291–300 of 322 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm pretty sure current cars with controls guarantee accidents and deaths
How sure are you that cars without controls guarantee neither?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think the eventual goal will be that most cars will be self-driving and that will negate most of those problems. I imagine that the vision of the future is a giant car-sharing program made up of self-driving cars all coordinated by Google. Think about it - you fire up an app to request a car, one appears at your door within a couple of minutes, takes you to work, then disappears. After work, a different car picks y…
Why not go the whole hog and just shuttle people to whichever house has an open bed for the night? With some smart scheduling software, you could ensure that families get shuttled to the same location.
They're called “hotels.”
It doesn't take a huge stretch of imagination to think that if the marginal costs of operation were similarly reduced by automation that it could become economically feasible to reside solely in hotels.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
How sure are you that cars without controls guarantee neither?
Because it's provably possible to make a car that drives better than the average human. It's not about guarantees, it's about improvement.
I should probably mention since I typically bleed karma in these threads, that i'm not at all against autonomous vehicles in principle. I can see a lot of ways in which they could make driving safer, and transportation costs cheaper, and do a lot of good.
What I am against is the premise that people are so dangerous and terrible at something they've been, mostly, able to do safely for about a century that their freedoms need to be taken away. Autonomous cars are fine - trying to take for granted that personal freedom is dangerous and stupid and that people need to be controlled like herd animals is not necessarily a good thing. Where is this absolute certainty and conviction that I see in these threads coming from? Certainly not from having observed several million autonomous vehicles on the roads.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The comments here are rather disappointing. Most of them remind me of Clifford Stoll's famous rant: http://www.newsweek.com/clifford-stoll-why-web-wont-be-nirva... "This new thing isn't like the old thing, so it could never work."
Stoll was one of the first to hop on the Internet bandwagon, and he thought he could get lucky twice by hopping off the fad before it became passe. As for the crazy from the other side, read anything by Nicholas Negroponte at the same time. A lot of young people, especially young hackers, think like authors of science fiction novels, where there is some grand society that they have designed, and how everything is hap…
Which is too bad, really, I have a feeling there is an important issue there that I should see.
It seems like a mistake to remove manual controls entirely, not necessarily because of safety concerns, but because there are a fair number of times when you need the car to go somewhere without having a route. I'm thinking of things like: Moving your car ten feet so somebody else can get out of the driveway; handling double parking during alternate side parking hours; moving the car because you were waiting to pick…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think the eventual goal will be that most cars will be self-driving and that will negate most of those problems. I imagine that the vision of the future is a giant car-sharing program made up of self-driving cars all coordinated by Google. Think about it - you fire up an app to request a car, one appears at your door within a couple of minutes, takes you to work, then disappears. After work, a different car picks y…
I can't see that working. You'll require a ton of cars taking individuals or small groups to and from work in a big city. That's not very efficient, and the reason we have a metro system in the first place. 1. That's a lot of pollution. 2. You have twice as much traffic, since these cars need to come to your house every morning, and drive back to their charging station in the evening. They can take those trips off-pe…
This is going to change the world. No more car insurance. Vastly fewer driving fatalities. Shared cars. Less parking problems. I can't wait. Just take my money already.
I bet you'll still need insurance (or the provider will need it, in a service model). It should be much, much cheaper though. Most vehicle accidents are caused by human error -- the insurance would just need to cover accidents caused by mechanical or software failure.
It seems like a mistake to remove manual controls entirely, not necessarily because of safety concerns, but because there are a fair number of times when you need the car to go somewhere without having a route. I'm thinking of things like: Moving your car ten feet so somebody else can get out of the driveway; handling double parking during alternate side parking hours; moving the car because you were waiting to pick…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Stoll was one of the first to hop on the Internet bandwagon, and he thought he could get lucky twice by hopping off the fad before it became passe. As for the crazy from the other side, read anything by Nicholas Negroponte at the same time. A lot of young people, especially young hackers, think like authors of science fiction novels, where there is some grand society that they have designed, and how everything is hap…
As someone who has ridden those buses, I spent a long time trying to figure out why the left was giving them so much grief as you astutely point out. I can't see it. I put myself in their shoes, read the rants, and the platform just doesn't make any sense to me. Which is too bad, really, I have a feeling there is an important issue there that I should see.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
As someone who has ridden those buses, I spent a long time trying to figure out why the left was giving them so much grief as you astutely point out. I can't see it. I put myself in their shoes, read the rants, and the platform just doesn't make any sense to me. Which is too bad, really, I have a feeling there is an important issue there that I should see.
I think the idea is that San Fran should be for people who work in San Fran. If you work in Mountain View, go live in Mountain View. Rent is high enough in San Fran without people who commute out of the city for work.
I'm not prepared for this debate, just pointing out why I can't understand the position.