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[Autonomous Transportation] When the cars have all the jobs, the poor will walk the earth
Atomika
Live fast and get fucked or whateverRegistered User regular
Live fast and get fucked or whateverRegistered User regular
The Future of Travel!
It will be sooooooooo awesome:
- No more boring, unproductive commutes! Sleep in the car! Eat breakfast! File your reports! Take a nap! Watch movies! Have sex! (come on, you know that's, like, the second thing people are going to do when they get one).
- No more troublesome and awkward mid-distance journeys! Wanna go to Disney? Just get the kids in the car, fall asleep, and wake up at the park already in a motherfucking parking spot!
- Literally everywhere now has valet parking.
- Parking too expensive? Instead of paying for that pricey, cumbersome structure spot in Alphabet City, why not PARK IN GODDAMNED CONNECTICUT.
- Wanna buy cheaper housing? Anywhere is close to the city when the commute is no longer the issue!
- Cabs? Ha. No. Fuck cabs. Siri is my designated driver.
I hope you have a fucking job to pay for this miracleworld:
- Because you ain't driving a cab anymore. Livery is dead.
- Oh, you drive a truck? How quaint!
- And forget all those delivery routes you memorized working for mail carriers. Drones and autocars took yer jerb.
- You're a courier I see. I mean, were a courier.
- You probably have good job security if you work in domestic security. Those automated car-bombs aren't going stop themselves.
What will cars look like? Cars, still? Or subcompact Airstreams? And will we even care? Will we still cling to our nostalgia for the petroleum era, or can we even be bothered enough to break away from our Netflix and Chill on the corinthian leather sexseat (with dual cupholders)?
Atomika on
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Also: I really hope we get something like a pea pod train that you can park your self-driving car into for longer trips.
Also also: Road trips are going to involve so much more sex.
Guaranteed minimum income plz kthx
Driving to Idaho from Seattle was an incredibly unfun experience, and anything that could have been cool about it I had to ignore because I was busy trying to not die or kill other people.
Give me a self driving car, stat!
Nerdier version: 4 folks playing board games on the way to visit friends / family.
Let's play Mario Kart or something...
Let's play Mario Kart or something...
Roadside hotels may be in trouble.
Imagine if you could sign your robocar up to do deliveries or "uber" work while you personally didn't need to use it.
Google's car finally had an accident it was at fault for.
Four million plus miles, one accident, zero injuries. The concern others have aired that it would only take one accident for massive public backlash seems to not be the case.
So we're a ways off from these all passenger vehicles.
-Indiana Solo, runner of blades
"You realize that people are gonna try have sex in that thing?"
"Uh, yeah. Durr."
Guns, or perhaps some sort of grenade launcher mounted on the vehicle? Lasers?
On the other hand, I'm very paranoid about driverless cars (and "smart" gadgets in general) simply because someone could hack into it. Want to assassinate someone? Remotely sabotage the brakes. Kidnap someone? Lock the doors and take over the car. And what happens if the family car starts going on the fritz on an icy road? Or a tire blows out at 70 mph? You'd better hope the computer can handle it, because it looks like there's no way to control the car when you're inside it.
Hadn't even thought of that.
Yes.
Convenience businesses are gonna get burnt
Self driving cars are the best solution we have for our current infrastructure.
Though "car" is the larger misnomer here, because done correctly they won't look much like cars in a few decades.
Let's play Mario Kart or something...
Blades protruding from the axles like in the Ben Hur chariot race.
-Indiana Solo, runner of blades
holy shit
I think the infrastructure will necessarily start to shift. In particular you gain a lot of flexibility if the infrastructure you build doesn't need to be efficiently navigable by a human.
In particular I'm curious what the best way for driverless cars to interact with mass transit will be - I don't think it'll be possible to shift the kind of volume of people that mass transit does by car, driverless or otherwise.
It kind of depends what services become available, I think.
I can see a taxi style service being wildly popular if the cost is similar to, or lower, than public transport, and that has the potential to displace a lot of private car ownership.
The latter concerns need not be.
Traction issues due to ice or problems of blown tires are predictable, or at least predictable and detectable enough that computers will easily do better than we do. They react much faster and entirely more consistently. They don't have (bad) intuitions to override and can have much more direct access to the details of issue - down to things like which wheels are/are not having traction issues - and take more direct control - like changing the distribution of power to each wheel to compensate for the aforesaid.
Essentially dynamic, bespoke public-ish transit in which you are your own bus stop.
Like uber pool, but much more automated and with the ability to distribute the cost of tolls across 10+ passengers
Let's play Mario Kart or something...
It's not that it won't be an issue, but OTOH, Jane, middle manger mother of 3, is not going to be assassinated by Iranian cyber division, but she sure as hell could be t-boned by a drunk driver. Honestly, if political assassinations increase 100 fold (and that's not realistic), we'll still see far fewer deaths than we do today by a huge margin, because human error in driving is one of the largest causes of death in people who aren't old.
Self-driving cars will likely save tens of thousands of lives per year.
People already get hacked via booze, other drugs, sickness, talking on the phone, talking to people in the car, listening to loud music, eating while driving, getting angry, etc. The second part? People already can't handle things like blown tires or icy roads.
I will admit I might warm up to them if they could make me one that looks like a '67 Mustang, and not a grey-plasticky rodentine bubble.
Also your current non-driverless car can already be hacked: http://www.wired.com/2015/07/hackers-remotely-kill-jeep-highway/
http://lexiconmegatherium.tumblr.com/
A vehicle being able to function driverlessly doesn't preclude a person being able to drive it.
But I think that'll probably be a niche, like genuinely off road capable vehicles (i.e. not consumer SUVs) are now.
Thinking of a driverless car like a car is probably the wrong mindset with which to approach it. It's probably very deliberate that the concept models take an appliance-style design approach, like you see in city cars.
As I understand it, one of the major problems with self driving cars right now is that snow confuses the hell out of them. They're fine with the driving part - they can adjust their handling for winter weather just fine. It's knowing where things are when there's snow piled up everywhere that they fail at. Through GPS, they may know that they're approaching the corner of 1st and Main, but their sensors are telling them that they've entered a mysterious alien landscape.
So for now, they drive below the snow belt.
I think that learning how to handle snow is the last major hurdle they need to cross before they become practical for consumers.
But fuck you — no, fuck y'all, that's as blunt as it gets"
- Kendrick Lamar, "The Blacker the Berry"
Solution A: Infrastructure upgrades with transmitters embedded along the roadway path that allow vehicles to communicate and know where they are without visual cues.
A lot of farm vehicles can be or already are replaced with automation, since a farm is very structured. Construction, demolition, etc will take longer, since they involve unprepared conditions.