Sorry, what I meant to imply is that those sensors could be used as a sort of reference point, so cars could accurately know their position relative to other nearby cars. Plus, they wouldn't need line of sight if they were networked. Your car would know if there was a stopped vehicle around the bend up ahead.

Depending on the amount of data being collected, it might actually be cheaper and quicker to ship the physical drives. Used to work as an IT assistant admin. When we filled up 20TB or so of data and wanted to back it up, we shipped it to a datacenter (1-2 days, $50 or so), as opposed to using up a bunch of network bandwith uploading the data over the course of weeks.

One day (and not long from now) driverless cars will make split second decisions on who to kill in an imminent unavoidable accident. Using facial recognition, the lighting fast 5G wireless network, and machine learning, the car will identify all possible victims and select the one for death that is least valuable to society and then take the appropriate action, all within a fraction of a second. Enjoy the future everyone.

Whether people like it or not, the way of the future will be automated transportation. With advancements in lidar technology and AI, making leaps and bounds, what people thought was impossible a few years ago is now reality. Now with that said, other forms of transportation along side vehicles will also evolve, like the hyperloop train (some form of it anyways) connecting cities together, even virgin galactic with their stratosphere plane/spaceship being able to transport people across continent in record time....

Look at the EV market being developed with WorkHorse, Arrival, Lion Electric, XO, Hyliion, Lordstown Motors, LucidMotors, Tesla

One thing for sure it will be a HACKER'S DREAM......

Let's hope they have the wherewithal to avoid the majority of accidents in the first place! Beyond that, I say whichever person is in the way goes splat, lest we inadvertantly create robots that determine the solution to the problem is simply killing all humans.

(Puts on insurance hat.) Assuming accident frequency drops as early data indicates, rates would go down for everyone. They'd just go down more for people using driverless.

(Removes insurance hat.) IMO, driverless MUST maintain some physical override capability, not just a software cutoff. ("What do you mean you can't turn it off?") It's safer than many drivers, but not foolproof. For generic non-irregular driving, it's like an airplane on autopilot. When it’s complicated - - turbulence, landing, taking off, in heavy traffic near the airport, etc. - - we’ll need to have humans able to take charge instantly when necessary. Same for cars. The simpler phases of both can be automated because we have a pretty good idea of how we do them, so we mostly know when we code them what the code will do (we hope). For many complex phases we don’t fully understand how we do it ourselves; it’s much harder to program something like that. Even more difficult to know for certain how such code will react to never-before-encountered circumstances. But there will be some emergency situations where the superior reaction time of automation will make it better than humans if both come to same decision as to the proper course of action. Braking to avoid rear-ending someone comes to mind.

On the darker side, here's a scary idea. "Kill the grown-ups" becomes a kid sport. Assume the cars are programmed to sacrifice the driver rather than run into a child. Kids learn that and jumping out in front of cars to make them crash becomes a "thing." People could even encourage kids to jump in front of specific cars to assassinate the (non-) driver and or passengers. Great for terrorists, political enemies, criminals who want to rob the car's occupants, angry neighbors, etc.

Yes, I'm worried about hacking, too (okay, at exactly 11:00, everyone turns left), but even without it, there's plenty of room for trouble if it's 100% autonomous.

An other story can be an self driving tuck wipes out an school bus full of kids in an small town and the local sheriff wants someone to do hard time for it so it's goes to an criminal court and in the that criminal court they have some one like the cousin vinny judge that useing contempt of court on people from the manufacturer who say we can't give logs, source code, etc out due to an NDA and the judge does not like that at all.

I don't remember anyone panicking over antilock brakes. I do remember panicking many times when you just touched the brake on an old car and all 4 wheels locked up. Anyways, there is a huge difference getting used to a few driving aids and trusting all car control to a computer. There is no way any software/hardware system is going to be 100% for life, especially when a car ages and things start falling apart. Nothing short of 100% is acceptable. That's why you will always need a "driver" behind the wheel. The idea of hoping in the back seat and taking a nap while you car drives to work is never going to happen. It's possible but just not going to happen. Same as flying cars. Everyone assumed we would all be flying around in nuclear powered DeLoreans by now. Why not? We developed nuclear power almost 100 years ago and put a man on the moon 50 years ago.

Wow, didn't understand one bit of your point? lol

How large of a business is automotive insurance? If driverless cars become a thing, wouldn't insurance rates drastically decrease? I'm not sure those big wig execs of Allstate, Farmers, Geico etc would like a pay cut, nor would their lobbyists'?

