Who goes to jail when ones of these hits and kills a cyclist?Frankly, I'd feel safer with cars driven by computers. Will mistakes be made? Sure, but they are never going to just stop paying attention entirely. They won't get tired, or drunk, and any texting that needs to be done can be handled in separate threads, and they'll be able to 'focus' on all inputs at once, unlike a person who might miss something.
What I doubt is that they'll become basically perfect or that many people will actually use them, assuming that governments even allow them.I think the interesting question is whether or not people will be able to drink and then ride in AI driven cars. If they could, then of course people would be interested in that option. But I suspect it won't be allowed. I guess it all depends on how much money the robot-car makers spend on lobbying.
The car can be programmed for different driving personalities — from cautious, in which it is more likely to yield to another car, to aggressive, where it is more likely to go first.I'm going to be setting that dial to 'Stig'.
Policy at Its Worst by Bob Herbertposted by andoatnp at 7:46 PM on October 9, 2010 [10 favorites]
We can go to war in Iraq and Afghanistan, and threaten to blow Iran off the face of the planet. We can conduct a nonstop campaign of drone and helicopter attacks in Pakistan and run a network of secret prisons around the world. We are the mightiest nation mankind has ever seen.
But we can’t seem to build a railroad tunnel to carry commuters between New Jersey and New York.
The United States is not just losing its capacity to do great things. It’s losing its soul. It’s speeding down an increasingly rubble-strewn path to a region where being second rate is good enough.
The roadway, even in idyllic suburbia, is orders of magnitude less predictable than the skies. Automated driving will not happen until we have AIs capable of the same level of ecological perception as a human. And if that's possible, automatic car-driving will be the least significant implication.I'm not sure what you mean by "ecological perception", it makes very little sense to me. But in terms of environmental awareness, people often space out completely while driving. They drive literally "on autopilot" and often don't respond to unexpected situations at all.
...in December 2006 London Heathrow was affected for a long period by dense fog. This airport was operating at maximum capacity in good conditions, and the imposition of low visibility procedures required to protect the localiser signal for autoland systems meant a major reduction in capacity from approximately 60 to 30 landings per hour.posted by notion at 11:00 PM on October 9, 2010
In the 1970s, such weather would have prevented most airlines from attempting to operate, but been a boon to British Airways, as the only operator based there with an autoland equipped fleet. (This author recalls making four Category 3 landings on one such day, with zero delays, as all other traffic was grounded.)
However in 2006, most airlines operating into Heathrow already had autoland equipped aircraft, and hence expected to operate as normal. The result was massive disruption to airport operations. The worst affected airline was of course British Airways, as the largest operator at the airport, but which no longer had an advantage as the systems it had so laboriously been involved in developing to solve exactly that problem of dense fog at Heathrow – Autoland - were now freely available to all its competitors. (source)
Currently, humans do a lot of conscious and subconscious communication to decide who should go first.Not if they're doing it right; cars pass in the order they arrive, and if two arrive at the same time the one on the right goes first. Any 'negotion' only involves people who are not following the rules.
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posted by pwnguin at 4:05 PM on October 9, 2010 [3 favorites]