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... but what happens when it hits a random object in the road and busts a ball joint or tie rod or blows a tire out? What happens if a large object smashes through the windshield? The driving straight down the road is the easy part but having a fully automated car be prepared for every scenario that can pop up is the tough part.
My example was probably exaggerated a bit however the reaction time of the computer to apply braking, steering corrections or whatever is going to be measured in infinitesimally small fractions of a second and would be able to use the car to it's limits safely if for example it had to swerve.
In fully integrated system they would probably space the cars out as far as possible for highway driving unless they were considering fuel mileage. Congestion would be less of an issue, you could even do way with stop signs and lights. A stopped car in traffic would become a rare thing.
I just read that article this weekend to. And the first thing that came to mind was the crazy scoff book I read where everything was based on an android like OS and it got hacked by artificial intelligence. The heroes of the store saved the world by digging up some Windows XP or NT or 2000 machines and hacking the AI to gain control.
That booked seemed just a little to probably for me. I agree we should drive less for safety. I am trying to bike more. No worries that my bike will get a blue screen of death.
There is going to be a lot of failures along the way but at the end of the day a human would never be able to compete against a computer. You could have supercars safely traveling down the highway bumper to bumper at 200MPH.
This tech is going to raise a lot interesting moral questions, you're computer driven car is going down the road and it has choice of hitting the kid that just ran out in front of you or the telephone pole. That said most of these types accidents will be far less common with computer tech to begin with.
Have you actually used computers? Even a brand new iPhone can just randomly crash an app it's running at any time. The difference is that when the 'car' app crashes, so do you.
It's like gun control, where you can't get to all firearms out of the hands of lawbreakers from where we are now without totalitarian government. There is no reasonable way to get from ALL human driven cars with varying vehicle qualities, abilities, and physical conditions, to ALL computer driven cars with identical capabilities and flawless condition.
Then, we act as though ALL driving is urban highway travel. It's not. Say you are driving home from the bar at 2 am, no one else is on the rural road that is the best route home. Your front sensor goes out. There are no cars ahead of you to piggyback onto their sensor in some type of utopian Cyberdyne neural net. Does your vehicle just stop in the middle of the road?
And it's not just a MORAL question that is asked about choices. Every time there is serious injury or death caused by a decision by the AI, there will be multimillion dollar lawsuits against the manufacturers of every bit of that vehicle, physical and computational.
Have you actually used computers? Even a brand new iPhone can just randomly crash an app it's running at any time. The difference is that when the 'car' app crashes, so do you.
It's like gun control, where you can't get to all firearms out of the hands of lawbreakers from where we are now without totalitarian government. There is no reasonable way to get from ALL human driven cars with varying vehicle qualities, abilities, and physical conditions, to ALL computer driven cars with identical capabilities and flawless condition.
Then, we act as though ALL driving is urban highway travel. It's not. Say you are driving home from the bar at 2 am, no one else is on the rural road that is the best route home. Your front sensor goes out. There are no cars ahead of you to piggyback onto their sensor in some type of utopian Cyberdyne neural net. Does your vehicle just stop in the middle of the road?
And it's not just a MORAL question that is asked about choices. Every time there is serious injury or death caused by a decision by the AI, there will be multimillion dollar lawsuits against the manufacturers of every bit of that vehicle, physical and computational.
Tens of thousands of people die in automobile accidents every year. The AI doesn't have to be perfect just better than a human driver. In 30 years it will be illegal to manually drive a car mark my words.
Have you actually used computers? Even a brand new iPhone can just randomly crash an app it's running at any time. The difference is that when the 'car' app crashes, so do you.
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Then, we act as though ALL driving is urban highway travel. It's not. Say you are driving home from the bar at 2 am, no one else is on the rural road that is the best route home. Your front sensor goes out. There are no cars ahead of you to piggyback onto their sensor in some type of utopian Cyberdyne neural net. Does your vehicle just stop in the middle of the road?
One, phones and personal computers don't have multiple redundancies because they don't have to, as an app crashing is not a big deal. Two, autonomous cars will have laser, radar, cameras and GPS all working in concert with multiple redundancies that allow for a sensor to fail and safely continue or safely come to a stop. That's how they work even now. GPS accurate down to the centimeter is already available and being used in many autonomous prototypes, which will help with rural roads that have no cars to piggyback on or on roads with rain and snow that fool the regular cameras. The computers are hard coded, and more stable/insulated than home PCs or phones, as well, as they won't have to be compatible with hundreds of other programs or apps that might conflict or cause issues, which is where most PC or phone problems arise. It's not coding in the BIOS or OS that causes problems usually, it's a program written by a third party source that makes bad memory calls or conflicts with ports/other software. Autonomous cars won't have those issues.
Some have said that human controlled cars will be like horses are now, some have said that they'll be illegal to operate soon.
It's this uncertainty that is worrying. Until we get a definite answer, the worrying will continue.
I am sure hobbyists will continue to manually drive in designated tracks however it will slowly die out. How many people know how to ride a horse today not very many.
Tens of thousands of people die in automobile accidents every year. The AI doesn't have to be perfect just better than a human driver. In 30 years it will be illegal to manually drive a car mark my words.
THANK YOU for being the voice of reason here. It drives me nuts that people dream up one extremely rare incident that might cause a death on the highway and use it to defend the necessity for humans behind the wheel.
Humans, as a whole, are TERRIBLE drivers. Driving is one of our most dangerous activities, along with walking near where cars and trucks are driven. Our reaction times are much too slow for the speeds we drive. A computer can make a million decisions in the time it takes us to make a single decision, let alone react.
Rear end collisions would all but dissappear. Distracted driving accidents would disappear. Drunk driving accidents would disappear. Even inclement weather would cease to be a life threatening issue as the computer would handle dark and wet roads much better than we do. Would other types of accidents increase? Sure. There will probably be one-off glitches and failures, some of which may even lead to fatalities. But I would happily take 10, 100, or even 1000 computer-related fatalities to remove the 10's of thousands of fatalities that occur every year due to having humans behind the wheel.
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