Yes driver assist will gradually become more compehensive and common, but I doubt fully self-driving will ever take of, due to the liability reasons mentioned above. Self driving cars will be more submissive and less agressive than human drivers, which will cause other road users to take the piss. If a cyclist knows the self-driving car will stop, if they pull out infront of them, without beeping the horn and swearing at them, they'll be more likely to do it. I can imagine a situation with a fully self-driving car stopped for ages, whist pedestrians and cyclists keep crossing the road in front of it, because they know it'll wait for them.
Not only that but how many teenagers will turn trolling self driving cars into a game? That's something I could see my youthful self doing, standing in a place that makes the car stop or choose a path that ends in a dead end, or putting up something the car will mistake for a stop sign along a busy arterial. There aren't enough (any) self driving cars around yet for this to be a problem but if they become mainstream so will these sort of incidents.If you ever want to have a perfect example of a strawman argument, then you can use what you typed above. With the same line of reasoning you could say EVs never become mainstream because youngsters disconnect the charging cables and shove potatos in the charger outlets at night.Fair enough he's taking it to the extreme, but why do you think the fact that most road users often break the rules, but a self-driving cars will follow the rules all the time, won't cause any problems? It will be fine if there are places where only self-driving cars are allowed, but I can see it being a huge problem, when they're mixed with unruly road users.I guess you are referring to keeping to the speed limit. First of all it seems Waymo's algorithms allow to go over the speed limit because driving slower than the other traffic -even though at the speed limit- is very dangerous. Secondly the EU has plans mandate cars to have active speed limiting on all cars sold within a few years. In the end self driving car algorithms will need to deal with other road users. Waymo et all probably have collected tons of data for that purpose.
As an autonomous autopilot yes, but certainly not as a driver assist. .... It's also IMO a whole lot more immediately useful than cars that drive themselves, that's just a novelty.
I agree and so do some car companies, but you can't sell those systems for $10,000 and people won't show them off on social media, so no free advertising.
@eti: you are missing the big picture of my remark and that is that new technology improves slowly but steadily. If you look at a modern car you'll see it has all kinds of electronic safety related features and no consumer cares about whether they are electronic and what kind of decissions are build into them.
@eti: you are missing the big picture of my remark and that is that new technology improves slowly but steadily. If you look at a modern car you'll see it has all kinds of electronic safety related features and no consumer cares about whether they are electronic and what kind of decissions are build into them.
I think society has descended to a new dumb when people trust CODE over human judgement and experience. No bytes are gonna better a human driver, even a terrible one. This reminds me of the so-called “AI” which powers Siri, Amazon Echo, Google assistant etc … yeah, no way this junk is ANYWHERE NEAR even approximating even the stupidest person that ever existed.
I have all the aforementioned “assistants” in my house, and not one of them can go 24 hours without falling flat on their faces at one or other trivial request. Deep delusion and Silicon Valley’s OBSESSION with having to act out some childish space age sci-fi future, forcing it to come to pass, is what’s happening. Silicon Valley kiddies.
Not much intelligence is required to drive a car, under most conditions. A computer doesn't get tired, so lots of accidents caused by people falling asleep at the wheel can be avoided.
Not much intelligence is required to drive a car, under most conditions. A computer doesn't get tired, so lots of accidents caused by people falling asleep at the wheel can be avoided.
"Under most conditions" is the key here. Unfortunately encountering a situation that falls outside of "most conditions" is not a rare occurrence and it is those edge cases which turn up all over that are the the challenge that self-driving proponents tend to overlook. I mean let's take a really easy example and consider snow. It doesn't happen often here, 99.9% of the time when I'm driving I don't even have to think about snow, yet I have been caught in it a few times when it started snowing and by the time I was nearing home the roads were dusted with enough that everything was white and starting to get slippery. A system like Tesla uses that relies entirely on cameras is not going to know what to do when the entire road is bright white, not to mention the slippery surface that makes driving a completely different experience.
