Quote:
Originally Posted by Humdizzle
eventually cars will improve to be better drivers than humans. and traffic deaths will be extremely low. this is very far away though. for it to work EVERYONE needs to be on autopilot on the same system.. all cars communicating together like an ant colony.
as long as there is the human variable on the road things will be difficult. we as humans can read other humans behavior and make good guesses as to who is paying attention on the road and who isn't. dipping off the shoulder multiple times on the highway or drifting into others lanes. speeding up and slowing down. small things like this can make us think.. ok better keep distance from that guy or get around him quickly.
another scenario: imagine a speeding car cuts you off in traffic but leaves a 1 foot gap with your bumper.. now your autopilot freaks out and hits the brakes... and now you just got rear ended by the semi truck behind you.
Or what if a deer and child both run out into the road in front of you, the computer has to decide who to hit in a split second. what about a decision between a basketball, curb, and a rabbit (obviously you hit the soft rabbit) but maybe some peta activist would rather hit the basketball.
it all gets very confusing. it'll eventually happen though because people want safety over freedom.
|
I think this is the correct answer, but how that gets implemented is the question. And like I said above, it's going to be incredibly expensive and each car will have to know where the other car is going (privacy issues). I don't think a near-field communication matrix between vehicles will work because the failure rate of computers is too high. And considering how close cars operate near each other and at the speeds they do, the redundant systems for reducing computer failures I just don't think will have time to take over if the primary system fails, your talking milliseconds for failover time. If comms between vehicles is lost for just a millisecond havoc will ensue. Tell me what computer-hacker-dick is not drooling for the day he/she can make cars crash into each other. The system will depend on GPS timing and GPS is easily jammed in local areas. Encrypt the comms channels or messages and the processing time goes way up and requires more computer power. Change the timing source and all current hardware/software for these systems needs to be converted (more cost). Put up a non-hackable GPS system to solve it, yeah, lots of new billions of dollars there. Hell, just fire an local EMP every once and awhile, just for fun.
It can be engineered no doubt, but who is willing to pay the hundreds of billions to implement it, secure it and maintain it? Or do it relatively soon and accept personal travel to slow down to a quarter of the average speed it runs at now. Elon isn't smart enough to keep the average travel speed up to what it is now.
We've been educating young people to accept socialism and communism for the past 20 years or so, so you may be right that future generations will accept the idea of safety over freedom and intrusion into their personal lives. Sure, Big Tech is there now, but you can still turn it off if you want. Big Tech is already brave enough to curtail freedom of speech, but when does it start to get to curtail freedom of travel? When it runs the national ground transportation grid, that's when. I'll be way dead before that happens. But that's what we're up against if we think a computer system can drive better than humans.