I'll just keep reading articles that say they are 5 years away, just as I did 5 years ago, and the armchair futurists will keep dreaming...
You should be skeptical of drawing conclusions based on a news article's two-word excerpt of a presumably much longer comment. I seriously doubt Google actually thinks their cars will only be usable if human drivers massively change their behavior. It sounds more like an off-hand joke than a serious description of their product strategy.
> I'll just keep reading articles that say they are 5 years away, just as I did 5 years ago, and the armchair futurists will keep dreaming...
Ten years ago, the best autonomous vehicles in the world could barely make it through an empty desert test track. Five years ago, they could do a reasonable job of navigating urban areas that were closed off from normal traffic. Today they drive about 50 miles per day, per car on public roads with a safety driver. It's likely not much longer before the safety drivers are considered unnecessary.
If you want to get a skewed, unreliable view of how this technology is developing, feel free to keep listening to "armchair futurists". But if you actually look at what the engineers who are working on it say, and what they've actually achieved, it's clear that steady progress is being made.
I'm quite surprised that you can be a skeptic on the concept as a whole. Being skeptical about the given timeframes is perfectly reasonable (and probably correct), but humans do so, so many things terribly. We have automated away so many tasks in our world, both for efficiency and safety, that i can't even see an argument to counter that.
To extend that further then, why shouldn't we want human drivers off the roads asap? It's a dangerous act that, frankly, many people aren't qualified for.
Self-driving cars have so much potential behind them, that being a "skeptic" seems quite confusing to me. Just because it's a difficult problem, does not warrant giving up. The safety benefits alone, are well, well worth it.
I could foresee this happening in one or two Western European countries, though I would expect Germany and Central Europe to hold out (the German electorate resists regulation that impedes the speed and power of their automobiles).
An aside: how would a car being self-driving affect the owner's ability to direct it wherever he or she pleases?
I very much believe in gradual improvements and that is what many large car manufacturers are doing. I can easily imagine not needing to control my car on a highway, in a city, or when parking it, but I expect the manual controls will stay there for a very very long time.
Fortunately, as you say, there are still a majority of sane people who vote in the USA. Will that still be true a generation later?
I would predict electric cars before self-driving cars, so they won't have that excuse at least.
Lol, i think you're mistaking my (attempted) logical thinking towards some type of agenda towards banning humans driving cars. You seem far more agenda driven, heh.
Just because i think we are extremely unqualified for driving, does not mean i want to ban the act. It be extremely improbable to achieve, with all the costs of upgrading the entire infrastructure alone making your defense of this almost seem like a half hearted joke. Moreover, even if in some magic realm where we can make all cars into self driving cars to abolish human driving, i'm just simply not in favor of removing human rights.
Yes, i would want to make it difficult for you to drive, but for your own (and mine!) safety. Our safety standards for driving tests are incredibly, and i mean incredibly, laughable. How often we enforce rules and laws for driving are also laughable. Almost no one even follows some of the most basic rules, like speed limits, and the more extreme people often break sobriety laws.
Self driving cars would give us a platform to A: Raise the bar for who can drive, and what sort of training you need. and B: Be more willing to ban someone from driving if they put others at risk, through speed, drugs, alcohol, or whatever.
We have a hard time banning drivers these days because it very negatively impacts your life if you cannot drive. In a world with self driving cars though, you can still have a first class life. Driving is now something of leisure.
Anyway, nice try at putting words in my mouth - next time make them a little less tinfoil though, please.
Don't kid yourself: humans aren't some kind of perfect driver. A bit of sleepiness, a text message, a tiny distraction in the car, and their responsiveness plummets.
I was going to just reply with "Horses give you the freedom to go anywhere, any time, without having to build roads or get a drivers ..." and then I'm like, wait a minute.... there's all sorts of stuff you need for a car...
Driverless cars, on the other hand, aim to "tame" the automobile and make it a kind of mini-train, with someone else deciding where you may go and how you may get there. Google is already creepy enough without handing over your freedom (and privacy) of movement to their computer.
It's only in the near term that it gets a little dicy.
Or until there is a critical mass that people adapt their expectations of how many drivers violate minor road rules, like running a red light or running through a crosswalk.
Also, even if self-driving cars aren't perfect, from the data we have so far, they're still several orders of magnitudes better than regular cars. If every self-driven car today were replaced with a regular car, we would see more crashes, not fewer, overall.
In addition, some multiplier involving driving conditions (rain, wind, proximity to other vehicles) and driver stats (driving record) comes into play.
Personally, I would guess that there would still be a reduction in accidents, thus fewer deaths and injuries.