Last month the New York Times’ Kashmir Hill published a major story on how GM collects driver behavior data then sells access (through LexisNexis) to insurance companies, which will then jack…
Full autonomous vehicles, and particularly significant levels of adoption of them are decades away
the only way fully-autonomous vehicles will truly work and work as envisioned, is if user-operated ones are taken off the roads entirely. and yes, that is at least ‘decades away’
At this point we’re not even sure if fully autonomous vehicles are possible.
Yes that one guy has been saying it’ll be ready next year for the passed 10 years, but no self driving company has been able to get an autonomous car from point A to point B in all road conditions that a competent human can manage.
Even aircraft autopilot is not as autonomous as what people want out of self driving cars. Pilots are still required to be at their seats the entire flight in case something unexpected happens. And there are a lot more unexpected things on a road than in the middle of the sky. Even discounting human drivers being in the way, a self driving car needs to be able to recognize everything a human can and react to it better than a human would. I’m not sure that’s possible, even with “AI”. The human brain is insanely good at pattern matching, and it took millions of years of trial and error evolution to luck our way into that. How can someone guarantee an AI is going to be better?
That’s not just “at least decades away;” that’s literally impossible. Streets, by definition, will always need to accommodate road users that will never be computerized, such as pedestrians, cyclists, horse-drawn carriages, etc.
“decades” from now, autonomous vehicles will have their own roadways, designed for them and with the infrastructure needed for the tech at that future time.
the streets as we know them today will be for last-mile (literally) transport, pedestrians, bicycles, some forms of public transit, and what not.
Maybe, but probably not because where would you put them? We’re not going to bulldoze through the street grid again like we did for the freeways and “urban renewal” (read: kicking out the black people) back in the '50s. We learned our lesson about not displacing people like that and passed NEPA to make it extremely difficult to do from now on.
the only way fully-autonomous vehicles will truly work and work as envisioned, is if user-operated ones are taken off the roads entirely. and yes, that is at least ‘decades away’
At this point we’re not even sure if fully autonomous vehicles are possible.
Yes that one guy has been saying it’ll be ready next year for the passed 10 years, but no self driving company has been able to get an autonomous car from point A to point B in all road conditions that a competent human can manage.
Even aircraft autopilot is not as autonomous as what people want out of self driving cars. Pilots are still required to be at their seats the entire flight in case something unexpected happens. And there are a lot more unexpected things on a road than in the middle of the sky. Even discounting human drivers being in the way, a self driving car needs to be able to recognize everything a human can and react to it better than a human would. I’m not sure that’s possible, even with “AI”. The human brain is insanely good at pattern matching, and it took millions of years of trial and error evolution to luck our way into that. How can someone guarantee an AI is going to be better?
That’s not just “at least decades away;” that’s literally impossible. Streets, by definition, will always need to accommodate road users that will never be computerized, such as pedestrians, cyclists, horse-drawn carriages, etc.
“decades” from now, autonomous vehicles will have their own roadways, designed for them and with the infrastructure needed for the tech at that future time.
the streets as we know them today will be for last-mile (literally) transport, pedestrians, bicycles, some forms of public transit, and what not.
Maybe, but probably not because where would you put them? We’re not going to bulldoze through the street grid again like we did for the freeways and “urban renewal” (read: kicking out the black people) back in the '50s. We learned our lesson about not displacing people like that and passed NEPA to make it extremely difficult to do from now on.