SELF-DRIVING CARS: THE HYPE VERSUS REALITY

[peteski]

8 hours ago, Joe Handley said:

Gotta make fun of the people panic buying a decade's worth of TP for a respiratory virus somehow?

Funny or not, I'm sort of caught with my pants down here.  I normally go shopping  on Thursday nights. Store at that time is almost empty (closes at 9pm) and shelves are always fully stocked and about 3 checkout lines are open.

I guess I didn't keep up with the news - When I got there last Thursday at 7pm, I couldn't find a parking spot, all the checkout lines were open and store was bustling with activity!!  WTF?!  I'm running low on TP (and since I didn't expect Coronapocalipse I didn't stock up earlier).  So now it is Tuesday, and I still haven't found a single roll of TP anywhere around the area!  I still have 4 left, but if this hoarding spree doesn't ease up soon, I will have to start using dry oak leaves from my yard. Or just my fingers!  Ewwww!  This is absolutely nuts, and I can't believe I'm now talking about it in a self-driving cars thread! Shame on me!  To make matters worse, I have tightness in my chest, sniffles and cough.  No fever. Hopefully, just a plain ol' cold.

[Ace-Garageguy]

54 minutes ago, peteski said:

 

...This is absolutely nuts, and I can't believe I'm now talking about it in a self-driving cars thread! Shame on me!  

Not at all. The self-driving car craze is as mindlessly monkey-see, monkey-do idiotic as the panic hoarding of toilet paper. 

There are not, unfortunately, very many people with whatever it takes to stand up and say a stupid idea is a stupid idea.

And the herd instinct seems to be getting stronger with the decline of general intelligence and testosterone.

 

[DonW]

Here's a man who had no time for self-driving cars, I wouldn't like to speculate on how much TP he  got through...

And testosterone was not in short supply here!

[espo]

I was reading the latest Car & Driver Magazine yesterday and they had several articles on the whole self driving cars thing. I have to agree with some of their observations that the manufactures and suppliers are finding that the technology to replace the human brain is a little harder todo than they thought. 

[DonW]

'Open the pod bay doors Hal'

'I'm sorry Dave I can't do that'...

 

[espo]

1 hour ago, DonW said:

'Open the pod bay doors Hal'

'I'm sorry Dave I can't do that'...

 

That movie was a peak into our future. 

[Ace-Garageguy]

9 hours ago, espo said:

... manufactures and suppliers are finding that the technology to replace the human brain is a little harder to do than they thought. 

That's it in a nutshell...except it's a whole hell of a lot harder.

I watched the early trials of the first-gen Darpa-sponsored self-drivers navigating around rocks and ditches in the desert, and thought "well, that's cool, but the rocks and ditches aren't all moving independently, or stepping in front of the thing, or cutting it off with lane-changes, or running stop lights. It should be interesting to see what happens when all that gets stirred into the mix".

Turns out I was right. The level of "intelligence" and fail-safe reliability necessary for a full-function self-drive environment is higher, probably by an order of magnitude, than anything ever previously devised by humans.

 

[peteski]

To get self driving cars to be as good driving as average human (no  funny comments  from the peanut gallery ), they will have to use some fuzzy logic, and quantum computing.

Edited March 19, 2020 by peteski

[Big John]

Hi Tech the wonder of our modern age.  What would we do without it?  We may find out sooner than we expect.  It doesn't work so well when the power grid goes down or someone hacks it.  Threaten the invoice billing system and they shut down the pipeline.

[webestang]

I guess it would very easy to pass a driver's test in a self driving car.....? But then what do I need a driver's license for if the car is doing all the driving.....? Can it take itself to the mechanic ( sorry, computer tech).....? 

[Big John]

Self Driving Dragsters!  It would be kind of like the old COX thimbledrome days but without the string.

[doorsovdoon]

Personally I don't think self driving cars, on a global scale, will ever be a thing, not that it's impossible, or that people will be too stubborn to accept such a technology, it'll never be a thing because of lawsuits. Say your family members died in a self driving car because the computer thought the better outcome in a crash was to dive the car off the road into a deep river (that the computer probably doesn't know is there by the way) rather than head on into a school bus on a single track road, it might have been the right decision but would you accept it? You'd be saying to yourself for the rest of your life "If I were driving I would have done this, or done that" Self driving cars will probably be introduced on a wide scale one day, but the court hearings over such controversies would soon see it all dismantled, and we all know insurance companies can be a bit dodgy when they feel the heat so there would be scandals involved as well. 

[peteski]

I think self-driving cars could be doable if *ALL* the vehicles on the roads were self-driving.  The mix of human-driven and self-driving vehicles seems like it is doomed to failure.  Humans are too unpredictable.  But that is not a future I'm looking forward too.  Thankfully, I'll probably leave this planet before that happens.

[89AKurt]

Time and place for such technology.  The Mars rovers are the best use of such technology.  Airlines have autopilot.  I'm guessing ships do, but don't recommend while in the Suez Canal during high winds.  Drones use GPS to fly paths while filming construction sites.  The recent story of the jerk in the back seat of a Tesla getting arrested, then after release gets another to continue, won't be funny when he takes out a family on vacation.  IMO this technology is making some people even dumber, totally reliant on technology to simply exist (as I type on this forum I'm a hypocrite?).  I don't live in a crowded city, by choice, perhaps when all those are in their dedicated Lexus Lane it's a good thing.  Knowing they want 35,000+ pound semi trucks to be autonomous, to save money on hiring humans, worries me.   Can hardly wait for a CME, it will stop this nonsense, and everything else for that matter.  Enjoy what we have at the moment.

[Draggon]

Fast forward to the time when electric and/or self driving cars are the majority. Insert "Darkside" into the mix. 

