I don't think that will ever happen. It may even be the opposite: AI will drive in a way it will always be able to stop if there's a possibility that there's someone behind some obstacle that may jump to the road at any moment.
Worst case scenario, beacons become mandatory. Cheap and anonymous beacons you have to carry when you're near a road. Smart phones may include such functionality.
"Install this app on your phone to make traffic lights recognize you when you approach them, for a timely shift to green light"
"Install this app to collect pedestrian-points, exchange points for prices and discounts!"
"Get a better insurance tier for installing this app which tracks your fitness. Do your daily 10.000 steps for a free <whatever>!"
Once enough people jump on board, and it's generally accepted as being "normal because everybody uses it", then you can mandate it and the few people left who resist can easily be branded as "paranoid tinfoil-hat people" to marginalize their opposition.
Smartphones are radio transceivers, I would imagine any anonymous beacon technology wouldn't be noticeably louder than what smartphones are already emitting.
No location tracking = new policy price
Location tracking = new policy price - 10K.
New policy price = old policy price + 10k
And that's assuming they can get away with the rate increases in the first place. States like CA have insurance commissioners empowered to review and reject rate increases.
After all, these beacons are not mandatory - they're only needed if you want to use the roads as a pedestrian or cyclist. If you don't, you can drive your car like any real (read: non-poor) American, or use a taxi or bus. Pedestrians already aren't permitted on highways, what's so different about restricting pedestrians on surface streets?
And if you don't carry the beacon, that's not illegal, it's just your fault if you get hit by a car. It's not the government forcing you to carry it, it's algorithms and corporations, which makes it okay, right? If these beacons are produced by the free market, why should government regulation step in and stifle innovation?
> This is the same United States where just about everyone already carries a tracking device by choice.
Sure, that's a very reasonable counter-point, however not everyone does.
> where lots of people have installed 24/7 network-connected microphones in their homes
Plenty of folks find asking a wiretap for pancake recipes fine, and there are plenty that balk at the thought. This Christmas my sister bought everyone Amazon's cute little NSA Listening Post™ - was fun how quickly the look of disgust crossed their face when I explained that every conversation would be recorded and store in Amazon's data centers... and probably a few three-letter agencies.
> and where everyone believes you need ID to fly. This is the same United States where a common political argument is that of course ID should be required to vote because ID is required for everything else, and citizens should just carry ID. This is the same US where a special police force arrests and detains citizens and forces them to prove that they're actually citizens. It's been a long while since we actually objected to the "papers, please" world.
There is an insanely large leap between having an ID for a few specific purposes and being mandated to carry a homing beacon.
> they're only needed if you want to use the roads as a pedestrian or cyclist.
The post I replied to did not state "to use the roads" - it stated general use of mandatory beacons. You're moving the goalposts.
> And if you don't carry the beacon, that's not illegal, it's just your fault if you get hit by a car. It's not the government forcing you to carry it, it's algorithms and corporations, which makes it okay, right? If these beacons are produced by the free market, why should government regulation step in and stifle innovation?
If the AppleMobile hits me because I don't carry an iPhone, you can best believe they will be sued into oblivion. Remember, this is litigious America!
The Evangelical community would surely denounce a mandatory tracking device as the work of the Antichrist, and I would love to watch politicians shit on that high-turnout demographic.
I agree with everything else you wrote (I think?), but I thought that the Echo only transmitted things it recognized directly following the activation phrase?
Why would it be harder to pwn than anything else?
I don't think they meant to imply that it would be hard to to cause such behavior via malicious action by 3rd parties.
Sorry - my reading was that it was in reply to "Worst case scenario, beacons become mandatory. Cheap and anonymous beacons you have to carry when you're near a road," and so I thought you meant "beacons that are mandatory if you're near a road and don't want to be hit." If you mean "beacons that are mandatory just to be a human in America at all," then sure, I think that's going to be a much harder sell, but I'd also argue that the post you were responding to doesn't require such beacons.
