We don't have 100% autonomous trains yet, yet we're supposed to have self driving cars next year?!

Don't commercial airliners have the ability to fly themselves? They can even land the plane, I think?

I think it's more that loss of life being reduced won't be enough. Loss of life will have to be reduced by a *lot*.

I do agree that DG's fear of being targetted by a hacker is ridiculous and belies a certain narcisism on his part when in reality no one cares enough about him to hack him (much to his self centered displeasure).

biogen wrote:

1 disengagement for every 5000 miles driven. it's not a pipe dream.

First, it's hard to translate to disengagement rate into a rate for incidents that would actually be dangerous - i.e., if no human was on board, how many of the disengagements would have resulted in collisions, injuries, property damage, etc.?

Second, Level 5 would require the car to get someone to a destination without ever counting on human intervention - taking kids to school, taking a drunk home from a bar, etc.

When Americans drive a total of something like 3 trillion miles a year, an incident every 5000 miles per vehicle is unworkable. That's 600 million incidents. The rate has to go way down before you will be able to bundle a drunk into the back seat of an autonomous car and count on the car to get the drunk to any address in the United States.

Xanax wrote:

DiscoGary wrote:

Of course.

You have to remember that quite a few people have expressed a desire to kill me over the years because of my politics both online and in person. If cars could be hacked, then I might be on the list of people targeted for a crash, so statistically speaking I would probably be much safer in a standard car no matter what the safety record is for autonomous cars. That's why I am so concerned about the hacking angle.

If someone wanted to kill you I'm sure they would find an easier way than waiting until you got in a self-driving car and hacking it.

Why do you have such a compulsion to turn somewhat interesting conversations into a cesspool of asinine assertions?

Yeeeees. It seems I'm one of the few here with an imagination. Not surprising. Very well. Let's do it this way. Let's wait until everyone here has the chance to ride in one of these autonomous cars, and then we'll reconvene and discuss what was going through everyone's mind as the car took off into traffic. Are you all imagining that moment right now? Good. Will you be wondering who's really in control of the car?

Yeah, I think you'll all find that we have a lot more in common after that. I'm just one step ahead, that's all.

Hey Disco, you realize planes have autopilot right?

Xanax wrote:

If someone wanted to kill you I'm sure they would find an easier way than waiting until you got in a self-driving car and hacking it.

Wrong. If I wanted to kill DG (I don't) I'd definitely prefer the clean, almost untraceable way of hacking his car than the bloody, dirty, risky way of gunning him down or strangle him.

(Although I suspect the violent leftist thugs he challenges wouldn't forgo the pleasure of strangling him slowly.)

I should have included this in my post but it's important to note not only the disengagement rate right now (which is surprisingly already quite low), but the rate of change in that rate. In 2015, that number was one in 1250 miles. In 2016, it was one in 5000: a 4x improvement in one year.

If that trend continues, it means we are very very close. Most tech improvements are exponential in nature, so I wouldn't be surprised if this is no exception. I look forward to the 2017 report.

drones are nice weapons wrote:

Xanax wrote:

If someone wanted to kill you I'm sure they would find an easier way than waiting until you got in a self-driving car and hacking it.

Wrong. If I wanted to kill DG (I don't) I'd definitely prefer the clean, almost untraceable way of hacking his car than the bloody, dirty, risky way of gunning him down or strangle him.

(Although I suspect the violent leftist thugs he challenges wouldn't forgo the pleasure of strangling him slowly.)

There it is! An unsolicited testimonial. Thank you for that.

There once was a man named disco gary,

Who dreamt of conspiracy fairies.

He said with a grin

As he wiped his chin,

"Progress? The word sounds awfully scary!"

no, you are many, many steps behind. your irrational ramblings about cars "taking off into traffic" only confirm that

A good article on issues with autonomous trains.

It turns out we have all the tech needed to make autonomous trains, and we've seen robotrains running in limited capacity since the late 1960s. The problem isn't technology. It's line of sight, and the massive distances trains need to identify and react to obstacles and bring a few hundred tons of steel and cargo to a stop safely.

thedgshow wrote:

no, you are many, many steps behind. your irrational ramblings about cars "taking off into traffic" only confirm that

Wait. The autonomous cars wait until the roads are empty before getting on the roads? One car per road. That would make it safer, but not very efficient.

Self-driving cars are already much safer drivers that humans, and there are studies proving it too. We don't have 100% autonomous trains yet because people do not spend as much time developing and working on trains since there is less 'hype' for it.

But, as of now, self-driving cars are still not 100% safe because they have problems recognizing things with foggy weather conditions, unclear lane markings, etc.

Gary poem wrote:

There once was a man named disco gary,

Who dreamt of conspiracy fairies.

He said with a grin

As he wiped his chin,

"Progress? The word sounds awfully scary!"

Inspiring a very young mind's creativity is it's own reward.

ah there it is, the incoherent rambling of a lunatic that weve all come to expect from DiscoGary. What in the world are you talking about?

thedgshow wrote:

ah there it is, the incoherent rambling of a lunatic that weve all come to expect from DiscoGary. What in the world are you talking about?

We ARE talking about self-driving cars on roads with other cars right? That would mean that the car would have to join the traffic at some point.

Gary Gary Gary!! Whadda you think about self-flying airplanes????????

Dennis T Reynolds wrote:

Hey Disco, you realize planes have autopilot right?

An airplane autopilot is not the equivalent of Level 5 autonomous driving. For the foreseeable future airplanes will fly with a highly trained pilot ready to take over from an autopilot when necessary. That's despite the skies having many fewer obstacles than the roads, having an active air traffic control system, less constricted path of movement, etc.

Congratulations! You learned how roads work!! You are now one fewer step behind the rest of society! Let us know if you have any other revelations about driving that you'd like to share.