News driverless cars

I can help but think there will be a whole heap of problems, some of them serious.

It is only a matter of time until someone is run over. What happens then; is the car capable or recognising it has been involved in a serious accident, or does it just drive off?
 
Blobbenstein said:
I can help but think there will be a whole heap of problems, some of them serious.

It is only a matter of time until someone is run over. What happens then; is the car capable or recognising it has been involved in a serious accident, or does it just drive off?
Click to expand...

There are problems, sure, but it's not nearly as bad as you'd think, and actually very promising.

This Oatmeal comic explains it better than I can.
 
yes, I think a lot of problems could be overcome with enough processing power.

Like it says, people die every day because of drink driving, texting, etc, so it makes sense.
 
Blobbenstein said:
yes, I think a lot of problems could be overcome with enough processing power.

Like it says, people die every day because of drink driving, texting, etc, so it makes sense.
Click to expand...

Mhm.

I think it's a matter of recognizing that driving itself is flawed and never safe, and although a driverless car might not be safe, with some work it will certainly be able to be just as safe as a human-driven one.

My prediction is that there are going to be certain human problems that driverless cars will totally solve (such as issues of attention and distraction), but that they will also introduce their own separate set of problems.
 
The estimates I've read are 3.5 million truck drivers. Add the 1.3 million jobs created by the shale boom, most of which will be gone in the next several years. You have to assume foreigners will be effected as well. It's not just a problem. It's a potential crisis we could be talking about.
 
trucks will probably have someone on board to be responsible for the thing, and the load.....it will be a while before they go around unmanned, I would think.....if they were unmanned, they could easily be stopped and unloaded by thieves.
 
This panic makes a few assumptions:
  1. Driverless cars will replace human drivers sooner rather than later, with no time for the economy to prepare
  2. Driverless car technology will, within that same time frame, be applied to trucks and not just personal cars
  3. In the event that this does happen, there will not be other aspects of transportation that need managing, providing job opportunities
Once driverless cars are deployed en masse, are largely successful, and the technology begins creeping into other facets of road life - such as trucking - then would be the time to start panicking and putting that toward solutions. But right now, your problem doesn't exist, and in the event that it does exist it will more likely than not be in a context that doesn't make sense right now.

Currently, our best specimen of a driverless car goes just over 20 mph, looks like a cartoon ladybug, and can only drive under ideal conditions. I think it's a bit overkill to worry about it pushing truck drivers off the road just yet. Until the technology is vastly improved, the only use it will have is to act as a sort of taxi, for short personal drives. That's hardly comparable to hauling commercial goods on the open road.
 
I bet the same was true for the people who took care of horses, coaches and who cleaned the excess horse manure from the streets before the advent of automobiles. Or the chauffeurs driving automobiles (or coaches) before everybody learned to drive his own car. Society evolves.

Somehow this reminds me a bit about the comments how horrible it would be if everybody went vegan, what would butchers and hog farmers then do? My guess is that they would find some other profession.
 
New technologies cause some jobs to become obsolete, and create other jobs. Before the advent of computers, there weren't unemployed IT professionals, computer repairmen, etc., wandering the streets with nothing to do. Life isn't static.
 
I think of a possible future for trucks similar to the autopilot in an aircraft ... The truck driver would negotiate the city roads, but once the truck was on the highway, he could lean back, let the auto-driver take over and get some rest.
 
I admittedly did not read the links (yet) but I keep seeing all of these cars on the road with no people in them...I mean, what's the point...where are the cars going? Lol
 
Andy_T said:
I think of a possible future for trucks similar to the autopilot in an aircraft ... The truck driver would negotiate the city roads, but once the truck was on the highway, he could lean back, let the auto-driver take over and get some rest.
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Yes.

Even if driverless cars can only ever drive on the road about as well as a human, and even if they end up suffering from the same mistakes people do, there is zero potential for distraction, so the humans in the car can be doing whatever the hell they want and there won't be a problem.

The danger of texting while driving could basically be wiped off the map if driverless cars really take off.
 
maybe it will happen that if most cars are self drive that it could be easier to cross a busy road...it would be possible to have a devise which stopped cars at some point on a road, to act as a temporary crossing place....or maybe a sign that one could hold up......or even if someone made a sign with their hands, like a 'C' shape, and the cars would recognise it and stop.

At busy times the main road near me is really hard to cross, so that would be great.


I suppose a crossing process like that could get abused, by kids etc....but then so can the present pedestrian crossings.
 
I suppose you could have a more relaxed auto-drive optional system, where you could control indirectly where the car went, by just pressing 'left' or 'right' buttons for example, and the car would take the turns you wanted, without the person doing the driving. Perhaps that could be called 'The Back-seat Driver' mode.
 
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Blobbenstein said:
I suppose you could have a more relaxed auto-drive optional system, where you could control indirectly where the car went, by just pressing 'left' or 'right' buttons for example, and the car would take the turns you wanted, without the person doing the driving. Perhaps that could be called 'The Back-seat Driver' mode.
Click to expand...

This could also make up for GPS fumbles.
 
I don't even know how to drive but it seems like a good idea. The government must make a lot of money from fuel duty though so how will they make up the money if they take that away?
 

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