Poll

[Cenna]

Poll

 

[Sebastian Castellanos]

There are some serious implications of this.  You would have to have many sensors all over the car, and after a while, could those sensors wear out?  Would there have to be a human consantly behind the wheel? Or would there just be a gps where you want to go and the car takes you there without you having any control of it. I believe it is possible, but would be very hard to maintain.

 

[Konakaga]

There are some serious implications of this.  You would have to have many sensors all over the car, and after a while, could those sensors wear out?  Would there have to be a human consantly behind the wheel? Or would there just be a gps where you want to go and the car takes you there without you having any control of it. I believe it is possible, but would be very hard to maintain.

Google is already far a long in the testing process having had their self driving cars drive more than 1.5 million miles, it's already been proven possible as a concept on a small scale, it's just a matter of scaling up their range/locations & number of vehicles in testing been done large by a handful of cars in select cities, which googles estimates & hopes to achieve by 2020.

1. The car's electronics would be capable of tracking if it needs maintenance.

2. No, for emergency/unexpected things during the tests they have one, but when it hits the market it shouldn't need one.

3. It works similar to Google maps for selection of destination (ie name/address/etc work to direct it.)

So it's not a question of if it will happen, but when it will happen, imo.

 

[Woot]

At some point the technology will be cheap enough and good enough that nobody will argue with it. That's inevitable.

But for the moment there are still many legal and technological hurdles. Getting something like that to work by itself 99.999% of the time instead of just 99% of the time is a serious challenge. For consumers it will come in slow boring stages, more and more autonomy creeping into every new generation of cars.

 

[japan77]

It's a question of when by now, the tech to do has been available for about a decade, and the cost to produce such a car keeps going down, as its quality is actually improving. Also is already a better driver than most people on the road(1 recorded crash across I forget how many cars, but still 3 years) in the US. The only major Issue I see now is the elimination of an entire sector of the economy(the guys who get to fix vehicles), so expect companies like Auto zone to take them to court to keep them off the road.

 

[Fanag]

Would the car prioritize the safety of the driver or of pedestrians/other vehicles if it had to make a choice?

 

[japan77]

That's actually one of the coding debates currently on going in the research, current versions prioritize the pedestrian/other car to reduce its crash ratio, but we'll see once they hit the markets(Note: it's probably going to be a combination of both)

 

[Patrick MacFarlane]

Beware Skynet

 

[japan77]

And that's why we need everyone to agree to install Asimov's on all robots everywhere.

 

[Rin]

The ruling now is that cars are semi-autonomous and will only make safe choices by themselves.

It requires driver input to ask it to change lanes into heavy traffic or go faster than it would. Drivers are also required to pay attention to the road and not sleep, but at least they can sit back and have some soda or so.

This is some protection for the manufacturers too, so they don't get blamed in every car crash. So cars will be more similar to planes in that you can autopilot them from A to B. But people are still required to override it in case of any problems.

 

[Abdul]

There already are, they're called trains.

 

[Doctor]

What happens though when the GPS says your somewhere else when driving on a long road or by mountains? If the car thinks your in the wrong place. Would it drive off the edge trying to get to where it thinks the road is? I think we should switch all the roads for train tracks and have little train carts that can drive for you. That would be a lot simpler to make.

 

[japan77]

If the GPS is inaccurate dramatically(by more than 500ft), its probably something to do with your application, rather than the satellite. Secondly, pure autonomous vehicles are not currently in anyone companies plans(outside Google).

 

[Konakaga]

What happens though when the GPS says your somewhere else when driving on a long road or by mountains? If the car thinks your in the wrong place. Would it drive off the edge trying to get to where it thinks the road is? I think we should switch all the roads for train tracks and have little train carts that can drive for you. That would be a lot simpler to make.

The local sensors on the car to keep it's driving in check take priority over the GPS which simply provides directions, not moment to moment navigation as I understand it.

Would the car prioritize the safety of the driver or of pedestrians/other vehicles if it had to make a choice?

That difficult to say & ideal it would drive in a way to reduce the likely hood of such an event occurring in the first place since it considers many possible scenarios ahead of time it would be better at preventing it than a person could.

 

[War and Peace]

I love that you guys have daily polls, that's really cool. 

Though self driving cars already exist, when will all cars be self driving? Meaning it's not if, but when.

My biggest problem is the GPS, which is not always accurate. The cars not gonna know if there's a detour of if the road is blocked. Honestly I'm not gonna be comfortable in a car without a stearing wheel. 

Also pedestrians and the like, cars making moral choices, that's a problem. 

Other than that I would love to chill while the car does the driving for me, and with 100% self driving cars on the road, no more red lights. That would be great too. 

 

[Abdul]

What happens though when the GPS says your somewhere else when driving on a long road or by mountains? If the car thinks your in the wrong place. Would it drive off the edge trying to get to where it thinks the road is? I think we should switch all the roads for train tracks and have little train carts that can drive for you. That would be a lot simpler to make.

Same as happens now...

 

[Doctor]

The local sensors on the car to keep it's driving in check take priority over the GPS which simply provides directions, not moment to moment navigation as I understand it.

That difficult to say & ideal it would drive in a way to reduce the likely hood of such an event occurring in the first place since it considers many possible scenarios ahead of time it would be better at preventing it than a person could.

Even if it is used just for directions I found when I was in Sydney that those roads were so close together that the GPS thoughts we were on the road next to us several times and we didn't know where we were going.

 

[Rin]

Secondly, pure autonomous vehicles are not currently in anyone companies plans(outside Google).

Tesla was working on it last I checked. And a lot of other car companies are putting research money into it.

There's a lot of misunderstandings about autonomous cars here. Their track record is safer than the average human driven car. They have cameras and are not fully GPS controlled.

They can sense weird behavior, like if a car is going to run a red light or if a pedestrian is thinking about crossing the road. Because they're 100% alert, they can sense this when people might not.

At the worst case, you can treat it like a copilot. They can warn you if someone behind you is possibly drunk, or emergency brake when the person in front of you does.