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
Yeah, it’s a “Google-driven car.”
So a cop pulls over a “driverless” car for anything, who gets the citation?
There will be a ton of crooks figuring out how to get an autonomous veh to crash into them for the insurance scam.
So your 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..
you're.
Self-driving cars would increase the distance people are willing to commute, leading to greater emission of CO2.
Progressive dilemma there.
...
And hackers might not just crash the cars. They could kidnap people.
I think they will be common sooner than most people think.
Every new technology has bugs and failures. Edison’s light bulb, early cars, rocket launches that blow up, computers that crash, etc. Even cars with drivers have failures.
I hope we get driverless by the time I am unable to drive myself. I would hate to be dependent on someone else giving me a ride any time I wanted to go somewhere. I know plenty of old people who can no longer drive and this would give them immense freedom.
If the bugs are worked out, it will IMO make driving much safer. There are plenty of horrible/idiotic human drivers out on the roads. Driverless cars would most likely eliminate tailgating, weaving and swerving, bad merging, red light running, etc.
I know a lot of people who enjoy driving, but no one who enjoys commuting in stop and go traffic. Maybe driverless cars will actually be “hybrids” which let us choose when to drive and when to ride.
Yes, there is a downside. My biggest concern is privacy and tracking of citizens. If I were going to pass legislation on driverless cars (or any cars) my top priority would be to prevent the government or corporations from tracking them.
Yet another uninformed bullshitting blogger who spreads nonsense about which he is ignorant.
Some specifics please?
There are also moral decisions, value questions, presented to human drivers on occasion. I'm wondering how these will be programmed into cars.
Seeing that there presently aren’t self driving cars, I believe the bullshitters are Musk and company.
The big difference is that people actually wanted those products so the bugs were worked out and they were successful. The market does NOT want driverless cars. The public is being lied to in an attempt to sell them something they instinctively don't want and for countless good reasons most importantly is the threat to individual liberty.
The author lays out his anti-technology bias near the end:
“Like artificial intelligence, virtual reality, genetic engineering and other “next-big-thing” oxymorons, what we’re really talking about here is a high-tech con”
Artificial intelligence and genetic engineering are very real economic forces today. To so flippantly dismiss them calls his reliability into serious question.
I have not seen any technological showstopper identified that would prevent autonomous vehicles - it is just a matter of time and money. And plenty of money is being spent on developing them.
You might not want driverless cars, but I am part of the market also and I want them.
Not quite sure about the "threat to individual liberty" you seem to see. But, as an older guy, I see driverless cars as increasing my individual liberty. The day when someone tells me I should no longer drive may never come.
People in high cost areas can afford real houses. 2+ hours drive to work isn't nearly so painful if I can doze while the car handles traffic for me. A coffee machine that brews me a cup 15 minutes out and hands it to me is going to be the big new option.
But happily for maps you don't have to trust them 100%. You have a driver who is supposed to use common sense.
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.
I don't bet against technology...just saying what it produces and when it produces it will frustrate intuition. The devil is in the details.
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