Well we’re already 19 trillion in debt so what’s a few more trillion. In fact isn’t infra-structure spending one of the big ideas in this election to get the economy out of neutral again? We’ve got HOV lanes. I’d like to see the self-drivers separated by Jersey barriers in their own lane. Every car driving with perfection. No slow pokes, no speeders, no swerving or emergency braking. What a wonderful world we imagine.
If self-driving cars get in wrecks because it's not possible to completely perfect self-driving car systems, that's acceptable as long as the wreck rate is below that achievable by humans.
Agree, but how much below? Currently I think a significant number of wrecks happen to people driving impaired or distracted or doing something stupid. So if there are X wrecks with people and X wrecks with bots, haven’t you shifted some wrecks from “bad drivers” to “good drivers”?
It seems to me that the accidents involving self driving cars will be due to the car with the driver in it also involved in the accident. A driverless car can stay in a lane and won’t care no matter how many times it has to stop in traffic. The pinball wizards careening all over the road will hit them.
@MikeInNH writes …
Never knew they were allowed on public roads without a backup driver yet.
I’m not sure if there was somebody in the car or not, couldn’t see inside from the angle I was approaching. I know it used to be the case several years ago when I saw one, that I’d see someone in the “driverless” car monitoring, but sitting on the passenger side.
It seems to me that the accidents involving self driving cars will be due to the car with the driver in it also involved in the accident.
Agree. I was considering all people vs. all bots. Thanks for facilitating this clarification.
I know it used to be the case several years ago when I saw one, that I'd see someone in the "driverless" car monitoring, but sitting on the passenger side.
I didn’t think that was allowed either since they’d have to take control of the vehicle in case of a malfunction.
@shadowfaxThe author believes numb 5 is at least 60 years in the future
That’s a pretty long time. To put that into contrast, 60 years after the Wright brothers limped their plane into the air, Lockheed first flew the YF-12, which is a variant of the rather more famous SR-71 Blackbird, and Gordo Cooper orbited the Earth 22 times in the final flight of the Mercury spacecraft program.Now, I bet if you grabbed a leading aeronautical scientist in 1903 and told him “Hey, in 60 years we’ll be flying more than 3 times the speed of sound and launching people into outer space” he’d have told you to stop drinking.
Even more impressive, the first general purpose computer was Einiac. It was announced in 1946, cost the equivalent of 6.8 million of today’s dollars, weighed 27 tons, was 100 feet long.
60 years later, even the most basic cell phone on the market had over 1,000 times Einiac’s power, and smart phones weren’t even much of a thing yet.
10 years after that, smart phones are ubiquitous - almost all of us carry around in our pocket a device that would have looked almost magical to the scientists working on Einiac.
I find it somewhat difficult to believe that it will take us 60 years to come up with suitable vision systems for computers that allow them to independently navigate (and really, the vision system is the big stumbling block).
There is always a lot of progress shortly after some new technology was invented but then the progress tends to plateau out. We went from the Wright Flyer to supersonic flight in the lifespan of one person, and then, not much more since. Even today, space travel and supersonic flight is incredibly expensive to do.
A lot of other technologies have also plateaued in their development.
For example, in 1836, the battle of the Alamo was fought with muzzle loading flintlocks using black powder. Less than 100 years later wars were being fought with machine guns. Another hundred years later, and the army still uses some of the guns that were around during WWI or are replacing them with guns that don’t work much differently. Plastic stocks instead of wood and stuff like that.
Computers are also destined to plateau out someday. After all, atoms are only so small and electric current or light only travels so fast.
Ditto with batteries for electric cars. There are only so many elements on the periodic table and lithium is one of the lightest. There will likely be better lithium batteries in the future, more likely better as in having a longer cycle life more than greater range. To get a real breakthrough, it would require something that works on an entirely different principle than chemical reaction based batteries, nuclear reactions for example.
This plateau effect is destined to hit microprocessors also some day. After all, atoms are only so small and electricity only flows so fast.
This plateau effect is destined to hit microprocessors also some day. After all, atoms are only so small and electricity only flows so fast.
So the branch off into Quantum computers…totally new technology at speeds 1,000,000 times faster then the faster computers today. Lets see how far that technology will go. There is a limit…but I don’t think we’re even close yet. And just when you think you’re close…a new technology comes along that changes everything.
