Absolutely. Driverless cars will be so easy to stop and pop. They will be just like little mobile candy stores all full of good things free for the taking.
3-D sidewalk drawings:
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 ...
Excellent!
It is posts like yours that make FR my preferred Internet destination!
Love it...:)
You admit to being too unskilled and paranoid to drive yourself, but you're an expert on the driving qualifications and skills of 200 million other Americans. Right.
Not coincidentally, your solution to your personal phobia, is to restrict the rights of your fellow citizens to transport themselves.
That's un-American, friend.
You are in error.
I drive, I just am one of the few honest enough to realize I, and most people suck at it. I probably have as many miles as any other 56 year old male except for professionals, and no at fault accidents, and no ticket for 25 years; so you assertion that I am unskilled and paranoid is blatantly false.
And personally, I’m more stating that I think it inevitable, based on facts and circumstances rather than advocating any such laws, so take your insults and insinuations of ‘un American’-ness and please revise them. I wouldn’t *SUPPORT* the government taking away driving privileges from almost everyone, I merely think it’s going to happen in the next few decades because lots of people don’t like driving and lots of people shouldn’t, and eventually reality will win. People would rather do things than drive most of the time (talk on cell phones, eat), autonomous cars will let them do that while also allowing the flexibility and freedom of movement that public transportation does not, that’s why in 30 years most cars will be self driving; that and insurance companies.
So kindly cease with ill founded and inaccurate insults.
thanks.
As an addendum, yes, I do stand by the belief that getting a driver’s license should require one hell of a lot more demonstrated competence than it currently does. Maybe you don’t drive the roads I do.
Don’t get me wrong. I love hi-tech. I’m a low-level geek. I’d love to be able to settle into my leather seat, set the Destination for Clearwater, FL, tilt my seat a bit and take a nap until I woke up to pee around Rocky Mount, NC. And then surf the net while sailing on down I-95 until stopping for dinner around Savannah. And so on thru the night until I arrived. But that won’t happen in MY lifetime.
I learned to drive in Southern California in the late sixties, and spent the next few decades driving those streets and freeways every day. SoCal is one of the most challenging places to drive in this country.
I also spent a year driving in England, and have spent the last dozen years driving the Dallas -Fort Worth metroplex. Trust me, I know about the skills of the average driver, and they're not so bad that government should revoke our freedom to transport ourselves.
As I said, I don’t think it will be government unilaterally doing such, I merely think it inevitable and evolutionary. all props to someone who wants to drive if they are actually competent. I know I’d buy a self driving car in a second; ideally with the option to override but I’d rather be free to look around, surf the ‘net, eat and maybe have a few drinks rather than trying to figure out the next idiotic thing some fool who shouldn’t be behind the wheel is going to do
The entire transportation infrastructure would grind to a devastating halt if "most" people sucked at driving as badly as you think they do.
If driving were as challenging as you make it out to be, the whole world wouldn't be motorized, like it is today.
There are definitely some people who lack the motor skills and coordination to safely drive, but it certainly isn't "most".
This doesn't qualify you on the subject any more than Hillary's term as First Lady qualifies her for the presidency. If you haven't been in the cockpit or talked with actual pilots, you don't know what you're talking about.
2) It doesn’t undermine my statement. I said the pilot is a redundant failsafe mechanism.
Actually, it does undermine your statement perfectly. Flying a plane is more than "Hey, Siri! Take me to Cincinnati."
You obviously have a much higher opinion of people than I do. I’ve taken a few defensive driving classes and ride my motorcycle a fair amount; maybe my standards for what constitutes a good driver are quite different.
Or at a road construction site where the people working it aren’t even sure of what they’re doing or how you’re supposed to get through it. I find these more often than I should.
>>This doesn’t qualify you on the subject any more than Hillary’s term as First Lady qualifies her for the presidency. If you haven’t been in the cockpit or talked with actual pilots, you don’t know what you’re talking about.<<
You said I probably don’t fly much. I do. Being a frequent flyer it is a subject that interests me and thus I keep up on it.
>>Actually, it does undermine your statement perfectly. Flying a plane is more than “Hey, Siri! Take me to Cincinnati.”<<
That isn’t what I said. I said a plane is perfectly capable of flying without a pilot. I didn’t say it is sample as your snide example.
So far your opinions are unsupported, except as statements of fear. “I just figures” is neither fact nor argument.
I would never use one.
A driverless car can react faster than you can - whether it’s the red light runner or the abrupt lane changer.
And eventually, there won’t be any red light runners or abrupt lane changers, because those cars will also be automated. At the very least, those cars will be “talking” to your car and your car will know what’s about to happen.
“As a retired programmer, I fear the decision path that has to decide what is going to get hit when the SHTF happens. “
I don’t see any nefarious decision algorithm here, except BRAKE. How many people have bad reflexes with the steering wheel and cause more damage than there should be instead of just braking.
Otherwise, agreed, a driverless car on long distances and/or at night is safer than a car with an exhausted driver. In traffic jam, it is definitively a good thing. A human can never beat a sub-millisecond obstacle detection algorithm.
Theoretically, at least, air traffic is much more structured than automobile traffic, I grant that. But even at that, stuff happens.But when “the nut behind the wheel” kills tens of thousands of Americans annually - and severely maims many others - driverless tech is not exactly competing with perfection, you know. You can always second guess each individual case with a woulda, coulda, shoulda - but that is true right now, with human “drivers” who are texting and who knows what else. And guess what? The inevitable failures of nascent ground autopilot tech will kill different individuals, for the most part, from those who would have died under the traditional manual piloting system. But as long as it kills substantially fewer - with the prospect of substantial improvement over time, with experience and better hardware - the adoption of autopilot tech in motor vehicles will occur.
When automobiles were first adopted, traffic fatalities were a really big scandal, but the liberating, transformational actuality of the automobile made prohibiting cars impossible. As autopilots become available, each case of “nut behind the wheel” fatality will again be seen as more of a scandal, because there will have been a realistic alternative.
Interesting times ahead in the auto safety field, for sure.
But in addition to drastically reducing the rationale and acceptability of the manual piloting of automobiles, auto piloting will drastically reduce the rationale and acceptability of the relatively arbitrary traffic laws now in effect. Laws which intend that, absent a really egregious case like a drunk driving, it takes driving errors by two drivers to cause a crash. Autopilot of cars should make auto travel much more expeditious.
This is one of those ideas that no one wants, other than the hucksters who want us to buy them. Thanks SeekAndFind.
Not in my lifetime either. Will be 70 before year ends.
I like good applied technology. I hate unnecessary complexity. Simple works. It always will.
Computers don’t solve problems. They analyze by adding layers of complexity. Best solutions are the smallest and simplest solutions.
Einstein: “Everything Should Be Made as Simple as Possible, But Not Simpler”
I traveled for a living (outside sales and support) for 30 years. 2 million road miles. Never had a single accident. Except, I did run over a wild hog late one night. Messed up the radiator and AC coil. Got hot. Warped head.
My wife is a control freak. She cannot stand for me to drive, so I simply let her. smile. (really don’t care)
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