
Autonomous Cars Are Not Imminent - georgeecollins
https://www.recode.net/2017/9/5/16257314/stop-autonomous-self-driving-cars-not-coming-soon-future
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rcheu
This article is pretty bad. There's no reason that automous vehicles have to
be linked to electric vehcules, it just happens to be the case that Tesla is
pushing both. The Lexus cars that Waymo uses are not electric for example.

Automous also cars don't need communication with other cars to hit the market.
It'd be nice for faster driving, but it's in no way a requirement.

Hacking is a real concern, but I don't think it will stop adoption. It's also
essentially unsolvable, companies will just need to have sufficiently good
security measures that it occurs rarely enough to make automous cars safer
than non-automous.

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yladiz
I think there are roughly two camps about autonomous cars: the people who
think that a car that's 70% as good as a human, but significantly better for
that 70%, will be good enough in the beginning, and the people who think that
an autonomous car won't be okay until it's as good at a human in every aspect,
e.g. requiring an AGI.

Both camps have valid arguments, but I think that the safer option is the one
where humans don't need to think or drive at all, essentially not requiring a
steering wheel at all. I don't think the Tesla model is so good because if you
let a driver essentially not worry about what's going on for 95% of the time,
and then something needs their attention quickly, their reaction time will be
significantly slower because they're not primed for it, unlike during a normal
driving session. You can argue that humans can be trained for this, but unlike
pilots pretty much anyone can get a driving license and it's not difficult:
for example, in Florida, many municipalities just have you do some simple
stuff in a parking lot with no real world, as in not in an actual road,
driving test. For those people you can't expect them to pay attention and
allow a car to drive, the human brain just doesn't work like that. This
argument doesn't even talk about the things humans don't even realize they
perceive, like the intention of other humans in the area, that is really,
really difficult for a computer to understand, another huge barrier.

In my mind there will be two areas that self driving cars will impact: long
haul trucks, and regular car features. Truckers are trained pretty well and I
could see a semi-automated truck work for them, especially if they were
trained a bit more on the specifics of the automated tech. Regular cars will
likely get an improvement as well, maybe a better version of cruise control
that takes care of stop-and-go traffic better, or something that can sense
accidents further away and warn the driver to take an alternative route before
even being near the accident. These would have real, and positive, impacts but
won't be truly self driving.

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throwaway2016a
There is a third camp.

The ones that think cars need to be better than humans and that one death in a
self driving car is too many even if there would have been thousands of deaths
by human drivers in the same time.

The amount of time spent debating issues is huge. Like how a computer would
handle situations that are unique to human drivers (for example, not leaving
enough room to stop because you're driving too fast and following too close)
or things that a human driver would perform poorly on too (should I drive off
the bridge or run over those children?).

It's fine to debate issues but to use them as "show stopper" by default is
irresponsible.

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bobsil1
Naysayers are a dime a dozen. What's valuable: someone who can see how to make
it happen.

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stretchwithme
Expected change takes longer than expected. And unexpected change happens
before you know it.

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kthejoker2
This article is one long non sequitur. I learned absolutely nothing.

