The pilot is redundant.
The pilot flies because he/she wishes to (to keep experience hours up, just because, etc.).
A human hand need not touch a single instrument from boarding jetwalk to debarking jetwalk.
And this has been true for 20+ years.
Not me.
I remember all the articles about the flying cars that were in our future back in the 1960’s. Where did that nonsense go? hee hee hee
The driverless cars are going to be similar. It will work in limited local situations. Globally? Forget it.
“I smell a rat, and it’s not the car.”
It does reek doesn’t it?
Driverless cars, trucks, busses and delivery vehicles are the future and it will be a bright future. From transportation automation, we will accept and find it economically viable to automate almost all industries. Factories, fast food joints, mines, aviation, farming, energy exploration will all be automated.
If one of these things were to crash, how liable would the company be, and how can they survive financially if they are?
The driverless car is a Trojan horse.
Much like cell phones, driver-less cars will change how we live. In particular truck accidents will be reduced, and a lot of truck drivers put out of work.
We may no longer have a family car. Rather an Uber like app will summon a car from a central location, and take us to where we want to go???
Change is coming. Deal with it.
From the Slimes you could also expect: "Mosques Made me Nervous. Until I Prayed At One." Or: "Sex Change Operations Made Me Nervous. Until I Tried One." Headlines from the goddamn left always have an ulterior motive.
“If one of these things were to crash, how liable would the company be, and how can they survive financially if they are?”
Every day, companies have human employees that crash cars and the companies survive.
for ?
It’s only a matter of time until libs push Congress to ban self driven vehicles.
I still enjoy the pleasure of shifting gears and using a clutch pedal myself, trying to find the right line in corners and enjoying the driving experience in general. That’s when it’s possible to actually drive - sitting in bumper-to-bumper traffic for 40 minutes on the 280 really doesn’t qualify. Bring on self-driving technology - fully autonomous so I can take my eyes off the road and do something else.
NYT makes it all better. /sarcasm
Do the jets also take off and land pilotlessly, or just cruise pilotlessly?
-PJ
Yeah, but at 37,000 feet, Sanford and Son doesn’t run the red light in front of you or change lanes abruptly into you. Airliners are in an extremely low traffic environment. There are between 5k to 10k planes up over America at any given time. And the pilots do spend a lot of time watching, planning, and entering their flight plan.
Automation of cars is ok, for some places and things. But airliners don’t translate well into cars.
It will work in limited local situations.
Eventually there will be roads that only allow driverless cars because the cars will be able to coordinate with each other and make split second decisions that would not be possible if any of the cars were controlled by humans. Traffic lights would be unneccessary because the cars would simply weave around each other like a bunch of ballet dancers.
Eventually, there will be no public roads which will allow manually driven vehicles.
Driverless cars with backseat sexbots: the aliens’ plan for the end of humanity.
What if I don’t want to give up piloting my own vehicle? Will my future be “bright” too?
You sound like a Soviet central planner.
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