If computers were any good at this sort of thing captchas would be useless. It took a decade or more before computers got to where they could even identify a spam email with any reasonable degree of accuracy and that's something that is usually trivial for even a below average intelligence human. Driving is similar, mechanically it is not a particularly difficult task, but there is a lot of nuance. I still remember when I was a teenager taking drivers ed, my instructor remarked that driving is primarily a social interaction, the physical part of controlling a car is easy but a large part of being a good driver is predicting what other drivers will do and responding accordingly. Anybody who has ever tried chatting with a bot knows that computers are notoriously awful at social interaction.
Just take a look at the boeing 737 max, it dont drive in any road, it only has to stay in the air, simpler cant be possible.
While a russian airplane would not have crashed.
Not much intelligence is still infinitely beyond AI.
The problem with these things is that they are massive projects with no financial benefit while costing a lot to even run, let alone build. The reason most people are not driving electric cars (including me) is because an internal combustion car is cheaper over the cars whole lifecycle.
Musk has already made SpaceX turn profits on this whole rocketry shenanigans. There are costumers that pay big money to get there commercial satellite up there into orbit, or to deliver stuff to the space station. The reason they pick SpaceX to do it is because they developed the latest in rocket technology to make it more cost effective. They also use this new capability by launching a better satellite internet service called Starlink.
So they keep developing there rocket tech to also become the first commercial provider of interplanetary transport, and the most attractive first step is Mars.
It's only governments that can launch and run a non profitable project that benefits humankind as a whole. Commercial companies can't do that because they would eventually run out of money, at what point the banks stop giving paychecks to the people that work there and those people stop working for you.
How do you make advanced things like chips or solar cells from scratch for example.
You can't even make basic stuff required to keep a civilisatiosn going, let alone advanced stuff.
People extoling this self sustaining colony stuff have not given one through to the insanely complex supply chain structure we have on earth to produce even basic stuff, let alone advanced materials and engineering.
I've put a figure on this before on The Amp Hour, and it was something like 500 years before we have a colony even cabale of surviving on it's own should something happen to earth or transport.
i.e. a figure so large that it basically means you can't predict when such a thing would exist.
all you really need on Mars, to quickly establish a colony, is to find a large iron deposit with the materials to smelt it and a nuclear power solution. Once you can create steel and cast iron you can quickly build the infrastructure to make just about every thing else possible. Things will be pretty rough before that happens.
Those reactors will also be important for food production so any settlement needs to be a close to thorium, uranium or other element suitable for a reactor. In a nut shell a settlement needs two things to get beyond temporary, that is energy and steel.
I would also say it is almost impossible for government to find a non profitable project that they can invest in an not screw up. About the only one we can really say was such a project was the Apollo program. I'd also have to say the Manhattan project similarly benefited humans as it made contemplation of nuclear war pretty horrible for most of the big actors. Sadly we now have far too many sub standard governments, run by the mentally ill, that don't see nuclear war as evil.
In a nut shell a settlement needs two things to get beyond temporary, that is energy and steel.
In a nut shell a settlement needs two things to get beyond temporary, that is energy and steel.
Steel doesn't help you eat.
The worlds largest biodome experiment could barely even feed a handful of people using 40 acres.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biosphere_2
In a nut shell a settlement needs two things to get beyond temporary, that is energy and steel.
Steel doesn't help you eat.
The worlds largest biodome experiment could barely even feed a handful of people using 40 acres.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biosphere_2
I'm confident that a self sufficient colony on Mars is monumentally more difficult than a lot of people assume. Build a colony somewhere on the bottom of the ocean or in the middle of the Siberian tundra as a proof of concept. The most inhospitable places on Earth are vastly more livable than anywhere on Mars.
Elon Musk is a marketing genius
just take one good look into the unproven transportation system of hyperloop, shows after 6 Years of research and development, this is about marketing an idea. not engineering a working proof of concept.