You see, driverless cars are kind of like cars...

Can't the same be said for drivers? Is a 90 year old driver the same 100% guarantee? There will never be a 100% system driver or no driver. Allowing technology to Support the human variable will only improve those odds. After visiting the DMV recently I am Grateful cars will soon take a greater roll in decision making lol.

I hope in that uber self driving car criminal court case that safety operator get to have access to ALL source code , docs, training docs, logs, etc or you must acquit

Please... all these driverless cars and trucks and other shit like drones flying everywhere.

All it will take is a few accidental deaths that people make crazy money suing off of for all of that to go away.

We cant even make a computer that doesnt crash or get viruses... or an internet connection that doesnt drop.

Does anyone really think any of this will work right?

It happens every day.

Even when people honk at me, I'm sleeping too soundly.

I would trust myself and my kids behind an automated car that’s gone through rigorous testing and qualifications over a human with road rage or drunk any day of the week.

People don't seem to realize that flying cars already exists. They are called hellicopters, and they are expensive and loud as hell, which is why we still use cars We will only get cheap, quiet, flying cars after/if we become a space faring civilization, a la The Jetsons.

Fucking carguments!!!!

I can see that happening to be honest. I predict somewhere around the 32nd century, and you can quote me on that. Will someone care to bump this post around that time to see how I faired in my prediction?

I think theyd still make equivalent profit. Sure lower rates means they collect less money, but fewer accidents means they pay out less often as well, so they get to keep a larger fraction of what tjey are collecting.

It is Waymo. That is the Alphabet's self driving car company(e.g. what was Google Car). Waymo is only allowed to operate in certain locations. So most of Google Street View cars are still normal cars.

I will be dead before it happens, so don't care

Yeah, and there have been wrecks with people sleeping at the wheel of self driving cars. It's illegal to do this and rightfully so. Amazing people trust there very lives to this technology.

True, some drivers should not be on the road but it's not like we would all switch to autonomous cars overnight. Teenagers will still be ripping around and old people changing lanes blindly. No matter how good the autonomous car will be there will still be accidents. As long as there are accidents, there will be lawyers. Imagine if you mother or child was killed in an accident in autonomous car and it was determined the car itself caused the accident. The car manufacturer knew the system was not perfect but said they are working on making it better. What would you do?

Will the driverless cars be smart enough to dodge the squirrels and gopher turtles while squashing the eastern diamondbacks?

I imagine the same thing with drug/alcohol drivers every day. Would love to call Budweiser to the table but it’s the risk we take every day. No system and more so driver will ever be perfect so my money is on technology to even the scales.

The morals of AI are fascinating, and very few countries have written Asimov-like laws yet. I like this MIT project:

"Welcome to the Moral Machine! A platform for gathering a human perspective on moral decisions made by machine intelligence, such as self-driving cars."

They are researching human views on who the car should choose to kill in different accident situations. Fascinating cultural differences such as countries that value older people's lives more Try it out!

https://www.moralmachine.net/

An interesting little quiz but it made little sense. The entire premise is an advanced self driving car some how still has an ancient braking system that results in total failure. I based my entire decision on two parameters. First, the fact that people inside the car with all of its safety features have a much higher survival rate than pedestrians. Than second if the choice is take no action vs take action and both result in an accident you would never add complexity to a dangerous situation so no action is the logical choice. What the test determined I valued had no bearing in my decision and the result was entirely arbitrary. I'm surprised this is from MIT is seems like it was written by philosophy students not engineers. Was it uber that had the self driving car kill that bag lady. That is a perfect example of this kind of problem, the car was programmed to not brake for a trash bag as its is so common that empty garbage bags blow around on the road. The car simple identified the women with her bags of cans as a trash bag and was programmed not to react. The logic was sound the problem is the lady walking right in front of a car at night disguised as a garbage bag.

A computer can certainly react faster than a human but nothing comes close to the human mind. It's one thing to get a car to drive down a road but another to have a level of intelligence anywhere near a human. A computer can easily brake by detecting if the car in front slows down. However, can it look far up the road in heavy traffic and recognize cars swerving to avoid a ladder dumped on the road? Drivers not paying attention will ultimately drive right over the obstacle because by the time the come upon it it's too late to react. Will computers recognize heavy pools of water? Floods are common where I live and flooded roads can be deadly. Will software be able to recognize an empty trash bag or tumbleweed drifting across the road? It would be dangerous if the car slammed on the brakes.