To me, that includes pedestrians walking on a city sidewalk who might jaywalk as the TFA that started this whole conversation is talking about. Now the only way you can ensure folks have that device is to mandate for everyone. Of course in the US it isn't nearly as common, but I know plenty of city-dwellers without cars. IANAL but I'm having a hard time believing a mandatory beacon would pass Constitutional muster, let alone public support.
That reads so snarkily. You announce that what the other guy wrote sounds like a lot of BS, or you strongly suspect it is (why mention that otherwise) but you will very generously act as though it's not. It's good to assume good faith, not so good to announce it like that.
I think you'll find "land of the free, home of the brave" is more or less a cheap slogan once the chips are down and people are afraid.
Exceedingly few people in the US actually care about individual freedom or privacy. 9/11 drove that point severely home to me - those born in the 90's and later will never know the America I once knew, and I'm sure those born before Pearl Harbor and the like would say similar.
The erosion of personal freedom and the expectation of privacy just in my lifetime has been absolutely astounding. Watching basically everyone trade their freedom for temporary security.
Hyperbolic? A bit. But I think if you spend some moments of reflection you'll realize almost none of your fellow citizens actually care. They will play lip service at best until an event happens that scares them, and at that point you're the crazy privacy freak with obviously something to hide.
You just wrote two things:
1) Pedestrians and bike riders should wear beacons or aren't "real Americans".
2) Poor Americans aren't "real Americans".
Are those what you meant to write?
- "Is someone behind that parked van?"
- "Yes"
- "Who?"
- "Mind your own business, just slow down in case I decide to jump to the road, ok?"
the whole "car detects obstacle in an untrafficed area, stops, door is opened, passenger gets out, passenger gets back in, changes destination to a place not proximate to anywhere they've ever been before" process also sounds like the sort of thing that would justifiably raise a bit of a red flag. maybe not an automated call to 911, but it should probably dump all records to the cloud and trigger a call from an onstar operator or similar.
Besides, if we're talking about this happening in the "bad" parts of town, the car can call 911 and broadcast is position all it likes. There won't be any immediate response.
Finally, people who do this long enough will eventually figure out what to disconnect to allow themselves enough time to do what they want with the car- like today's car thieves do with modern car alarms.
9-60-060 Pedestrian crossing. [...] (b) No pedestrian shall suddenly leave a curb or other place of safety and walk or run into the path of a vehicle which is so close that it is impossible for the driver to yield.
https://www.cityofchicago.org/city/en/depts/cdot/supp_info/o...
So you get get punished if it hits you? Or how does this work...
Ever since self-driving cars started being a thing I keep being reminded of this book, and am half-waiting for at lease that part of it to come true.
I've been searching for a bit now, and I still haven't find it. I think it was from the 70s or 80s.
A situation with pedestrians only doesn't require those traffic controls.
A situation with motor vehicles only does require them, otherwise there will be an increase in the number of accidents and unacceptable congestion.
The mixture of the two requires them only because of the presence of motor vehicles.
It's very simple, really.
i always bring up the examples of thak thak gangs in delhi to show actual threats which become worse with autonomous cars.
i suspect people in the first world who believe in autonomous cars are exposed to a very limited set of uses for roads and cars.
India is the place where the autonomous car dream goes to die.
after that every downgrades the idea to lower than level 5 driving.
Honestly, the 21st century is basically clickbait: You won't believe what happens next!
If carjacking becomes a problem the cars will figure it out and start locking all the doors. Or if the car is unoccupied, let the carjaker in, then notify the nearest police station it is coming in with a criminal.
I'll just say that it is an option with some merit. Depending on the technology and the local situation I might or might not be in favor of it.
Of course that won't stop the behavior completely but it won't be a free for all either.
just because the lights for cars are gone doesn't necessitate that the pedestrian crosswalks and buttons be removed. they might even work more effectively, if they can communicate with all the vehicles in the vicinity.
