self driving cars...

[TurboPablo]

Good I'm glad we agree on that.
And yeah I don't expect a complete and total banning of driving in my lifetime legislatively, but we will eventually hit a point where its generally socially frowned upon or maybe limited to different areas and roads. You're not alone in building your car and loving it. I've done it myself.
I think it'll only take a generation or two for driving your own car to seem quaint.

Yes, I agree- for places like LA, Seattle, Chicago. Sure.

But let's remember we just elected a president who pretty much said "fuck the environment, let's do coal again" and chances are he will win again next year.

Even when technology gets to the point where taking the F350 away from Bubba makes perfect sense, good luck finding someone to legislate that if he/she needs ANY support from some areas in the country.

Doing the cross country drive last year after spending 2 decades in LA and Vegas was an eye opening experience for me.

Even the area I currently live in, which used to be a coal mining area, is kind of like that. I don't think I've seen a single Prius ever since I moved here. This will take time.

All excellent points.

I think it's easy for folks in more modern urban areas to idealize stuff that isn't quite appliclable to huge parts of the country. Wide open, straight 8 lane L.A. highway? Sure, this could be mint out there.

The I95 corridor through Providence? Not so much. Let's not even try to imagine it in a Boston rush hour. Somebody would get out and beat your AI vehicle to death

[VTM]

Good I'm glad we agree on that.
And yeah I don't expect a complete and total banning of driving in my lifetime legislatively, but we will eventually hit a point where its generally socially frowned upon or maybe limited to different areas and roads. You're not alone in building your car and loving it. I've done it myself.
I think it'll only take a generation or two for driving your own car to seem quaint.

Yes, I agree- for places like LA, Seattle, Chicago. Sure.

But let's remember we just elected a president who pretty much said "fuck the environment, let's do coal again" and chances are he will win again next year.

Even when technology gets to the point where taking the F350 away from Bubba makes perfect sense, good luck finding someone to legislate that if he/she needs ANY support from some areas in the country.

Doing the cross country drive last year after spending 2 decades in LA and Vegas was an eye opening experience for me.

Even the area I currently live in, which used to be a coal mining area, is kind of like that. I don't think I've seen a single Prius ever since I moved here. This will take time.

All excellent points.

I think it's easy for folks in more modern urban areas to idealize stuff that isn't quite appliclable to huge parts of the country. Wide open, straight 8 lane L.A. highway? Sure, this could be mint out there.

The I95 corridor through Providence? Not so much. Let's not even try to imagine it in a Boston rush hour. Somebody would get out and beat your AI vehicle to death

That's a big 10-4 good buddy!

So how's that self drivin' big rig delivering my grits n' porridge come February gonna put on it's own tire chains?

What about when I'm runnin' shine and jump a crik? Self drivin' car gonna pull a Boeing and take a nose dive into the drink!

[TurboPablo]

Good I'm glad we agree on that.
And yeah I don't expect a complete and total banning of driving in my lifetime legislatively, but we will eventually hit a point where its generally socially frowned upon or maybe limited to different areas and roads. You're not alone in building your car and loving it. I've done it myself.
I think it'll only take a generation or two for driving your own car to seem quaint.

Yes, I agree- for places like LA, Seattle, Chicago. Sure.

But let's remember we just elected a president who pretty much said "fuck the environment, let's do coal again" and chances are he will win again next year.

Even when technology gets to the point where taking the F350 away from Bubba makes perfect sense, good luck finding someone to legislate that if he/she needs ANY support from some areas in the country.

Doing the cross country drive last year after spending 2 decades in LA and Vegas was an eye opening experience for me.

Even the area I currently live in, which used to be a coal mining area, is kind of like that. I don't think I've seen a single Prius ever since I moved here. This will take time.

All excellent points.

I think it's easy for folks in more modern urban areas to idealize stuff that isn't quite appliclable to huge parts of the country. Wide open, straight 8 lane L.A. highway? Sure, this could be mint out there.

The I95 corridor through Providence? Not so much. Let's not even try to imagine it in a Boston rush hour. Somebody would get out and beat your AI vehicle to death

That's a big 10-4 good buddy!

So how's that self drivin' big rig delivering my grits n' porridge come February gonna put on it's own tire chains?

What about when I'm runnin' shine and jump a crik? Self drivin' car gonna pull a Boeing and take a nose dive into the drink!

DBN always drops the proper perspective.

[itchyfingers]

Imagine if the General Lee drove itself... I bet he'd rip them strips of denim right off Daisy's ass.

[Harvest]

<stuff>

I was just pointing out that many of the issues you raised don't work today with human drivers (or at least a non-zero percentage of them) to the tune of 37000 deaths per year as others have mentioned, and the technology ones are either already solved or trivial to implement. I think we're a few design iterations away from self-drive being provably safer than you driving, definitely not decades.

There are other ethical questions that need to be answered as well of course, and getting people to decide on what's acceptable will be an uphill battle for sure.

AI drivers can react much faster than you can, but they cannot defeat physics; there have been and will continue to be situations where a pedestrian jumps into the path and the car knows it cannot stop in time - does it mow over the pedestrian and save the occupants? Does it swerve into oncoming traffic and risk the occupants? What if the pedestrians in the way are a class of kindergarten-aged kids? What if they're all 85+ year old terminal cancer patients on a field trip?

Then there are legal and political implications too. What if the operator of your self driving car decides it doesn't want you to go to a particular destination because a rival company is selling their self driving cars there? Or to a political protest? Is the operator responsible for safeguarding your location data or can they sell it to advertisers? Can that data be used in court? etc. Who takes legal responsibility for the car? The operator or the passenger? How do you defeat the insurance company lobby when it becomes obvious the accident rate is a tiny fraction of what it once was?

Will an incremental improvement over human performance be acceptable if there are 10000 deaths per year or is zero the only acceptable number to allow large scale adoption of the technology? If incremental is ok, what's the number? Should holdouts be allowed since they will represent an increased risk to safety?

Then again, many of the decisions on this will be made by folks in washington who still can't explain what the internet is, so maybe you're right.