LMAO!

Before this year I might have believed you, but at this point I think we’d all agree we’d be better off if computers - And I’m talking anything as advanced as a Speak and Spell - we’re calling the shots!

I already touched on the garbage bag point in the post above. As to the distance ahead the car can handle this much better than a human being can. When I first got my Tesla I was driving along behind a cube van. The car start blaring this warning and braking. At the time I had no idea what it was. I had time to look around and saw no issue I was just about to override the braking, when the cube van slammed on its brakes. My car had detected that the vehicles in front of the cube van had hit. This was completely out of line of sight, the car can see things happen that are impossible for a human to see.

I for one welcome our new Speak and Spell driving car overlords! lol

I have a newer model Toyota with some of the new safety features. One is lane guidance or whatever they call it. Its supposed to keep you in your lane. It looks at the stripes and the curbs and such and figures this out. Not long after I got the car, I was taking a freeway exit where you come to a stop sign to a cross road. I was making a left. But this cross road is constructed very oddly visually, as you have to sort of make a hard jog across the big road. Its hard to describe, but this is what it looks like on Google Earth. Its no problem to figure it out for a person, but the computer had some issue with it. I start heading across, and the next thing I know the damn thing is trying to take over the steering wheel, and I had to fight it to avoid going the wrong way. I think it thought that middle divider part was the lane I should be heading into. I shut that crap off after that. Somehow after about 50 years or so of driving, I have never had a problem figuring out how to stay in my lane. I should be good.

I do have the front collision detection enabled still. It seems like a good idea. It hasn't messed up on me yet, although it did start to flash a few times when it didn't really need to. Such as, when coming up to an open intersection and green light but at somewhat of an odd angle, and there are cars on the left side waiting to turn.

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Toyota lane keep Assist does nothing more then poke you when you get close to a line and pinball you back to center. FAR from actual full self driving and not meant to do anything you described. Had that system in my Honda Touring and at that time felt the same about sell driving, till I drove a Tesla...

But a Tesla is not a self-driving car. You are supposed to keep your hands on the wheel and pay attention at all times. Of course, you can elect to not do that. You can end up like Walter Huang that way. What happened there is not all that different than I mapped out above. Just another odd variation in the lanes that was not expected and was handled incorrectly. In this case, total disaster for the results.

Well, it's a better idea than passengerless cars.

Im not completely sure why, but they scare the crap out of me!

It's all fun and games, until a Johnny Cab decides to go berzerk-o on you.

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How about driverless pinball?

And this is the moral debate....companies are going to get their ASS SUED!!!! Who are they to determine who lives and dies when a choice has to be made. No AI. People need to be accountable for their actions. Period. If machines are going to do everything for us then we are the disease and should be eliminated. Terminator is real folks and that is the path this all leads to.

I don't even like the stuff in today's cars. It's gotten out of hand. My 2019 Nautilus has lane control, all the blind spot stuff, anti-collision stuff, and adaptive cruise. A few weeks ago, I was driving in the left lane of an Interstate. I was passing a large truck in the center lane. The afternoon sun was at my 2 0'clock position. I had the cruise control on and as I passed the truck, it cast a big shadow on my car. Before I passed the truck, my car slams on the brakes. Antilock activated and I went from 70 to 30-something in about 2 seconds. There were no cars or objects in front of me. This thing just messed up and could have caused fatalities had someone been directly behind me. It's bad that driver's are so lazy now, that they have to invent all of these gadgets so you don't have to pay attention anymore. Put down your phone and drive. It's worked for decades.

Wonder how LIDAR handles weather (downpour, snow, fog). That has to cause of bunch of refraction.

Austin Russell (25 years old) became the world's youngest self-made billionaire yesterday

The college drop out's self driving car sensors are being slurped up by every major car manufacturer worldwide

https://nypost.com/2020/12/04/luminar-chief-austin-russell-25-is-billionaire-after-ipo/

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He owns $3B in stocks. Jesus. If you just put that in a bank, you could live off just the interest alone, as a multimillionaire. Heck you could provide 300 people with a very comfortable living off of the interest alone. I would own so many freakin pinball machines...

Sure, but then how will Skynet ever get created?

Elon Musk has that base covered with starlink.

I'm ready to go all in on Starlink.

The internet sucks here, AND I've got to hop through a friggin server in the USA to fool Netflix into working