The self-driving cars fantasy
As a PhD student in genetics, my fellow grad students and I didn’t think the human genome would be sequenced in our lifetime. In the event, I got *my* genome sequenced years ago for $200. I’m happy to have been wrong.
My point here is that prophecy about future technology is risky. So, what about self-driving cars?
“You can have a modest taxi fleet, but you can’t scale that too much. Personal cars definitely won’t function like that . . . Drivers are cheap! True self-driving vehicles would be a neat invention, but the case for 96% self-driving is less obvious.”
Nobody died from genome sequencing. People die in car accidents. Do you want to be that person?
self-driving cars ain’t happenin’
My point here is that prophecy about future technology is risky. So, what about self-driving cars?
“You can have a modest taxi fleet, but you can’t scale that too much. Personal cars definitely won’t function like that . . . Drivers are cheap! True self-driving vehicles would be a neat invention, but the case for 96% self-driving is less obvious.”
Nobody died from genome sequencing. People die in car accidents. Do you want to be that person?
self-driving cars ain’t happenin’
The only self driving car I will ever trust enough to ride in is a hearse.
Good metaphor for “AI”: it’s a computer program, only as good as its human input
I gotta’ admit, even as an EV owner I look both askance* at Tesla and tend to pay them the same attention I would someone I suspect is impaired. You know, keep a distance. They’re all over the place around here and there have been incidents involving the automated system
*It was a great notion in inception, too bad about musk …
I want to see a successful, reliable self-driving car in my lifetime, so the very slow development of this feels great!
@Eric,
As a teenager, you may well see a successful reliable self-driving car in your lifetime! Enjoy!
Software can be made to work reliably for the normal cases. The bugs tend to crop up whenever something nobody ever imagined could happen actually does happen.
Self-driving car might work just fine on a nice well maintained road with appropriate striping and normal intersections. I drive on roads with potholes, inconsistent striping or no striping, and run into both one way streets, dead end streets, and the occasional five or six way intersection.
I’m getting to the point where I really would love to see it but I don’t think I’ll live that long.
@Jane,
Also too, shopping mall parking lots, with customers darting around with carts. And residential neighborhoods, with children darting around.