331–340 of 341 posts
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And aliens could come from space and take over our planet. What's your point?
You know my point, you just don't like it. It's far from a stretch of the imagination to see a future where the government essentially has a kill-switch for most roads.
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You know my point, you just don't like it. It's far from a stretch of the imagination to see a future where the government essentially has a kill-switch for most roads.
It's not about not liking it. It's simply infeasible to think in this day and age a totalitarian regime would ever gain traction in the United States.
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I agree with your point - though I'd also say that people who actually working in the field generally are considering these sorts of issues and are not blind to them. The "OMG only cars will exist and everything will be amazing because pedestrians are a fictional concept" crowd overwhelmingly seem to be wide-eyed futurists who don't actually have professional first-hand exposure to the field.
There are people that are considering these issues, but I'm a bit concerned that I've only read insightful commentary on this issue from urban planners, which aren't going to be the ones creating self driving vehicles and advancing that tech forward. In contrast on the Silicon Valley side, I am disturbed by how many tweets and breezy blog posts I read from people that don't seem to know what Induced Demand is and don…
Also, given the nature of the work and the insane level of competition right now, anyone working on this first-hand would be wise to not speak about these things in public.
So the only commenters are urban planning and infrastructure folks who don't work first-hand on the problem - and fortunately they are writing extensively about it. People who have first-hand expertise on the matter are prevented from speaking extensively about it, which leaves the remainder of the commentary to the peanut gallery.
And the peanut gallery is unfortunately filled with people whose visions of the future resemble more of the Jetsons than anything practical.
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Imagine some drunk guy hops into his car in bad weather. He taps the auto-cruise button and then passes out. Snow, rain, construction, - something - hinders the ride somewhere along the way home. Car cannot process the issue correctly, and slows to a stop, alerting the driver. Driver, being sound asleep, cannot hear the annoying alert tone. Alert continues, and possibly after some time, alerts authorities of it's dis…
This puts a positive spin on the culture in busier urban areas of expecting drivers in front to start very quickly at a green or else get a friendly reminder honk. If you're going to look at your phone at a red, know the light timings or look at the transverse pedestrian crossing signal or transverse yellow light so you know how long you have.
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Does the article add anything, or at least provide a compact summary? Does anyone know where the video can be downloaded?
Doesn't add too much, but does summarize compactly. Looks like it's hosted on Vimeo... so I don't think so, at least without hackery.
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You know my point, you just don't like it. It's far from a stretch of the imagination to see a future where the government essentially has a kill-switch for most roads.
It's not about not liking it. It's simply infeasible to think in this day and age a totalitarian regime would ever gain traction in the United States.
The major reason why history repeats itself is that people dismiss the possibility of it repeating itself. The reason why Nazi Germany was able to murder millions of people is that no one thought it would happen.
If it’s true that algorithms are statistically better than drivers then we shouldn’t let people to drive." It is difficult to decide if this statement is idealistic, naive, or written by an algorithm. I love motorcycles, as do many millions of other people, despite the obvious safety risks. This may come as a shock, but minimizing risk isn't the sole goal of everyone's life on earth. By this logic, we shouldn't "let"…
> I love motorcycles, as do many millions of other people, despite the obvious safety risks. Society as a whole could decide that the obvious safety risk has no place on public road, and if you want to drive motorcycles, you could do so on private property, and/or in places specifically designed/reserved for that. Same for manual driving of cars. That would be a big change, and it'll likely take decades until we get…
Specifically for motorcycles, as many experienced riders would say, sport bikes especially can hardly even be used on public roads anyways. My old bike red-lined 1st gear at ~96mph, i.e. there isn't a public road where it is legal to "use" the first of 6 gears. They're made for a track. On the other hand, RE: safety, in the overwhelming majority of cases the safety risk on a motorcycle is to the rider not the other drivers on the road. Motorcycle accidents where the rider was at fault and a vehicle occupant was killed are likely less probable than death via choking on a bagel. So a outlawing human drivers in this case sounds more like taking away an individual's choice rather than controlling any legitimate risk to public safety.
As for cars, I agree that it will probably at some point make sense to separate autonomous cars from human drivers. There is not much way around the fact that you can kill other people easily in a car, and that a great number of people would justifiably want to opt-out of that risk if they had the option. Someone's enjoyment of driving won't be nearly enough to justify otherwise that when the time comes.
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Driving 100 mph is also a fun recreational activity that's mostly banned because it's dangerous. If you want to drive 100mph, you need to either go to a track or go to the Autobahn. In the future, I imagine that manually driving will be similarly constrained.
Once the technology is good enough, there is no theoretical reason for a speed limit. I'm looking forward to sitting in the auto-lane cutting code at 200mph while the petrol-heads are doing a thrilling 70 in the manual lane beside me!
Tyres/brakes/everything are more likely to fail the faster you go, and unknowns like animals coming onto the road and weather will always be a thing.
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Autonomous vehicles can't rely upon V2V comms. There are far too many ways for such comms to degrade.
This kind of problem has long been solved in the mobile comms world by strong ECC codes and robust modems and channel coding algorithms. We routinely send autonomous vehicles into interplanetary space so I can't see that linking vehicles on a road is going to be a major blocker. Especially if they're on a redundant mesh network, or a smart highway.
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> Cars == freedom That is a very American statement. For me it is freedom not to have a car.
I agree fully. I have a car, but I commute on the train because I value being able to multitask. I spent half a lifetime stuck in traffic and hated every minute of it. The future cannot come soon enough for me.
On wet days I drive, but I find sitting in traffic worse than pulling teeth, so avoid it as much as I can.
I enjoy driving (not in traffic), but autonomous cars would hopefully make my bicycle commute safer.