Trust me, autonomous cars will not go far.. Too many safety hazards, and humans are far smarter than computers.
Or perhaps it could have like... an emergency button where it will throw on its 4 ways, alert all other vehicles to make room for it, and basically punch it to the nearest hospital... there would have to be a function like this... I mean... I don't want to take a turn here, but how many wives have had their water break and then have to be sped to the hospital... that's not really something you want to just be waiting around for your self driving car to slowly shuffle you there... you want to be hauling ass to get there on time. Plus... that is a fairly common occurrence for something like that to happen, so I would be lead to believe that they MUST end up being equipped with something like that. Now if you're dumb enough to not push the button in times of emergency, well, that's your own fault then I guess...
There are racetracks, fields, empty lots, off-roading areas, etc. In general, the automatization of traffic would be bad, but not catastrophic. Look what happened to horses: riding did not disappear, it just turned into an enthusiast's game. --- Post updated --- Yeah. Road rage is especially smart.
It's like I said before, you can't take risk out of life. Maybe a perfectly-designed system could save lives by preventing accidents, but it will introduce its own hazards. It can't tell the difference between a harmless text walker and a murderous thug. While it might notice things a human would miss, it can also miss things a human would notice, like the time one crashed because it mistook the big, white side of a semi-trailer for open sky, and people have found that it can be possible to fool their sign-recognition in very odd ways - someone even got an autonomous car to mistake stop signs for "speed limit 45" signs with things that looked like simple, everyday vandalism, or even just a worn, faded sign, to the human eye, so who knows what they're going to do when snow gets involved or signs get damaged. Furthermore, "smart technology" (technology that can act on its own initiative, as opposed to "dumb technology" that can only react to human input) is a potential force multiplier for both incompetence and avarice. Humans are guilty of a lot of dumb stuff - we space out, we don't pay the attention we should, we do dumb stuff out of anger or because we think the road is emptier than it actually is, but those mistakes are specific and localized. A programmer working on an autonomous car makes a mistake, that mistake is now live in thousands of cars everywhere, with no idea when, where, or how it will first manifest. Then, when someone does discover and report the glitch, someone has to wake up, find the source (which may not be easy), fix the source (99 little bugs in the code, 99 little bugs in the code, take one down, patch it around, 127 little bugs in the code), and push the update out to all the cars that are out there in use. Hopefully, no one else has the same problem while all this is going on. If you're driving through California and someone cuts you off because he didn't see you there or forgot to check his mirrors, remember... he might be a Google programmer on his way to work. Considering the way some have said they work their people, I really wouldn't trust them to be clear-headed enough to program such a car competently. As for the "malice" angle, well, the only form of computer security that's anything close to perfect is isolation. Giving a computer the ability to drive a car and then connecting it to the internet is just asking for trouble, because any security measures the designers put in place can be hacked around given enough time. Really, existing "convenience" features already become vulnerabilities when a car is connected to the internet, as the Jeep Cherokee hackers showed. Drive-by-wire? Stolen vehicle recovery system? Throttle is remotely killable. Crash-avoidance auto braking? Vehicle is remotely stoppable. It parks itself? Throttle and steering can now be remotely activated as well. You think a hacker wouldn't abuse this stuff for revenge, a K&R scheme, or just mischief? What about a future dystopian government? And that, in the end, is what it's really about. Freedom. The freedom to go wherever, whenever, without anyone having to specifically allow it, without anyone even having to know about it. In other words, the freedom to disappear. No communications with a central server or with other cars to give you away and nothing that can be done to remotely rein you in. In that way, I would go so far as to say that a switch from manual to autonomous automobiles would be more transformative, and significantly more destructive to freedom, than the switch from horse to automobile a century ago. Even if a horse wasn't always cooperative, it could at least be controlled somewhat in some situations, couldn't be mind-controlled to bring you to a specific location, didn't broadcast your location 24/7, and didn't have doors that could be remotely locked to trap its rider. When you say you would welcome a switch to autonomous cars, what you're really saying is that you welcome a switch from an environment where the rider controls the vehicle, to one where the rider simply trusts the vehicle... and when the vehicle starts answering to someone other than you for where it will go and when, you're going to wish you'd ignored the siren songs of safety and efficiency back in 2017.
Hilarious. Humans are smarter at Imagination, or Creative thinking. Robots are ridiculously good at mundane tasks It may not come soon. But it is nearly inevitable.
My dad keeps saying that all cars in the future will be self-driving and not owned by anyone. We'll simply request an Uber and a car shows up and takes us to our destination. We don't have to pay for insurance, gas, or the car itself. He even predicts that you will need a special license in order to actually drive, since computers are so much safer than human drivers. Personally, I don't see the car going away, but I do agree that self-driving cars will be a lot more commonplace.
A car that shows up upon request and takes you to your destination...isn't that innovative contraption called "a taxi"?
You trust a lot of things. You trust your home won't have structural problems. You trust nobody on the road will try to push you off it. You trust nobody's waiting to empty a 12 gauge into your face. You trust you'll get your paycheck. Why shouldn't you trust an autonomous car?
I think that the way the tesla autopilot works is the best autopilot and we shouldnt move onto more just making it more functionable. I think that because its mostly a car wich you can drive but it also can drive itself on motorways so theyre doing more like a driver aid than a completly new system
I'm not very worried about self-driving cars becoming mandatory. If anything, much like electric vehicles, self-driving cars will be easily accessible in the future, but not required at all. Unless some kind of worldwide totalitarian regime happens anytime soon, car enthusiasts will be able to enjoy their dream cars for many years to come
Because I would rather not star in a modern-day version of Niemöller's poem. "First they came for the street racers - and I didn't speak out because street racing is illegal and dangerous. Then they came for the V8s - and I didn't speak out because we needed to consume and pollute less. Then they came for the remaining combustion engines - and I didn't speak out because London and Paris had air quality problems. Then they came for the cars you could drive yourself - and I didn't speak out because we needed to reduce traffic fatalities. Then they came for me - and I had no way to run."
Do you know the phrase "know where to stop"? Also, it's not like dictatorships implement all the rules in a second. It took Hitler and Pol Pot a few months, and Stalin a few years.