All other road users have to stop and the light cycles normally. (and during this specially triggered light cycle, even self-driving cars need to stop)
I, too, am a fan of roundabouts.
I doubt that attitude will ever catch on. Maybe I'm being overly optimistic, but it seems to me that there's a healthy suspicion about AI drivers.
So far at least, the attitude taken by, well, everyone, is that AI drivers are untrustworthy until proven trustworthy. If AI drivers can't cope with the various challenges of real driving, then the AI drivers are to blame, not the external factors.
If they work well, AI drivers will be permitted to drive. If they do not, they will not be permitted to drive. At no point will they get to dictate what other road-users may do. Our Ludditism will see to that.
It is not particularly difficult to imagine the general public swaying even to some opposite extreme, supported by some reasoning like "he probably did something wrong to get killed, the AI cars make very few mistakes."
But I agree that if autonomous cars come to pass, there will be a lot of pressure to go down the route you discuss.
.
It needs a catchy name though. Back-alley is too harsh. Something that represents our aspirations for the cities of the future. I'm thinking "Metro."
But with a difference of point to point rather than line-based. Autonomous technology will probably mean a kind of union between private and public transport, and between road and metro rail.
Sounds an awful lot like a subway or lite rail system to me. I've never understood the fascination with self-driving cars and what they imply for PT--how is such a system superior to a well designed and maintained train system?
Cars can go anywhere.
We could really hide the rails underground and at last free the roads again for people to use, like the article says it was in the 1920's. We could reduce automotive accidents to a bare minimum, which btw is the main selling point of self-driving cars, far as I can tell. We could reduce pollution by a factor of 10, probably, which is the much bigger problem that the industry isn't try to sell a solution for - because more cars are not exactly what you'd call a solution to it. We could make our cities places for humans, rather than noisy, dirty, polluting, often deadly machines. But, no. We gotta have more cars. Because you can't stop the march of progress.
We tried that, it's called the Interstate Highway System, and it was a half-trillion-dollar disaster.
When we were building the Heathrow Pod[1] -- which is effectively an autonomous taxi system -- this was an objection that people raised all the time. In practice, it took approximately zero instances of bad passenger behaviour for people to catch onto the fact that the interior of an autonomous vehicle that can deliver you non-stop to airport security is really the last place on Earth that you'd want to engage in anti-social behaviour.
1: https://www.heathrow.com/transport-and-directions/heathrow-p...
1: This does not reflect the views of any previous, current, or future employers, or indeed of myself when I'm being serious.
Literally just stand in front of them and there will be nothing they can do. Once people get used to zero social repercussions (driverless cars will be empty probably 50% of the time en-route to pick someone up or go park themselves by my estimation) I imagine you will see things like certain folks simply crossing streets blindly comfortable in the fact that the cars will stop for them regardless of right of way.
Many will disagree that this will happen, but I think many underestimate the antisocialness of folks when there are no consequences.
the best solution isn't to try to slow down the cars but rather to make mixed-use urban areas the default so that walking and biking become the norm. you also get all kinds of other benefits with that (less traffic, healthier air, more fit people, etc)
i agree that driving qualifications should be more strict, but probably in a different dimension than you: test drivers on situational awareness and predictive decision making. fail people for both distracted driving and indecision (and lack of follow-through), as well as not communicating intent (e.g, signaling) to other drivers.
I'd wager that you can reduce the top speed cars are allowed to travel significantly before the effective speed goes down by much, especially if you can improve traffic flow by e.g. vehicle-vehicle communication.
But my post was not about the relative merits of cycling versus driving. I simply wanted to rebut clairity's point that making cycling and walking safer necessarily makes driving slower.
Also, I think I would frequently (perhaps not every time, but at least 25% of the time) beat a driver to the door of my workplace from my apartment because of a combination of cars not actually being much faster than me due to traffic, stop lights, etc. and parking. My parking is so small that it's a lot closer to my building. This obviously depends on where you work, but here it seems to be a major factor. (On second thought this would also depend on which lot the driver would park in. Most would have a long enough walk to make cycling faster or at least about the same. I also haven't done this race, for what it's worth. Anyway, the point stands: travel times for cyclists are not necessarily worse than drivers.)
