Self driving buses, trains, trucks etc

magicbastarder wrote: »

https://twitter.com/LydNicholas/status/1031164564686229504

There was a recent article suggesting pedestrians would have to radically change their behaviour in order to enable self driving cars.

I learned to drive and then drove in a country where pedestrians always have right of way. I think it is the only sane approach and can't understand the US where pedestrians are considered fair game and are only avoided because of the cost of repairing dents.

To Get Ready for Robot Driving, Some Want to Reprogram Pedestrians

Researchers bemoan human unpredictability and back the kind of campaigns that helped Germany cut jaywalking fatalities.

They will be gone, not at once, but gradually. Soon enough things like lane keeping, automatic braking and adaptive cruise control will be mandatory, and that is the direction they will be taking. Next will be something like the TCAS the planes have, and so on. Cars already take away the control when needed, with mandatory technologies like ABS and ESP, so it already started.

magicbastarder wrote: »

i'm 42, so maybe (hopefully?) have another 42 years to live.
when i was born, it was the year the first apple was released, which had 8kb of memory. now, your standard computer has one *million* times as much memory.

your lack of faith in technology is interesting.
actually, faith is the wrong word. we've gone from zero to the current point in probably less than a decade, where autonomous cars are driving on roads, albeit in limited or restricted circumstances, but you're still shouting at the tide.

self driving cars will happen; my main concern is that society should dictate the technology rather than the technology dictating to society.

Your use of the word 'faith is telling. The notion that there have been significant advances in science and technology in the recent past, therefore there absolutely will be success for this particular technology, is logically fallacious and is akin to religious faith. It ignores all the failures of technology and science. It's classic cherry-picking.

Apple bought the rights for the use of liquid metals in consumer products. They never did anything with it beyond making an expensive SIM ejector tool. Clearly they had a vision for something more than that, but it didn't pan out. They sunk millions into GT Advanced Technology for the promise of making sapphire for phone screens in large quantities, cheaply. That venture failed spectacularly.

Current Intel CPUs are so riddled with fundamental vulnerabilities, that really patching them would likely see performance drop more than 50%.

The Italians built a bridge designed to last at least a 100 years...

The US has sunk Billions into the F35 fighter program, it would seem, on exactly the same sort of techno-faith that so many autonomous driving boosters display with their baseless 'will happen' pronouncements. The F35 was envisaged as having a myriad of very advanced systems all integrated into a seamless super-system by software. The reality is they can't write that software.

The US Space Shuttle program was predicated on the promise of re-usability drastically reducing launch costs. From that aspect, it was a complete failure.

I remember when the Concorde was in regular service, pronouncements that soon there would be hypersonic travel - London to Sydney in 2 hours, no less. Hows that looking, 40 years on?

Side splitting comedy that - today you can't even fly supersonic, even if you are a billionaire - you could back in the 70's!

Limitless energy from fusion reactors is just around the corner, just as it was back in the 70's

Cherry picking technological success stories, while ignoring failures, is self-delusion.

As I said, I think driving is a far more complicated task than people give it credit for and autonomous driving will require nothing less than real AI, not all the garbage being touted as AI of late, which isn't even close.

People who think humans are bad drivers and need to be replaced by fault-free perfect and shiny technology, are talking out their 4rse. The fatality rate versus distance driven is actually remarkably low. Humans are generally very good drivers, actually.

Not sure what kind of technology is behind self driving cars but there are lots of Youtube videos show casing what machine learning can do:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8V2sX9BhAW8