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Apple's Self-Driving Car Spotted on Freeway in New Video
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I don't think anyone sees the real dangers of autonomous vehicles and there are many:
- Any that have ever watched Doctor Who may be familiar with the ATMOS system, no it wasn't all about autonomous vehicles, but someone was able to take control of the vehicles and kill people with them. Any autonomous technology could be manipulated in such a way.
- Now the first one is a bit of doom and gloom, here is something more realistic: The government will track every mile you drive and charge per mile driven, how long you parked on a public street, automatically bill any parking violations, they could even start taxing you for going to certain "high risk" places such as McDonalds, the list goes on and on with this one, but make no mistake about it, the government will find a way to tax you with this technology and possibly to control your behavior. Imagine if your car refused to drive to say Jack in the Box, you would be ticked off because you paid for the car, but I could see a world where the government required that.
So all in all maybe having Apple run it with their attitude about government surveillance isn't such a bad thing. Better still would be to just give up on this idea all together, as it really does present a lot of potential problems.
While this is only a guess, my assumption is that there is something about this particular model's control system setup that makes it easy for Apple, Google, and others to modify the vehicle.
Toyota/Lexus has featured intelligent parking systems in their vehicles for over a decade (and even longer in Japan), so they have plenty of experience building control systems that occasionally command the vehicle.
It would be easier to modify such a vehicle rather than try to build an autonomous control system in a vehicle that has no existing interface for such situations.
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Google has those little autonomous bubble cars driving around the southern SF Peninsula. It's not just Lexus SUVs.
These autonomous test vehicles are probably already safer than your typical teen driver.
Shame on the videographer for:
1) Recording in portrait orientation
2) Recording while driving.
In that order.
1) Recording in portrait orientation
2) Recording while driving.
In that order.
I don't get it. Are you saying that you think somehow these "experiments" could be less safe than letting humans drive? That despite the fact that with millions of miles of self driving between Tesla's and Google cars, no human has been killed due to self driving tech, while somewhere between 700 to 800 people per week are killed by cars driven by humans in the U.S. alone?
Where's the logic in that?
This kind of makes my point, the government won't get all the revenue from all of the tickets, which means that they will need to find other ways to make the money and make no mistake about it, they will find a way to use this technology to do so. Overall, I think that while indeed it may reduce accidents, there are many, many other problems that will be created that are unforeseen consequences.
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I have an electric vehicle and I don't have a home charger, I don't need one, there are plenty of public chargers all around.
The technology that is dead in the water is fuel cell vehicles, it causes more damage to the environment to get the hydrogen than it does to run a gas engine, especially compared to modern gas engines. But at least with EVs, they can be solar powered.
Sure there are... some serial killer will not die in a car accident they would have otherwise gotten into. Instead, they'll live on to kill more people. Shouldn't you be stocking your prepper hideout?
Actually, I think that this tech is going to lead to significant unemployment, but that's what technology is for: eliminating jobs. (I love my Mac, but if we didn't have all this processing power there would be far more jobs.) So don't blame the government. Blame corporations looking for ways to reduce costs.
In the current state of so called autopilots it is neither more efficient nor safer.
Yeah, right. Let's just ignore the truth. There is no 40% decline in accidents. Human drivers are great!
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Tesla and Google aren't the only players in this space now. Uber's cars ran red lights. To say I trust Apple more than Uber in this regard is a massive understatement, yet I think all companies should minimize risk as much as possible when they are operating driverless vehicles on public roads.
But that's not what I responded to:
"It would be nice if these self-driving car experiments used smaller cars..."
You were implying that self-driving cars are somehow less safe than human controlled vehicles. I've seen no evidence of that. The best evidence we have is that they are safer than human drivers, even in their current, primitive state.
It's a given that they're going to get much safer. Elon Musk has said many times that he's waiting until they're 10x safer than humans before making a push for allowing fully autonomous driving. That would mean a 90% drop in accidents, injuries, and deaths! Instead of nearly 40,000 deaths per year, we might have fewer than 4,000. That's huge!
Did you not read the very next sentence? Uber's self-driving cars RAN RED LIGHTS. It is only through the grace of the universe that no one was hurt. Whether or not production-ready self-driving cars will cause accidents is another story (the Tesla accident where a Tesla on autopilot didn't see a semi come to mind), but for test harnesses like this one, there should be more safety precautions when operating on public roads. Reducing the amount of tonnage the computers are driving around would be a good start.
Yes, and I thought it was laughable that you'd think that one issue by one entrant (and the least likely entrant to succeed) is in any way representative of the whole. So I'll ask again: What makes you think autonomous vehicles won't be much safer than human drivers?