A $60k retrofitted transporter van isn't exactly the definition of "independence".
Slower roads (max 20MPH/30KMPH) should be bicycle and pedestrian-first. Cars there should be "guests" catering to the slower non-motorized traffic.
This way we have the best of both worlds: nice & livable urban roads and faster driving in connecting roads.
my one pet peeve around that is that most californians don't respect the rule that any intersection of two city streets is a crosswalk, whether marked as such or not, and pedestrians crossing at a corner have the right of way. as soon as they start walking, cars must stop for them, even on larger streets (most drivers don't know/rememeber this and zoom dangerously close by).
Slower roads (max 20MPH/30KMPH) should be bicycle and pedestrian-first.
all roads, but even residential streets, in car-centric cities like LA seem to be built wide enough to accommodate 747's with ease.
my proposal: rather than 12-15 foot widths, make urban residential street lanes 9 feet wide (cars are typically 6-7 feet wide, delivery trucks, 8 feet wide). replace parking lanes with slightly grade-separated (3-4 inches) bike lanes, leaving existing walkways for pedestrians only.
and make sure these narrow lanes have shoulder lane markings.
In one street of my city the parking was replaced with two way bicycle lanes, and there are plastic bollards to separate it from the road (which is probably around 9 feet now as you suggest). Compared to a grade separation that isn’t going to do much if you go over it, if you hit a bollard it’s going to leave a nice permanent mark on your car, so you are going to drive more carefully.
The only issue I’ve seen with this is if vehicles need to deliver to the shops and bars on this street, they have to park in the cycle lane (there is no rear access or parking).
hopefully you're not suggesting that cars should be travelling 50km/hr in mixed-use urban areas? Because "slowing down the cars" is a synonym for mixed-use area. That's the same thing, if you continue with car-only roads there's no need to slow down the cars.
This is actually happening. Portland has recently fallen in line with other cities, like Seattle, and lowered thousands of miles of streets from 25 MPH to 20 MPH.
http://www.oregonlive.com/commuting/index.ssf/2018/01/portla...
25mph is much better than 35mph.
The $64k question is: what will states and counties do without police citation revenue?
The only thing these auto-scammers would get are human drivers not driving precisely and accurately.
I live in Edinburgh, which has been gradually introducing 20mph limits over the last couple of years, and I've actually taken to them much better than I'd expected to: they don't reduce my average speed all that much, especially as the arterial roads are still 30mph, and they're much more pleasant when I'm out of the car.
http://www.kgw.com/news/local/red-light-cameras-can-catch-yo...
What about people who genuinely love to drive cars & ride motorcycles? Are we a danger this utopian self automated future? I just don't see it happening. There's so many people that are enamored with cars and motorcycles, who love the sensation, independence and freedom derived from the experience. Older manual Ferraris or air-cooled Porsches appreciate in value for a reason.
I almost lament at the future where an entire generation will grow up without experiencing such "archaic, manual and dangerous vehicles" because it will be too expensive, much as classic supercars will remain out of reach for majority of the population.
I suspect we can find a place for them outside of our most densely populated urban cores. The popularity of cars isn't in itself a scandal. The scandal is that cars still enjoy undue priority in places like Midtown Manhattan, it's that urban neighborhoods were destroyed and divided by interstate highways, it's that most cities no longer function properly for the carless.
That seems unconstitutional and a bit like North Korea where they restrict cars to specific areas and ban it in others.
There is no Constitutional right to bear cars.
I think the world outside USA would want a word with you about that "most cities" part.
There will be car clubs where people interested driving car can go and have the experience.
In my part of the rural US, one can get an isolated hour of horseback riding for $20 or so, or maintain a personal horse for a few hundred a month (if kept at a stable run as a business for that purpose; cheaper if you have your own property suitable for housing the horse).
