China wants to ban gas powered cars.

I never made any claims about jetpacks!!

It is part of the title of a book about unfulfilled technological predictions.

I got the title partially wrong.

https://www.amazon.com/Wheres-My-Je...=UTF8&qid=1505069507&sr=1-2&keywords=jet pack

Autonomous vehicles are already fulfilled: they're no longer a prediction.

Self-driving cars are programmed to avoid all obstacles. Period. Paragraph. They'll notice a dog running around in someone's yard before a human will. They'll have a quicker response time than a human if the dog runs out into the road, and will have already predicted possible paths to take to avoid the dog. And while some people don't care if they hit a small animal, nobody wants to hit a deer or a moose.

What makes you think that the self-driving car would be moving at that point? The law stipulates that if a bus is discharging people, all other traffic stops.

How does it make more sense to pay a human to drive out to the middle of nowhere to deliver something to a business, when you can send an automated truck to do the job for you? Especially if that delivery is the only one in the area you have?

When that happens, people will protest, and the trucking companies (if they're smart), will hand out fat checks to the victims and their families, and the issue will die down pretty quickly. If the trucking companies don't do it, there will be protests and more regulation, but self-driving trucks will still continue to roll on the highways, because there's too much money to be made by having them than to allow the public's fear of them stand in the way of profits. In 2015, there were over 25K people in the US killed in auto accidents, over 1 million people injured, and the cost of accidents was nearly $160 billion. If self-driving vehicles cut those numbers in half, it's a huge savings for everybody. This doesn't take into account the productivity lost by people missing work due to the accident (either because they're in the hospital, had to miss work due to the accident, or had to take time off of work to get their car serviced).

Pretty much has already happened. Americans, as usual, didn't give a shit.

Predictions are often wrong...



Then some do!

FF to 12:05 for 40's predictions of 1960's highways...

I take it you've never driven a school bus. Well I have. For more than six years.

Bus approaching a designated pickup spot for kids. Bus yellow lights are activated but not its red flashers yet. So traffic is merely being warned of impending stop.

Kids near the school bus stop start running across the road to line up for the bus. I will tell you from experience that this happens frequently.

Which is one reason I've always loathed picking up (or discharging) kids on a highway. I would rather pull into their yard if I had to.

And some people actually enjoy driving.

Again, you're talking about a situation with a human behind the wheel of a car. The yellow lights go on, the self-driving car is going to be slowing down, scanning the area for children, and not staring at its phone, a kid starts to dart out into the road, the self-driving car will have noticed it faster than a human could, and started taking the appropriate action (like jamming on the brakes) before the kid gets to the road.

And they can enjoy it, while paying higher rates for car insurance than people who have self-driving cars.

Depends if the human is a Democrat and the computer Republican.

Automation will kill many jobs. Truck drivers, taxi drivers, train drivers, aircraft pilots, hell, ships will be self driving. Those people, millions of them, will be out of jobs. This won't be decades from now but 10-15 years. How do you find decent paying jobs for all of those people? Self driving cars are real now but it will take time for people to accept them.

What did all the people employed making horse drawn vehicles do?

They might rear end old ladies and take off.

How do you program cowardice into a self driving car?

Started teaching in the Arkansas public school system.

Yeah, I enjoy the feel of driving (I've never once used cruise control), but the fact is most people suck at it.

I'm fine with self-serving cars.

Commercial airlines have already been automated, apart from departure and landing.

So is AMTRAK.

Uber and Lyft will kill the yellow cab before automation will.

Beyween the Fitzgerald and John S. McCain collisions, self driving ships wouldn't be the worst idea in the world, so naturally the Navy won't implement those until sometime after first contact with an alien species Luckily, the commercial fleet won't be so stupid

I've never used cruise control either. And at age 55 I still have reaction time that is off-the-scale. I'm probably one of the best defensive drivers on the road, full stop (no pun intended).
Fuck a self driving car.
That said, are self driving cars designed with "glitches" in mind?
For example, when making a left turn at an intersection with heavy traffic, the traffic signal isn't working and there is no green left turn arrow. Will the self-driving car sit there for five hours waiting for a chance to turn left against non-stop oncoming traffic (ignoring a constant barrage of honking horns and verbal threats?) when the light is green? Or will it merge right and just go straight, go a few blocks, find a place to turn around and then go back to that same intersection and turn right? Or maybe the left turn lane is already filled up well before the intersection in heavy traffic.
Will the car hop into the suicide lane 50 yards early until it gets into the proper left turn lane, or will it block traffic sitting there with it's signal on (ignoring a constant barrage of honking horns and verbal threats?) until enough cars turn left to fit into the turn lane? My point is when traffic doesn't work as advertised, will the car improvise as needed?

