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They can remove all regulations to promote driverless cars. But it's never gonna be a dull reality. Because real world is not easy to model in software. You can try all AI or whatever, something says nothing can match the human instinct.
 
Well it’s same old tired argument. Don’t change anything until I, the consumer, am ready. I’m still using my ten year old Mac so Apple better make sure I get security updates and patches until I’m darned good and ready to buy something else. USB-C is okay as long as you keep the standard USB ports too until I’m darned good and ready to buy something else. Or else I’m looking with “tentative, doubting, squinting eyes” at going to the competition. Guess what? Apple doesn’t care, never has cared, from ADB and SCSI, NuBus, to doing away with DVDs before consumers were “ready” for it. And Apple is doing quite well with that way of doing business.

It’s the same old tired argument. Any change forced upon the consumer should be adjusted to with zero pushback. There is never a more clever and elegant way to move the ball forward than how Apple does it.

The issue isn’t so much the moving forward, it’s often how it’s done. Move forward but not elegantly and with certain new pains. Move forward by eliminating an iPhone headphone jack, just now performing your daily task of charging and listening simultaneously using one of your many 1/8” cables or high-quality headphones requires buying splitters and dongles to be kept at every location you keep headphones or stereos unless you want to always carry them around. Two lightning ports would have at least blunted the pain of having to buy several new items to keep track of and haul around, where as before, things were quite convenient and flexible for carrying around just your phone.

Also the world will never adjust to Apple. So your lightning splitters and adapters will never work for the other various sound sources. Not even MacBooks which would need another set of 1/8” to usb-c adapters. So, yes Apple advanced wonderfully to them, with noticeable introduced pains to the customer. But that’s a tired argument to some.

When Apple moves away from lightning connectors and restarts the “buy splitters buy dongles to tote around” routine, I’ll be jealous of your willingness to adapt unquestioningly instantly and painlessly.

Apple is successful because they’re still a slightly better option than the competition for many, unlike 5+ years ago when they were the unquestioningly just best option to many. A subtle thing not everyone recognizes but is so very apparent to users like me.

Back on subject. Their autonomous cars: can’t wait to see how Apple differentiates theirs from the others, seriously. Assuming engineers across companies will be pretty good at creating safe cocoons on wheels to transport people, what will Apple do differently besides maybe media/entertainment access inside. Very curious...
 
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Serious question. When it's found that a software/hardware glitch caused a fatal accident, who will be liable?
 
They can remove all regulations to promote driverless cars. But it's never gonna be a dull reality. Because real world is not easy to model in software. You can try all AI or whatever, something says nothing can match the human instinct.

Humans are better (look at how much trouble autonomous cars have still, can't distinguish a bus from a car when changing lanes)

Nether can humans really, but at least we learn quickly when someone **** us off, not to do it again.

All of this take care, but the only thing this autonomous cars gives us is convenience.. that's it.. Safe driving ? Possibly, but depends who you talk to... It would eliminate road rage but only if the car can "know"..

If you would be putting your hands on the wheel, just for those times, you need control,, you may as well go back to a normal car where you are "totally" in control.
 
On the iPhone X Apple forgot to test for temperatures below freezing and had to push out a software update to adjust the sensitivity or something with the display for colder temperatures because the display would freeze up for ~20 seconds while adjusting. I hope that Apple goes up into the mountains or somewhere that has potholes and tests for that. I was driving home late last night and in the dark it was very hard to see potholes. This has been a bad year for potholes around here with more ice than snow. It got me thinking—are any of these sunny California coastal companies even considering the mighty pothole? They seem like they would be difficult to detect since they're a low, small target—and how do they make decisions about avoiding them safely when I hardly can myself?
 
Starting on April 2, companies in the Bay Area that are working on self-driving vehicle technology will be able to deploy cars that do not have a driver behind the wheel.


More aptly, they should begin this on April 1. California is using its citizens as guinea pigs.
 
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This, however, can be a scary thought. This is one reason (the only reason) I hope Apple gets into the game. Imagine a terrorist cell or even one “lone wolf” who can hack a truck and drive it through a crowd

this has already been possible with modern cars for a few years. as there’s a general absence of high-tech terror attacks, i wouldn‘t be afraid of this scenario.
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Serious question. When it's found that a software/hardware glitch caused a fatal accident, who will be liable?

who is liable today, when this happens? wasn‘t there a software or hardware fault in toyotas ten years ago that got people killed? afaik they paid a settlement with the us-government.
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This could bring back the pump jockey at fuel and EV stations.

I guess self-driving EVs will have inductive charging and only have to park on the right spot. Self-driving gasoline cars will probably be very rare and thus there won‘t be any infrastructure to fill them up automatically. aren‘t there any service-gas stations left in the US? we still have the occasional one in europe. a self-driving gas-car could just go there.
 
