231–240 of 269 posts
It doesn't matter if you reduce by a 1000 the risk of accident. When an accident is caused by a human error you have someone to blame, you can think "I would have done better". But when the accident is cause by a machine, then people will stop trusting the car and be done with it.
The cars still need to learn how to handle snow-covered roads That is going to be hard to pull off. For places that get a lot of snow, often you can't even be sure if you're on the road or not.
The problem is, if it gets to production, the first real accident will be considered totally inacceptable. It doesn't matter if you reduce by a 1000 the risk of accident. When an accident is caused by a human error you have someone to blame, you can think "I would have done better". But when the accident is cause by a machine, then people will stop trusting the car and be done with it.
People will be upset, even outraged, by the first few autonomous car accidents. But as long as they're still legal, they'll be building up a safety record that will quickly surpass what humans can achieve. Google has already invested enough money in the legislative system to prevent laws from being yanked off the books after one accident.
The general form of "People won't like it when machines do X" doesn't have a lot of merit. There are always problems and people never like it at first. Then they get used to it and quality of life improves over time. I'm sure similar arguments were made about the automobile itself.
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I thought they were limited to driving on the highway in the empty parts of nevada?
I've seen the Google self-driving car navigating within morning traffic in San Jose. There were two men with laptops in the driver and passenger seats, presumably monitoring the car and available to step in if something went wrong. It was also kind of surprising to see the roof-mounted device it used to map its surrounding. It was fairly large and rapidly rotating.
Very impressive spec - as you'd expect for a $75,000 product.
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Actually, not when you factor in the need to serve unpopular routes and non-Busyntimes. That's a lot of trains and buses running nearly empty. Small, on-demand personalised mass transit has the potential to be the most efficient transport system.
That's really just a negative externality of inefficient suburban development. If the 'burbs didn't exist in the first place, there would be no need to subsidize their barely-used mass transit services.
Only a few Asian cities get more than their public transport systems cost to run back. This page has more info:
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Good points. Without any statistics about the frequency and nature of situations where the human driver still has to intervene, numbers like '300K miles without an accident' are meaningless. For all I know the Google cars might have had a near-accident every 10 miles if it weren't for the human driver that's always there to save the AI when it fails. The fact that Google never discloses anything besides mile counts,…
Would you be ok with a computer that augments your own driving (similar to those cars that automatically brake when they sense an accident)? If so, then it's just a matter of continuously improving on this augmentation. Even if it never reaches the level where you can truly step away from the wheel while the computer drives 100 miles in rush hour traffic, attaching an AI to help avoid accidents in many common situati…
Don't get me wrong by the way, I'm not 'against self-driving cars' or anything, I simply think it can't be done. Not unless we replace all road infrastructure with something that supports autonomous vehicles, and introduce some form of centralized traffic control, ie: more like air traffic.
Autonomous cars are the next big tech that changes the world - I put them up there with computer, Internet, and smart phone. When economists think about technology, they look at it as a productivity booster. From that angle, robot cars will have a huge impact - so many commute hours will be transformed to work, or even leisure, which also boosts productivity. So many smart people are about to be given a 10% or better…
> Autonomous cars are the next big tech that changes the world - I put them up there with computer, Internet, and smart phone. I wouldn't be so sure. Yeah, it might prove to be a very good thing for the United States, but for the rest of world there's first Europe's public transport networks (I'm 31, don't have a driver's license, I live in Europe, I'm doing perfectly fine, thank you), and short of us reaching the Si…
Anecdote does not data make. I'm 32, I have a drivers license and two cars, I live in Europe, and my quality of life would be severely impacted if I didn't have a car. The vast majority of Europeans live in places where the population density is too low for it to be sensible to depend solely on public transport, not to mention that only a part of Europe has any 'reliable' (I use that word loosely, because name me one public transport system outside of the German one that works 'reliably') form of public transport at all.
It only takes one or two times a month that you need a car (for big groceries, visiting a far away friend or relative, or going somewhere where there is no public transport) to make it worth while to get a car, and once you have it, it's better to use it as much as possible to make it pay for itself. Public transport is not a viable long-term option to satisfy our transportation needs - it's too expensive, inconvenient and inefficient. Lean, pay-per-use and easily rentable autonomously driven cars are the way of the future, and the near future, at that.
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It's going to shift a lot of capital that's currently tied up in owning and maintaining cars into other uses. Right now, most cars are only in use for about 5% of their lifetimes. When everybody owns their own private car, those cars spend a lot of time sitting parked. If those cars could drive around and be used by other people who need them on demand, you'd need a lot fewer cars, as well as a lot less parking.
Remember that the "5%" of the time you use your car is probably the same "5%" of the time every one else wants to use their car, i.e. rush hours.
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It's going to shift a lot of capital that's currently tied up in owning and maintaining cars into other uses. Right now, most cars are only in use for about 5% of their lifetimes. When everybody owns their own private car, those cars spend a lot of time sitting parked. If those cars could drive around and be used by other people who need them on demand, you'd need a lot fewer cars, as well as a lot less parking.
Though this presents a problem in that we're burning through a car 20 time faster, (100% vs 5%). Most cars people own don't last 20 years, so they won't even last a year in the future? There better be some distributed economic system for providing those cars, because that's a large expense. A car right now needs regular maintenance as it is every few months, even if it's just changing the oil. That will go from month…