Oh, and the Tesla was also using an early version of Autopilot, which requires the driver to pay attention. It is not autonomous driving. That was driver error.
To whoever made the comment about the Apple "walled garden" being a negative in a vehicle, I just want to point out that without a centralized navigation service autonomous cars will quickly cause traffic problems and possibly accidents.
The most obvious solution to this is to have a "real time" centralized computer system that allocates various vehicles to different routes based on congestion and how many cars are already allocated to that route. Something perfect for a "walled garden" ecosystem.
The most obvious solution to this is to have a "real time" centralized computer system that allocates various vehicles to different routes based on congestion and how many cars are already allocated to that route. Something perfect for a "walled garden" ecosystem.
hopefully their driving software won't crash as often as macOS Sierra.
I will never ever put my life on the line by anything built by Apple or Microsoft.
Since 1984 they haven trying to build reliable software - without success and now I have to rely on THAT software to get me safe from A to B while sitting in a car.... Are you KIDDING @!
The buggy software that never gets fixed is going to come back and bite them in the behind once and if their self-driving software goes public.... Run and hide...
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True - but not even the dumbest human brain is as dumb as SIRI.
And don't forget those humans you refer to - those humans are designing the self-driving instruments. Aint that a bitch..
No one can EVER imagine ALL causes for an accident. And no software programmed by any human is able to grasp the concept of improvisation which is a life-saver in an accident.
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Mercedes and BMW have been able to self-drive for years. There is a VERY good reason to why they have not launched a self-driving car. Distronic in a Mercedes and Lane-Assist is second to NONE. They keep it at that until they can truly come up with something that really works. Although, I believe they are smart enough to understand that a self-driving car will never be possible. At least as long as there are humans behind the wheel of other cars.....
I will never ever put my life on the line by anything built by Apple or Microsoft.
Since 1984 they haven trying to build reliable software - without success and now I have to rely on THAT software to get me safe from A to B while sitting in a car.... Are you KIDDING @!
The buggy software that never gets fixed is going to come back and bite them in the behind once and if their self-driving software goes public.... Run and hide...
[doublepost=1495583909][/doublepost]
True - but not even the dumbest human brain is as dumb as SIRI.
And don't forget those humans you refer to - those humans are designing the self-driving instruments. Aint that a bitch..
No one can EVER imagine ALL causes for an accident. And no software programmed by any human is able to grasp the concept of improvisation which is a life-saver in an accident.
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The number of humans getting in to a car every day and getting safely to where they wanna go is so large that your calculator won't be able to print it. There are more successful drives on this planet by humans in 1 hour than drives having been undertaken of all time with autonome vehicles... Let those vehicles do as many drives (which is impossible) and you will see a higher death toll in accidents with them than what you see today.
Mercedes and BMW have been able to self-drive for years. There is a VERY good reason to why they have not launched a self-driving car. Distronic in a Mercedes and Lane-Assist is second to NONE. They keep it at that until they can truly come up with something that really works. Although, I believe they are smart enough to understand that a self-driving car will never be possible. At least as long as there are humans behind the wheel of other cars.....
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Can't see the lines? It's the human that can't see the lines when there is snow. Autopilot doesn't just use optics. It can use infrared, radar, lidar, and ultrasound. It can also look 360 degrees simultaneously at all times. With data sharing, it could take in data from DOT or even other cars about the conditions ahead. Okay yes, not today, but it is coming together. It is what the engineers are working on.
So in fact the autopilot might have a much better idea of where the road is and what's going on than even the most alert driver. Especially in low visibility situations like fog, snow, and rain. Humans are abysmal in the fog--we end up with 60 car pileups. An autopilot would see right through the fog, or be warned by the cars ahead. Or even avoid the route altogether if there is already a pileup.
There are already real-world operational examples of this. Planes can auto-land at properly equipped airports, and this is actually the preference when there is fog, because the human pilot cannot see the runway.
You seemed credible enough that I considered looking into what you were saying, right up until these two, contradictory statements. Autonomous driving can't work because humans also drive, and they'll screw it up???
Sheesh! The point of self driving cars is to reduce the chaos and death caused by human drivers. It's absurd to claim that self driving cars can't be allowed while there are human drivers.
Just face the facts: Autopilot — which is no where near as good as what will be autonomous driving — reduced Tesla's crash rate by 40% versus the same set of drivers without it. When (not if) it gets to level 5 autonomy, you can reasonably expect it to be five to ten times safer than humans. Asking if it will be 100% safe is also absurd, so just don't do it. Nothing is 100%, but autonomous driving will be much safer than human driving.