Yeah I think we are going to see an exponential increase in reports like that.
Indeed.
Fast-foward a few years, now you’ve got a flying car. Let’s say it’s a second-hand model, and your brother-in-law has cleaned and tuned the engine. Also, he’s patched the BIOS with a newer version, so how about taking your car for a test fly?
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Why not? Didn’t you admire test pilots and thought about becoming one? Now you have your chance!
…also, isn’t that what remote control is for? With a couple servos, every vehicle can be an unmaned vehicle.
Yeah, but a '79 Grenada is able to push pedestrians out of the way by sheer cool factor.
Not a camera, but a LADAR system -Light Detection And Ranging specifically to stop, (or minimise the damage of) the frequent rear-end collisions that occur in cities. I believe it’s fitted as standard in all Volvos.
You’re right, Dire. I was just going on the lingo that the warranty/service manual uses on p. 16 (‘camera’) but used in connection with “collision warning” now seems to imply the ped detection upgrade: http://esd.volvocars.com/local/us/2012-Volvo-Warranty-Manual.pdf
The owner’s manual doesn’t use ‘camera’ for City Safety™—they do call it a “laser sensor” on p. 168 here http://justgivemethedamnmanual.com/download/?f=2012-Volvo-S60-Owners-Manual.pdf
I’m actually a lot less scared by flying cars than “autonomous” cars; at least for he foreseeable future flying cars will still require a pilots license and will still be so absurdly expensive that only those with lots of money and leisure time will have access to them. And people who have pilots licenses are generally pretty responsible people. Autonomous cars otoh will be available to everyone within the next 5 years, and will be operable with just you’re run-of-the-mill drivers license that pretty much any 16 year old can get.
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I believe autonomous cars have a good chance to perform better than live drivers, even the early ones. Yes, on one hand you have the relative “cognitive impairments” given by contemporary tech limitations, which will go away asymptotically with more research. On the other hand, however, you have the absence of fatigue, of distractability, of emotions, of all the handicaps inherent to humans.
And you can improve machines way faster than you can improve humans.
And our perception of the “unsafety” of robocars will be fueled by the media, for which every single fender-bender where robocar gets involved will be a frontpage-worthy news, while human-caused mishaps of much higher count and much more severe outcomes will be as neglected as they are now, because they are so common.
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Oh I agree 100% - fully automated cars can exceed human capabilities and be safer than human drivers. But almost fully autonomous cars are going to be dangerous as fuck.
Not necessarily. Sure, you get both failure modes. But the actual error rate will be way less than the sum of both human and machine failure rates, as they will be divided between the manual and auto modes, with some overlap.
This is another safety hysteria that will pass as people get used to the things.
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