[uberlyfer]

Was just about to post the same story, but thought I'd search first. Yesterday I saw there was a target of 2025 for this, so this is a bit of a surprise. Still I anticipate headline, "Driverless Cars Fed Up With Uber Rate Cuts Form SkyNet, Humanity Doomed!"

 

[uberlyfer]

Self cleaning restrooms have already been invented.

Was thinking something similar, but I actually looked into the self-cleaning public bathrooms a while ago and many of them were eventually discontinued. I think they actually cost more to acquire and maintain than they are currently worth. It's just like how they keep threatening that McDs employees will be replaced by robots, and yet well over half of century of McDs and no robots. I guess it still DOES cost more.

 

[uberlyfer]

Brake faster than a human possibly can. In milliseconds it will determine the best course of action.

Your 60 year old retiree driver, in a car that barely fits Uber's 10 year max, with brakes that should have been replaced 10,000 miles ago, will freak out and do A or C. When B, with hard braking included, is the obvious correct answer.

Still lots of unanswered questions about driverless cars. Do you remember recent news that under some circumstances they were currently being programmed to potentially swerve and in effect kill the driver to save multiple pedestrians in the road? I thought immediately of a scenario where some young deer are crossing the road in fog and the car swerves and kills the driver, or some reckless teens aware of the behavior of the avoidance systems dart across highways as an atrocious prank knowing the cars will swerve to avoid them.

There are a number of troubling questions that still need to be answered about these systems, I think it will be a while before they should really be trusted (but odds are we won't wait and there will be a lot of disasters).

 

[uberlyfer]

It's cool stuff, but you can always have an initial example of cool stuff that is still not economically viable yet. You'll know it's viable when it starts popping up everywhere.

 

[uberlyfer]

Agree with both of your posts. Technology will catch up.

Given the number of 60 somethings, and above, still driving, I wonder which is more dangerous.

That's true, pick your poison, although I've known plenty of 60-70 year olds that are still very good drivers. Probably the answer for both humans of a certain age & machines is to slow down so most problems aren't so critical.

 

[uberlyfer]

When machines can do all of the work,what do you imagine they will do with all of the surplus people ?

I think a lot of people "gulp" at that question. It does seem like times are coming when a large portion of the population will not have skills that are needed for production anymore. I've heard futurists & theorists saying we can/should move to a life system where working in the traditional sense is not the focus of most people, and that perhaps everyone would receive the base means of life, with opportunities to improve needed skills to grow their overall prosperity, but it's hard to say.

I have to wonder right now if our ingenuity will really be powerful and timely enough to outpace our consumption of resources that can't be easily replaced.

 

[uberlyfer]

...I suppose the TNC's are operating under the assumption that riders will quickly alter their behavior and expectations for these types of situations. Because the cost per ride will become so low, riders will accept some potentially inconvenient situations in exchange for dirt-cheap, on-demand, transportation.

Yes! I don't think it would be too much of an issue. Even if they keep the pin system, they could require requesters to be using the most accurate form of GPS when they make the request. They could also provide a constantly updating screen that shows the pax their proximity to the car, and the car itself could light up or indicate and make itself obvious as the pax got close.

 

[uberlyfer]

I hope the first driverless car will be referred to as "Hal," and the first driverless attendant shall be named "Dave."

"Open the Prius Back Doors Hal..."

 

[uberlyfer]

Like wal Mart self checkout ?

Like Robots building the cars ?

Wasn't saying it's not here in places or is not coming, but even in the KFC example you showed the food was still getting made by people. Kiosks for everything is sort of the half-way work around, with most successful example being ATMs, but there are still plenty of stumbling blocks.

I live in a nice area, and yet both my local CVS & Grocery have removed self checkout. Some people don't like talking and interacting with machines, and no business wants to lose out on a sale for those that prefer human interaction. I like machines where they speed me along to taking care of a task, but who doesn't hate those obnoxious customer service phone trees where all you want is to speak to a representative and they're trying to save a buck by wasting your time with a robot that doesn't understand your needs?

 

[uberlyfer]

I would like to see a scenario where robo car has a choice of killing a person or itself. I.e. is the command more important than self preservation? In that case you want the kamikaze suicidal robocar to go off the bridge, and not kill the person (if its driving empty). If it has a person in the car, it will be given an algorithm, based on age, bank account status maybe, race maybe, whatever you want to program. Perhaps, who is the better uber customer? And that is how the supercomputer in trunk figures who dies.

Edit: it can also look at health records, and criminal. This will definitely be monitored and edited by insurers and other crooks.
You have already proven that for "safety" you are willing to give up your privacy withh the patriot act. So thanks for that.

Another option: for the 99.9% of the time the car is not under a bridge, overpass, or high tension wire, it ejects you in a parachute bucket seat like Bruce Willis in Die Hard 2...about as sensible as the idea of this stuff really coming any time soon.

 

[uberlyfer]

Given everything you know about us as people, what are the odds that people will even accept driverless cars that kill people from time to time as long as they can now use all that car time to do other things? If the number of people killed in driverless accidents is at or below the number of people that were being killed in human driver accidents per year, what happens then?