Saying this is pointless and worthless is insane to me. More than thirty thousand people die in motor vehicle deaths in the US every year. The amount of pain and suffering this technology will eliminate is incalculable.
> Are you really arguing that driving deaths are a major problem that requires intensive effort to solve?
It's obvious to any observer that driving deaths are a major problem, and that an intensive effort to solve this problem is appropriate. We've made tremendous progress over that last 50 years. Let's continue that path.
>It's obvious to any observer that driving deaths are a major problem, and that an intensive effort to solve this problem is appropriate. We've made tremendous progress over that last 50 years. Let's continue that path.
This is disingenuous. Driverless cars are not part of an effort to reduce driving deaths, that's just how they're being sold. It's just as likely that driverless cars will increase driving deaths, until their safety record is refined over a period of many years and lots of testing (the same way it happened with humans).
Driverless cars are being pursued because tech companies see an opportunity to use their machine learning expertise to turn driving into a commodity service that they control and can make billions off. It has nothing to do with driving safety, and if that were the goal (which, again, it is not, the goal is to make money by turning driving into a service and eliminate the cost of labor for drivers), there are a hundred cheaper ways to do it. If increasing driving safety were a goal that society actually cared about, Tracy Morgan would not have been hit by a truck.
No one is talking about that. Poorly-driven vehicles will be with us for decades, because freedom. Everyone knows that.
Humans are quite capable and will always be able to handle things that computers can't in situations they're not designed for. At least until an AI is invented that is indistinguishable from a human mind. There will be mistakes and bugs (just as there are now in software made for cars). But believing that humans who drive while tired, eating cheeseburgers, playing with their phone, texting, not accounting for blind spots and tailgating others are going to be safer in the long run is bordering on religious faith in some kind of fantasy that humans are more than they are.
No one is talking about replacing F1 drivers, we're talking about a sea of idiots that anyone who commutes every day with any awareness would recognize as being a major hazard. I'll take the patchable bugs over the psychos I see every day that put lives at risk with their self-centered hyper aggressive driving that relies on the attentiveness of everyone around them to prevent an accident. There is no software update for people like this–you either wait years for them to grow up or for them to kill someone.
There is no right to drive like there is a right to own guns.
The authoritarians just hate that one! Some might say it doesn't apply, since the state owns the roads, so it can declare them off-limits to human drivers. That might have worked if we didn't already have billions of dollars worth of extant rolling stock in constant use. Suddenly taking all that would require the state to compensate vehicle owners, which will not happen. Thus, drivers have a right to drive, subject to reasonable regulation.