I have seen enough threads spiral into an off-topic debate on whether autonomy in cars is good or bad. Nobody likes to see it, and if you join in on the debate, you feel weird because it is off-topic. I figured this would be a beneficial thread to have. A few ground rules: -Keep discussion civil, you can criticize thinking, don’t criticize people. I know people can get fired up over things like this, so just keep yourself in check. Just to get the ball rolling here, as I know a lot of people have opinions, I think that autonomous cars will be beneficial in safety and in travel time.
Well, here is my opinion on it. Autonomous vehicles are fairly neat, and I believe they will be beneficial for large cities, and for people whom are disabled or are unable to drive. There seems to be a lot of people claiming that it's going to take away manual driving, but this simply isn't true. If you take a look at a lot of semi-self driving automobiles (Teslas, etc), they are far from perfect. In fact, you cannot even consider Tesla's to be autonomous like they claim to be. If fully autonomous technology comes along, it's going to be a long long time before it hits the market. A lot of automakers, such as VW, have implemented self driving features into automobiles, but have driving as a priority or at least a 50/50 split between the two. If we take a look at VW's newest concept, the ID Buzz, we can see this in action. Would I drive a self driving car? Hell yes. Some roads I cannot stand to drive on, and I think that long freeways are pretty dang boring. But for curvy and fun roads, I'd most definitely manually operate a vehicle. But this is just my personal preference. In conclusion, no, self driving will not take away regular driving. It's going be nothing more than a driving aid for long freeway trips probably. Car culture is still alive and booming, and there are lots of people that are interested in automobiles to keep the hobby alive. There is no need to fear the future. Thanks for coming to my Ted-Talk.
I think that car culture as a whole is going to evolve in the future, leaning more heavily to lightly nodded JDM and BMW/Audi sedans and such. Now I have ideas for a realistic cyberpunk racing game aah
AI computers don't have emotions, so they don't have hungers for power, to takeover human society. The only way to AI takeover is that human beings voluntarily give up their/our right to enjoy life. Yep, those people also claim that 80% of population are "useless eaters" and should be euthanatized, to free up space for the 20% "elites" to create new goods. The history repeats itself, you may want to check out this.. Most people(including myself) don't "enjoy" being healthy, however we always regret it when we lose health. Some people may feel driving is a burden, however when they found that they lose the right to drive even they did nothing wrong, they'll do what ever it takes to fight back. In terms of aging, people's ability to drive diminsh gradually. Computer maintain 100% performance but the faliure rate increases with age, when they fail, they fail completely. AI is good for a single task, not good for complex tasks. Autopilots in airliners don't have to avoid other traffics every second. And for some vehicles such as the A330 and B737MAX, the autonomy is too much and they don't give the control authority to the pilot/driver when they fail. Conclusion: Manual driving should always available for manned vehicles.
The same argument can be made with humans, and humans never reach the 100% performance part in the first place.
Sometimes human reach 120% performance, such as in an emergency situation. A computer always reacts the same regardless emergency or not. Therefore, computer driving and human driving should cooperate, instead of one replacing the other. Also a problem is the computer aging is often undetectable before a failure. When a driver is too old to drive they retire and transportation companies hire new drivers. For computer drivers, they either fully functional of completely fail, It's hard for engineers to detect aging. BTW, it's always fun to watch a racing session between a human and a computer. If our guesses are correct, the computer would win but the human would get a better fastest lap time.