I'm old and resistant to technology, but even so, would I be able to buy a self-driving car for the price of a used Honda in my lifetime? 

[Brian Austin]

Remember when manufacturers were developing automated highway driving using buried electrical conduits?

 

This GM promo film from 1956 envisions hands-free cruising:

 

 

Side note:  I'd like to know more about the nifty miniature set depicting the futuristic highway interchange.  The model cars seem to be driven with a conveyor system used in World's Fair displays.

[Draggon]

That certainly was entertaining. A self-driving car with ice cream, cool drinks, and a smoke--I'm all in for that! Now where did I put that bottle of Vodka? 

 

Edited May 16, 2021 by Draggon

[Aaronw]

On 5/15/2021 at 11:28 AM, Draggon said:

Fast forward to the time when electric and/or self driving cars are the majority. Insert "Darkside" into the mix. 

I'm old and resistant to technology, but even so, would I be able to buy a self-driving car for the price of a used Honda in my lifetime? 

I think this last bit will result in a major shift. Why would you own a car at that point, just use a car service. Instead of having a car sit in your garage or parking lot at work 1/2 to 2/3 of the time, just rent and schedule a pickup when you need it. No drivers to pay so they can have a fleet sitting around in strategic locations. Sure there will be some who own a car for their specific needs, rural areas or frequent short notice driving, as a status symbol etc, but I think over time a large number will give up car ownership.

That is assuming they get past the occasional freak accident like plowing into the side of a semi because the computer didn't recognize the trailer as an obstacle in the roadway. I think most of the members here are primarily of the when you pry the keys from my cold dead fingers variety (who'd of guessed a place called Model Cars would be full of people who love cars), but a lot of people hate driving and have no attachment to automobiles. For those people self driving cars cannot get here soon enough.     

[Rodent]

Another important part of this will be V2V communication, where your self-driving car communicates with other  nearby vehicles.

[Draggon]

37 minutes ago, Aaronw said:

 just rent and schedule a pickup when you need it.      

That would be really weird seeing a car pull up with no one in it ?

[Brian Austin]

IIRC, some writers have dreamed up scenarios where few people decades from now would own a car.  Most would subscribe to a service.  The self-driving cars would be circulating through the city, picking a dropping off customers, freeing them from having to find a place to park.  I think also someone suggested cities could spread out more with self-driving cars.  Just what we need...more sprawl!

I think most far-future scenarios I've read in the past few years seem to expect no older vehicles sharing the roads with the spiffy new autonomous ones.  I think some futurists would love to see non-autonomous vehicles ruled off the roads.

 

But the scenarios I've read all are 20-40 years off into the future.  FWIW, I don't recall these articles discussing flying cars.  :-)

 

 

 

[peteski]

2 hours ago, Brian Austin said:

But the scenarios I've read all are 20-40 years off into the future.  FWIW, I don't recall these articles discussing flying cars.  ?

Well, it if flies then is it really an automobile (car)? 

[Brian Austin]

Some "flying cars" in development have been carefully described as street-legal aircraft you drive from airstrip to airstrip, rather than a car you could take off from the road to avoid traffic.  :-)

[Richard Bartrop]

16 hours ago, peteski said:

Well, it if flies then is it really an automobile (car)? 

"Car" has been used to describe railway carriages and the cockpit(?) of an airship, so it's not exclusive to automobile.  If you really want to get really pedantic, "automobile" just means "self moving" so I guess an aircraft counts as a kind of  "automobile".

"Flying car" is a good term for what they're attempting,  an aircraft that has the same utility as a regular car.  Kind of like how "horseless carriage" encapsulated what those gas buggies were about in the early days.

As that Firebird II movie shows, we should know better when it comes to making sweeping statements about the future.  Lots of otherwise clever people do let themselves get seduced by having their own ideas parroted back at them, and bad ideas get magnified and distorted..  Personally, I think just the fact that we can make machines that can just look at something, and kind of sort of understand what it's looking at is pretty amazing, but it wouldn't be the first time something that was considered a trivial detail turns out not to be so trivial after all.  On the other hand, some things that seem insurmountable turn out to be pretty surmountable. so we'll see.  

Are we becoming too dependent on technology?  If we are, that happened about the time people discovered spears are better than teeth for bringing down a mastodon.  Being dependent on technology is kind of H. Sapiens' thing, and for the most part, it served us well.   Ironically, one of the ways the horse was supposed to be superior to the automobile was that it could think and react for itself in a way no dumb machine ever could.  Maybe people will develop an affection for their self driving cars the way people do for horses. 

I think people will still want to own cars if they don't have to drive them.  There is still that idea of your own piece of mobile territory, and the whole notion of pride of ownership, and there are all kinds of ways that people enjoy cars that aren't about how they drive.

 

[peteski]

2 hours ago, Richard Bartrop said:

Are we becoming too dependent on technology?  If we are, that happened about the time people discovered spears are better than teeth for bringing down a mastodon.  Being dependent on technology is kind of H. Sapiens' thing, and for the most part, it served us well.  

There are examples where we *ARE* becoming too dependent (or even addicted) on modern technology.  Just look at the kids walking home from school:  each kid in the group has their nose in their smart phone, with the thumbs tapping feverishly.  What ever happened to the in-person live conversation with the friend walking next to you?  Or people walking into all sorts of trouble (off the cliff, into a fountain, into a ditch, or crash their car killing someone), because of their smart-phone addiction?

Or people solely depending on all those safety gadgets in their cars, not paying any attention to  their driving.  Yes, lots of new technology is very good, but only if used judiciously.  And plenty of people out there fail to do that.

I can't wait to see what happens when Amazon and others start drone deliveries.  That should make a great shooting gallery for bored kids.