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they are unlikely to be introduced in the UK
IMO (and that of futurologists like Jaron Lanier) driverless cars are inevitable - in 10-20 years. The tech pretty much exists now and the moral argument - that far fewer people will die on the roads - is hard to counter.
Downsides: job losses (but then many middle class occupations will have been computerised by then too). Driving on public roads - and if you think they're over-crowded now, just wait for 10-20 years - will be a chore. Enthusiasts will wheel out old-fashioned petrol-powered, manual shifting cars at weekends for a nostalgic drive through the endless suburbs, much to the horror and amusement of the younger generations.
I dislike removing the driver entirely, purely for the "what if" scenarios. Planes are capable of take-off, flying and landing unmanned these days but they still keep pilots and they still need to be trained to deal with them when things go wrong, because things DO go wrong.
The difference being automated cars can to a large extent "fail safe" simply by applying brakes. Planes cant do that at 30,000 ft!
There was an interesting TED talk a while back from a guy that designs small, cheap efficient electric cars and in his summary he talks about where he see's this technology converging with self drive technology and mobile phones.
The link should start at the summary bit but if not it's around 13.25
When you look at it in this light it becomes quite a compelling argument.
In the skies, you have complete three dimensional freedom, there are no hard objects apart from other planes and there's someone (or something) controlling all of the planes and watching they don't even come close to each other.
Roads are much more complicated. I'm unsure if it will be possible on winding B roads without very advanced AI.
Although, networking might save it. If you had all the autonomous cars wired to a central system, then they could share knowledge of specific roads and risk situations. For example, the system could start off on motorways where the problem is fairly straightforward, then revert to driver control on A and B roads. However, the system would still be active and would learn what drivers do and how they react to hazards and so on. Over the years it would be fine tuned to find the safest possible way to drive every single road in the country. Think about it - it would know where every dodgy junction or concelealed exit in the country is. It would ALWAYS know the road as if it'd driven it a thousand times.
Then, if you had enough uptake, the system would know where all the other automatic cars were, and if there were only automatic cars on a stretch of motorway it could drive appropriately, taking advantage of the fact that ALL automatic cars would be gathering data about the road network wherever they were. So it'd instantly know if there was a problem or risk at any point in the road network. It would also know where all the non-automatic cars were too because it would register a car visually and know it didn't correspond to one in its system.
Think of the advantages of fully networked traffic.
Every car knows where every other car is and more importantly its intentions.
Suddenly you have eliminated conflict at junctions which I'm guessing is the single biggest cause of collisions on the road
Fek me Mol, we can't even get a PC to run properly all the time, what the hell is going to happen when the server for that little lot goes offline or someone uploads a virus to it!
Imagine that. Tesco upload a virus that makes ALL cars drive to their nearest store and park up!! 🙂
molgrips - Member
stuff
It's already negotiated winding roads, etc. See here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_driverless_car
Google has tested several vehicles equipped with the system, driving 1,609 kilometres (1,000 mi) without any human intervention, in addition to 225,308 kilometres (140,000 mi) with occasional human intervention. Google expects that the increased accuracy of its automated driving system could help reduce the number of traffic-related injuries and deaths, while using energy and space on roadways more efficiently.[1]
The car has traversed San Francisco's Lombard Street, famed for its steep hairpin turns and through city traffic.
Bearing in mind that it's still early days, I think that's remarkable success.
Fek me Mol, we can't even get a PC to run properly all the time
Totally different situation. Safety critical systems are designed and built in an entirely different way. We could build laptops the same way but they would cost a fortune and you wouldn't be able to run any external software on them.