Will drones make self drive cars obsolete?

antodeco · 28-05-2016 08:20AM

This seems much more errective

14wp76

Bit cynical · 28-05-2016 09:31AM

o1s1n wrote: »

I still don't know how they're going to get around this

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ixIoDYVfKA0

If a crash is inevitable, then the auto makers can avoid responsibility by handing control back to the sleeping human driver at the last moment.

mickoneill31 · 28-05-2016 10:43AM

Capt'n Midnight wrote: »

Tell that to the 60,000 people Foxconn are replacing.

What about the millions involved in jobs made possible by computing. I don't think anybody is stupid enough to think that some jobs don't get lost when technology advances but if we lose 1 million jobs and it facilitates the creation of 10 million of equal or better quality, I'll live with it. It happens over decades, not overnight.

Nearly every job now would have been done by several people if it existed 20 or 30 years ago. We are not awash with unemployed, unemployment is probably down since then.

Capt'n Midnight · 28-05-2016 05:38PM

mickoneill31 wrote: »

What about the millions involved in jobs made possible by computing.

Back in the 1960's in most industrial countries it was possible to get a new job tomorrow. If you wanted to work, you could.

Now we've "only" 8% unemployment which means one in 12 people won't find a job or if they do it will only be at the expense of others.

And our jobless rate is far higher than 8% thanks to keeping people in education years longer. People with degrees are now chasing jobs that would have been available to people leaving school with the inter in days gone by.

endacl · 28-05-2016 05:40PM

The Backwards Man wrote: »

You're getting way ahead of yourself.

Drones and self drive cars are a long ways off for those of us that would benefit most from drones and self drive cars, they'll probably be competing in large urban areas in the near future, where self propulsion should have been outlawed decades ago, but I'll be old and grey before a drone takes my turf home or a self drive car takes me home from the pub.

Years ago, my grandad had a donkey that knew his own way home from the pub. Does that count?

Bit cynical · 28-05-2016 06:04PM

Advantage of flying drones is the space available to them. No roads that they need to line up upon. Three dimensions of space. Easier to write collision avoidance algorithms when the only other objects to avoid are other drones. The autopilot on a plane makes much more sense than the "autopilot" on Tesla cars.
Even without collision avoidance, a self-driving car that follows roads and intersections is much harder than a self-flying plane, helicopter or drone.

Disadvantage, as Capt'n Midnight points out is energy requirement and the disastrous consequences of failure from a height.

But it is an interesting question. It could well be that self-flying drones for short distances become reality before self driving cars if the energy and reliability problems can be solved. There is also the problem of landing a vehicle with spinning blades in busy city streets. Probably some sort of infrastructure would be needed.

In both cases I think we could expect a large proportion of these vehicles to be taxis. With self-driving or self-flying there's no need to support a driver or pilot. The distinction between driver/pilot and passenger disappears. You may as well have the cost of vehicles shared between many users, you just need to have enough vehicles available to meet most of the demand most of the time.

Wibbs · 28-05-2016 06:14PM

Capt'n Midnight wrote: »

BTW this is also why the Hyperloop is flawed. Just can't handle enough passengers to provide real mass transit. There is also the issue that at high speeds you can't have sharp corners so massive bridge and tunnelling costs to stay straight and level. HS2 in the UK is costing FIVE times what a similar project in France would. But the higher speeds proposed for the UK would slash an extra 210 seconds off a journey to Birmingham.

Aye and why the concept is a very old one, like going back to the 19th century old and every time a similar idea came along folks did the hard sums and realised "eh…nope. Looks good in scifi flics of future cities but otherwise…". The current one is far more about the Musk effect and some thinking him their silicon messiah.

mickoneill31 wrote: »

What about the millions involved in jobs made possible by computing. I don't think anybody is stupid enough to think that some jobs don't get lost when technology advances but if we lose 1 million jobs and it facilitates the creation of 10 million of equal or better quality, I'll live with it. It happens over decades, not overnight.

Nearly every job now would have been done by several people if it existed 20 or 30 years ago. We are not awash with unemployed, unemployment is probably down since then.

As was pointed out in the other thread on the matter, the big difference this time is pretty much all human labour is under threat and that includes computing jobs. Machines are replacing the heavy lifting, but they've been doing that for centuries, but now they're also replacing the heavy thinking too. There are few enough professions that it's hard to see how they couldn't be replaced down the line and that line isn't so long. Including creative ones. Machines can already write music that people can't tell apart from a human composer. Writing programs are getting better, ditto for design programs. Programs can already learn and that ability is growing. It's not too far off when they'll be able to learn enough to be able to copy most clerical work. Or learn enough that they program other machines, or the bulk of the programming, with last minute oversight by a human. For a time anyway.

Will drones make self drive cars obsolete?

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