I thought an atom was a quantum of a particular element. Divide it up smaller and it no longer has the properties of that element.
The term “quantum leap” is one of the most wrongly used terms in our language. We use that term to mean a revolutionary step in the development of something when it actually means the smallest possible increment.
The development of the jet engine was a revolutionary step in the progress of aircraft.
The Wright brothers painting the fabric covering the wings with butyl based dope instead of nitrate based dope would be a “quantum leap” in the progress of aircraft.
Yes but quantum computers are not just being small. Computers today work in bits (0’s and 1’s). Quantum computers have three states. The bit can be a 0 or 1 or both.
We went from the Wright Flyer to supersonic flight in the lifespan of one person, and then, not much more since. Even today, space travel and supersonic flight is incredibly expensive to do.
That’s definitely true, but it’s more a function of political will than the ability to progress technologically. If we’d advanced tech as fast as we could have, we’d already be on Mars and those Mars One idiots would have to find a different money-making scam to dupe the public with (Andromeda One! 
).
I suspect there will be lots of political will to get self-driving vehicles fully autonomous, because then a lot of company owners who rely on people to drive for them will suddenly see their profits soar as they can fire all of their drivers, which means no wages, and no benefit payouts.
Well its an interesting discussion. I remember having an oil price projection on my bulletin board years ago projecting prices ten years ahead. No where near correct. I dunno, to me self-driving cars are an old time solution to a problem where I tend to look at paradyme shifts that render the old time solutions useless. What are the old problems being addressed? Traffic, distracted drivers, multi-taskers, labor costs? Things like working at home, distributed populations instead of large city clusters, drones, etc. might be the technological shift that makes the self-drivers a solution to problems that no longer are significant. Of course it wouldn’t be the first time that our beltway friends spend enormous sums on old solutions.
Oh I dunno. Plenty of people are still going to have to physically go somewhere for work. Emergency services, construction workers, entertainers, people who work at entertainment venues, journalists, social workers, medical professionals, etc.
It’s sometimes easy to forget that a 9-5 job in an office cubicle is just one category of jobs and that there are a lot of jobs out there that telecommuting would not work for.
I agree with that, nor does it support group cohesion. However it seems the thrust of the issue is to reduce congestion and a lot of the workers in the city center areas are the type that don’t have to be there. I don’t remember which eastern city but their vision was allowing no “owned” cars in the future so that everyone coming in would be using government owned self-drivers for transportation. It’d be interesting seeing the syllabus for Urban Studies classes.
I don’t think telecommuting would work for auto mechanics… 
Or for EMTs.
@shadowfax 8:58AM @B.L.E. We went from the Wright Flyer to supersonic flight in the lifespan of one person, and then, not much more since. Even today, space travel and supersonic flight is incredibly expensive to do.That’s definitely true, but it’s more a function of political will than the ability to progress technologically. If we’d advanced tech as fast as we could have, we’d already be on Mars and those Mars One idiots would have to find a different money-making scam to dupe the public with (Andromeda One!
.
Modern airliners have actually lost cruising speed compared to earlier passenger jets in favor of fuel economy and resulting low fares. Besides, what’s the point of crossing the Atlantic at supersonic speeds only to spend hours going through security and customs on the ground. Our airplanes are fast enough, it’s our airports that are too slow.
Good point. 2-3 hours waiting in the airport either way and ya gotta go cross country or cross ocean to make it worth while anymore.
I was just using telecommuting as an example of a paradyme shift that reduced loads in the city, not that it is having a whole lot of impact at this point. But the deal is we try to solve a problem with old ideas and all of a sudden there is a shift in technology that eliminates the whole issue. Like wiring millions of miles with fiber only to have satellites take over. So I just play the devil’s advocate and ask again what is the A#1 problem that would be solved with a driverless car? Congestion, safety, allowing blind or crippled folks to go to the store, reading a book while driving, etc. etc? Then what technology might come about to throw a monkey wrench into that one? Maybe its just a fun technology to make a couple companies some money, which is what I suspect.
Many companies are getting away from telecommuting. HP is just one. They found that too many people were taking advantage of the situation. You have to be disciplined and have the right home environment to work there. We allow it occasionally, but not on a regular basis.