I can see car garages and designated driving areas becoming the riding stables of the future.
Aside, you might find this short-fiction story from Vice interesting: https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/xygzvz/one-star
Your freedom comes at a high price, direct and indirect. Countries with functioning public transportation are providing a lot of this freedom, to a broader population and at a fraction of the cost compared to personal cars.
I already see this with public transit. Public transport is a method of population control. You can keep classes of people confined to their neighborhoods simply based on how and where you choose to route buses/trains.
I can get in my car and go anywhere. That to me is the true spirit of America.
Turn the sidewalks into elevated walkways. Or use pedestrian tunnels underneath the road surface. Pedestrian crosswalks are a money-saving measure, ignoring one of the many externalities involved in automobile manufacture. Cars simply should not be driving on pedestrian walkways, and pedestrians should not be walking anywhere that does not have a significant physical barrier between them and the massive objects moving at high speed.
Elevated walkways would be vastly cheaper, but still infeasible on any current budget. You would end up having to rebuild the lobby of most buildings to be on the second floor, and probably turn the first floor into parking. It feels like one of those utopian ideals from the 50s or 60s that came out before people started thinking about the money.
Seattle was raised in the 1880s.
A portion of Atlanta was raised in the 1920s. They actually did rebuild new lobbies on the upper floors, and a lot of the old storefronts are still intact down below.
but yes, underground infrastructure is expensive (maybe the boring company will help drive equipment costs down), but we're a rich nation and we want nice things. i think we can do it if we want to. plus, it creates working class jobs and that makes the economy go 'round.
Around my area, people don't walk for pleasure, mostly, they walk because they're too poor for a car and the public transit system is terrible. Forcing them to climb stairs (assuming they're even physically able; a fair number of pedestrians near here are in wheelchairs) to get out of the way of cars is a non-starter.
(Though I can't imagine people being happy about going up and down stairs, escalators, or elevators every time they want to cross a street.)
The necessity arises from the car-drivers, so you charge them for the pedestrian safety measures, just like you charge them for the creation and maintenance of limited-access highways.
Without crosswalks, there is no pedestrian-crossing phase needed in the traffic signals, so separating the two types of traffic simultaneously makes cars faster and pedestrians safer. The question really is how much drivers would be willing to pay to shave that last minute off their commute.
If you look at projects like Boston's "Big Dig", the answer is that they are willing to spend quite a lot [of other people's money].
The results are... mixed. Some people love the place, but the grade separated cycle paths are not popular. Well worth looking at, if this is an area you're interested in.
1. http://www.spiegel.de/international/spiegel/controlled-chaos...
It really makes no sense for an 80Kg person to go around in a 1000kg vehicle.
The 1000kg vehicle protects the 80kg person from harm because the 80kg person is not designed to go 100kph.
> Motion sickness comes from the conflict between your eyes and the part of your ear which tells you which way is up and lets you stay in balance.
If there's no windows, then your eyes will say "We're not moving", but your inner motion sensor in your ear will say "We're definitely moving", and you'll create motion sickness.
It's for the same reason some people feel motion sickness in some VR apps that involve movement in the virtual world that doesn't match your real world movement, such as driving a car in VR. Your eyes say "We're moving", but your ear says "No we aren't!", and the discrepancy triggers motion sickness.
And until ALL the human drivers are gone, automated ones are going to have to drive 'on eggshells' in case an uninstrumented car happens by. IF it were known for a fact that all cars were instrumented (so the software knew where ALL of them were) then we could even do away with stop lights etc - the cars could regulate intersections 'in the cloud'. And so on.
Which leaves the interesting problem - what do we do to cross the chasm - from all human drivers to all automated drivers? There are few good solutions in the middle.
a) during transition, human-driven cars must be instrumented. Automatic moving violation for speeding.
b) automatic moving violation for driving a non-instrumented vehicle in a zone where they are mandatory.
Such a utopia: not only do the police have a monopoly on violence, but also private transportation.