They can land by themselves. I don't know about commercial planes taking off by themselves, but F/A 18's launch themselves from aircraft carriers.

Do they really launch themselves or does the aircraft simply have no choice to respond the way it does once the catapult activates?

Yes, the car will improvise as needed. Google's put several million miles on their self-driving cars in a couple of states. I don't know how much other companies have put on theirs, but it's certain they're racking up the miles as well. Google engineers are logging the events that the cars don't know how to handle, and are programming them how to deal with similar events in the future. I don't recall the numbers, but Google released the details on it's testing a few years ago, there were surprisingly few times when the driver had to take control of the car because the software didn't know how to handle the situation. Oh, and Teslas log everything a driver does when it comes to handling the car. This data gets fed back to Tesla, who use it to improve their Autopilot feature (right now, little more than glorified cruise control, but will form the basis of their self-driving car technology). Tesla's sold around 200K cars, so they've got a lot more data than anyone else does at this point.

The biggest stumbling block to self-driving cars, right now, is the weather. They don't have the systems to the point where they can be reliably trusted to operate in bad conditions. But they're working on it, and I doubt that it'll be too much longer before they get the problem solved.

I count 5 cars, close my eyes, turn the wheel and floor it. Works surprisingly well.

They really launch themselves. The pilots take their hands off of all of the controls and hold a handle called a "towel rail" during launch. They can also do carrier landings automatically. I read somewhere that there is a plan to make a lot of F-18's pilotless and have them be slaves to a piloted F-35 master.

IIRC, the latest Airbus planes can do it all. Take off, fly, and land, all without a human ever needing to touch the controls. In fact, they're so automated that the pilots are barred from using the automation more than a certain amount of hours each month. Turns out, if you don't let humans have regular practice using the controls, they get rusty and can't handle emergency situations.

What, Hope and Denial?

not to nit-pick or anything, but if I'm in the "self driving" car at the time then I might as well be driving it myself! Just sitting behind the wheel (ready to take over when the car gets overwhelmed) would leave me with nothing to do but be a "back seat driver" to the car itself. The trip would seem longer & more frustrating under those conditions. While I'm sure it's inevitable, I doubt I'll ever be interested in a self-driving car.

I wouldn't mind reading on long trips but overall I agree with you.

Something I wonder about.

How will American drivers react when their cars creep along at absolutely no more than the posted speed limit? In a number of places, especially on rural interstates law enforcement pays no mind unless you are going at least ten miles an hour over the limit.

I truly doubt car makers will be allowed to program cars to exceed the speed limit by certain amounts due to the inevitable liability if an accident occurs.

If/when self driving cars are widespread there will probably automated car only lanes. You could have dozens of automated cars driving ten feet from each other at higher speeds. They can communicate with each other and all react if needed to when other cars enter and leave the group.

Unless a self driving car had the capabilities of KITT I doubt I would be interested.

Of course in addition to self driving, KITT had a vast encyclopedic knowledge, a "turbo booster" that could send it flying through the air, a laser cannon, high traction drop downs for extreme rough terrain (HTDDs), air ram styled ejection seats, a nearly impenetrable armored shell......

"If/when self driving cars are widespread there will probably automated car only lanes. You could have dozens of automated cars driving ten feet from each other at higher speeds. They can communicate with each other and all react if needed to when other cars enter and leave the group." Well that doesn't sound too scary - cars communicating is great, but the laws of physics still apply!

@Dayton3 There are already a ton of videos like this. Yeah, that is the Tesla driver fast asleep while the car drives itself.

Those would include the laws which state that computers have a faster reaction time than humans.