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Self-driving cars projected to reduce injuries by 90%, save $450B annually

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Re: Self-driving cars projected to reduce injuries by 90%, save $450B annually

#91

Post by seanmcdirmid »

ekianjo wrote: post #83
seanmcdirmid wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you are American, your cost of flying and driving is already quite low compared to the rest of the world, what's being "milked?" Since you used motorways and might be from the UK, I don't know what your situation is. Transportation infrastructure is one of those monopolies that the government is the best choice to take care of.

> Transportation infrastructure is one of those monopolies that the government is the best choice to take care of. There are many countries around the world where the government has no money to take care of the infrastructure and you need private ventures to step in.

And the infrastructure in those countries is quite crappy, relationship?

Re: Self-driving cars projected to reduce injuries by 90%, save $450B annually

#92

Post by EricDeb »

As someone who just had occipital nerve decompression surgery due to a whiplash injury, I can say I am very excited for self-driving cars. The amount of scar tissue the surgeon removed from those nerves was horrifying, and it was a relatively minor accident.

Re: Self-driving cars projected to reduce injuries by 90%, save $450B annually

#93

Post by ekianjo »

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #91
ekianjo wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Transportation infrastructure is one of those monopolies that the government is the best choice to take care of. There are many countries around the world where the government has no money to take care of the infrastructure and you need private ventures to step in.

And the infrastructure in those countries is quite crappy, relationship?

relationship > You can't expect governments to do everything. And these countries used to be in authoritarian regimes, so don't blame the private sector, it didn't exist there until recently.

Re: Self-driving cars projected to reduce injuries by 90%, save $450B annually

#94

Post by loup-vaillant »

hrjet wrote: post #85
rogerbinns wrote: post #80

I wonder how the cars will deal with inevitable accidents - what does the self driving car prioritise? If there is no choice but to hit one of two different cars does it pick the one with the fewest occupants? Is there calculation of likely injuries (eg bounce off two cars causing less severe injuries to both than hitting one harder). Avoid all other vehicles resulting in more severe injuries to the occupant? Cars ca…

This. I am reminded of Isaac Asimov's three robot rules. I am also led to wonder, who will be implicated if an accident happens? What if the auto-driving car has a bug? Or if it was infected with a virus or hacked? What if the driver deliberately modified a self-driving car to cause injury to a target?

> What if the driver deliberately modified a self-driving car to cause injury to a target?

The same as what would happen today if someone mess with the brakes?

Re: Self-driving cars projected to reduce injuries by 90%, save $450B annually

#95

Post by georgemcbay »

rogerbinns wrote: post #80

I wonder how the cars will deal with inevitable accidents - what does the self driving car prioritise? If there is no choice but to hit one of two different cars does it pick the one with the fewest occupants? Is there calculation of likely injuries (eg bounce off two cars causing less severe injuries to both than hitting one harder). Avoid all other vehicles resulting in more severe injuries to the occupant? Cars ca…

Communication between "smart" cars opens up some good possibilities to increase safety even when the inevitable accident occurs.

Consider: Car #1 suddenly realizes (for whatever reason) it is going to impact car #2 or car #3 at approximately equal energy for either crash, pings both, #3 isn't "smart", no reply. #2 pongs back, car #1 heads for car #2, reports this to #2, car #2 deploys air bags proactively using a lowered-energy inflation mode since there is some advanced warning of the impact and sets its own transmission mode and braking (or lack thereof) to be optimal for safest possible (to inside occupants and other detected cars in the impact area) energy transfer.

Re: Self-driving cars projected to reduce injuries by 90%, save $450B annually

#96

Post by recursive »

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #47
nl wrote: post #17

As a cyclist, I long for the day when all cars (and especially heavy trucks!) are self driving.

What about self driving bicycles? You just need to peddle, and the integrated road traffic system removed the error prone human element completely from the equation.

A bicyclist must adjust his weight to handle the bike. That seems tough to automate away.

Re: Self-driving cars projected to reduce injuries by 90%, save $450B annually

#97

Post by jonmrodriguez »

loolo wrote: post #43
objclxt wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> if the 1/10 of deaths are caused by computer errors then at least the problem can be fixed over time. This only follows through if you don't introduce new technology and innovations to your software (and thus new bugs), which isn't going to happen. If you look at air travel, the number of fatal accidents occurring each decade since the 1950s has stayed around the same, even though we've significantly improved autom…

The number of accidents has perhaps stayed roughly the same but there's a hell of a lot more planes flying every day now. So it's highly likely that the accident rate per flight has dropped dramatically. (Though I don't have the data handy to support either hypothesis).

visakanv wrote this good comment: "This is correct. The better our flight technology gets, the more we push our planes to fly in rough weather, etc."

visavanv, it looks like you got hellbanned between 10~14 days ago, possibly because of: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6548892

Re: Self-driving cars projected to reduce injuries by 90%, save $450B annually

#98

Post by seanmcdirmid »

ekianjo wrote: post #93
seanmcdirmid wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And the infrastructure in those countries is quite crappy, relationship?

relationship > You can't expect governments to do everything. And these countries used to be in authoritarian regimes, so don't blame the private sector, it didn't exist there until recently.

I agree, so we can't make any inferences about them at this point. The problem with the libertarian hypothesis is that it lacks any reasonable examples to support it. There are however plenty of examples of governments that do work pretty well; even the USA is not as dysfunctional as many would like to believe.

Re: Self-driving cars projected to reduce injuries by 90%, save $450B annually

#99

Post by smokinn »

thesash wrote: post #88

I can't wait to explain to my grandkids someday that back when I was young we used to let humans drive big hunks of plastic and steel at breakneck speeds, with nothing more than our laughably slow reflexes standing between life and death. They'll rightfully think it was barbaric and tragic that we let thousands of people died each year in accidents caused by distraction, drunkenness, exhaustion, and plain old human e…

Thousands is kind of downplaying it too. 32 thousand in the us alone: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_motor_vehicle_deaths_in...

Probably in the hundreds of thousands globally.

Self-driving cars can't come fast enough.

Re: Self-driving cars projected to reduce injuries by 90%, save $450B annually

#100

Post by seanmcdirmid »

recursive wrote: post #96
seanmcdirmid wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What about self driving bicycles? You just need to peddle, and the integrated road traffic system removed the error prone human element completely from the equation.

A bicyclist must adjust his weight to handle the bike. That seems tough to automate away.

Gyros can do amazing things these days...i have no doubt we'll see something like this in our lifetime (I'm hoping for a self balancing unicycle).
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