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I think everyone misses the point about self driving cars:
Self driving cars are not about making the roads safer, they are solely about giving more control of your life to others, it may be to the companies that make the vehicles, it may be to the government, it may be to hackers who will hack the vehicles and make them drive off of bridges or other parties as of yet unknown. The reality is it will probably be a combination of all of these.
 
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I think looking both ways before crossing the street is one of the earliest lessons I was taught. Also, I’d rather trust an autonomous car coming at me than a drunk driver.
What about the blind? They are listening for cars and such crossing at intersections. These electric cars are very quiet. Blind people are taught to raise their cane to show drivers that they are preparing to cross the road. Of course driverless cas wouldn’t know.
 
No, it wasn't just specific to driverless cars.

https://www.ted.com/talks/travis_ka...ussion?referrer=playlist-the_economy_of_trust

http://money.cnn.com/2015/09/16/technology/uber-travis-kalanick/index.html

And now you also have these companies proposing set routes where the cars just go around in circles and don't necessarily drop you off exactly at your location (like a bus). Imagine what that's going to be like for congestion.
No, dude - I was talking about driverless cars, not Uber. I don't care about Uber and this article isn't about Uber. Nobody ever claimed driverless cars would alleviate traffic problems, that is not their goal.
 
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What about the blind? They are listening for cars and such crossing at intersections. These electric cars are very quiet. Blind people are taught to raise their cane to show drivers that they are preparing to cross the road. Of course driverless cas wouldn’t know.
Not all autonomous cars are electric... The one in the picture isn't. Even so, they have significantly better reaction time than humans and they will be able to stop earlier if they detect a person in the way. There are practically no limits to how these cars can be programmed, they can absolutely detect if there is a person on the side of the road attempting to cross.
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In Pittsburgh, and other places, some Uber cars are self driving and someday will be driverless.
What does that have to do with anything?
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I guess self-driving EVs will have inductive charging and only have to park on the right spot. Self-driving gasoline cars will probably be very rare and thus there won‘t be any infrastructure to fill them up automatically. aren‘t there any service-gas stations left in the US? we still have the occasional one in europe. a self-driving gas-car could just go there.
Inductive charging has a very long way to go before it is viable to use in EV's - even the most efficient implementations are around 65% which means you are wasting 35% of the electricity you are using to charge the car. There will be automated plugs long before they attempt to use inductive charging, if the technology for inductive charging ever gets there.

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And to everyone talking about someone hacking a car and driving it into people or off a bridge - this is very easily guarded against... Hacking isn't what you see on TV or in movies, hackers can't just add controls to the cars willy-nilly. If the car doesn't have functions for remote manual control of throttle and steering then it can't be 'hacked' to do something like that. The systems they are working on basically take an address or GPS coordinates and route their way to it, with all of the onboard software handling the steering, throttle, brakes, obstacle avoidance, etc. None of that is remotely controlled.

Automakers (who are notoriously bad at writing and securing software) already have remote shutdown and other controls built into their cars that can be easily hacked and there isn't a hacking problem now, why would you assume actual developers writing significantly more secure autonomous driving software would suddenly create a hacking epidemic.

Everyone is such an alarmist nowadays - just because you don't understand something doesn't make it dangerous. Why anyone thinks idiot human drivers with one person killed in an auto accident every 25 seconds are safer than autonomous cars with no distractions, better reaction time, and no human flaws boggles my mind.

Will automated cars kill people and make mistakes? Absolutely. It will be a massive sensationalist headline every time it happens and the developers and automakers will be held accountable. Will it eventually mean hundreds of thousands fewer deaths every year? Yup.
 
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While I agree in principle, it'll be decades before we see that kind of benefit. If left purely to market forces, driverless cars will remain a small percentage of the vehicles on the road for the foreseeable future. Expense combined with the general unease of relinquishing control to a computer is going to make this an uphill battle. So much research has been done into the technology, but not enough into the psychology.

A fair point.

But I think we have also all been trained to trust and adopt new technology so much so that we actively clamor for it. We will do so very quickly with autonomous vehicles when they are a) readily available and b) demonstrably superior to what we have now. I believe we will see both of these points satisfied soon with a rapid deployment of self driving tech across the market.
 
Are driverless cars only for fair weather states? How do they navigate with snow on the road or when sea gulls muddy up the sensor lenses?

Even the automatic breaking feature now on many cars is extremely dangerous in the winter. On cold days when the exhaust from the cars in front of you turn into white misty clouds the auto breaking system randomly and suddenly slams on the brakes hard. Not smart thing to do in icy conditions as well as the added danger of being rear ended.
 
You can try all AI or whatever, something says nothing can match the human instinct.

Like when those humans landed the Falcon 9 on the barge at night.
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Serious question. When it's found that a software/hardware glitch caused a fatal accident, who will be liable?


When your husband has a glitch and causes a fatal accident who will be liable?
 
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