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from the who's-gonna-drive-miss-daisy? dept.
The race to bring driverless cars to the masses is only just beginning, but already it is a fight for the ages. The competition is fierce, secretive, and elite. It pits Apple against Google against Tesla against Uber: all titans of Silicon Valley, in many ways as enigmatic as they are revered.
As these technology giants zero in on the car industry, global automakers are being forced to dramatically rethink what it means to build a vehicle for the first time in a century. Aspects of this race evoke several pivotal moments in technological history: the construction of railroads, the dawn of electric light, the birth of the automobile, the beginning of aviation. There's no precedent for what engineers are trying to build now, and no single blueprint for how to build it.
Self-driving cars promise to create a new kind of leisure, offering passengers additional time for reading books, writing email, knitting, practicing an instrument, cracking open a beer, taking a catnap, and any number of other diversions. Peope who are unable to drive themselves could experience a new kind of independence. And self-driving cars could re-contextualize land-use on massive scales. In this imagined mobility utopia, drone trucks would haul packages across the country and no human would have to circle a city block in search of a parking spot.
If self-driving vehicles deliver on their promises, they will save millions of lives over the course of a few decades, destroy and create entire industries, and fundamentally change the human relationship with space and time. All of which is why some of the planet's most valuable companies are pouring billions of dollars into the effort to build driverless cars.
After automation puts everyone out of work, will anyone need to drive anywhere anymore?
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Lunix Nutcase on Wednesday December 16 2015, @02:47PM
Anything that reduces the number of fatalities / injuries by even 1% is a good thing.
Not really. The money spent on driverless cars could be spent on curing diseases and other societal problems that amount for magnitudes more deaths than automobile fatalities. Cardiovascular disease in the US alone kills more than 20 times the people who die due to cars.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by RobotLove on Wednesday December 16 2015, @04:00PM
This kind of thinking is not useful. "Because we can't fix the worst possible thing, we shouldn't fix anything." Unless you can show that the money that is being invested in driverless cars would have otherwise been invested in successful research, it is not a waste.
(Score: 2) by Lunix Nutcase on Wednesday December 16 2015, @04:30PM
I didn't say we shouldn't fix anything. I specifically pointed to something that should be fixed insead because it causes a far bigger amount of deaths and economic drain than car accidents.
(Score: 2) by Vanderhoth on Wednesday December 16 2015, @04:42PM
People are already pouring billions into medical research, hell the funds spent on developing this tech is a drop in the bucket compared to what pharmaceutical companies spend. Putting more funding there doesn't mean more problems get solved there.
Putting money into other areas where lives can be saved, on top of increasing the quality of life for millions of people, is a better use for it IMHO. And we're only scratching the surface of what driverless cars could do. Driving people from point A to B is the bare minimum. Think of ambulances that could put out signals to communicate with traffic to clear paths. Or cars being able to negotiate with each other rather than people guessing what the other drivers are going to do. Or cars knowing where there's construction or or emergency crews putting out fires.
There's huge benefit here beyond just saving lives.
"Now we know", "And knowing is half the battle". -G.I. Joooooe
(Score: 1) by cmdrklarg on Wednesday December 16 2015, @09:02PM
Is there a reason that we can't work on both (and more) issues concurrently?
The world is full of kings and queens who blind your eyes and steal your dreams.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 16 2015, @04:19PM
I'm pretty sure almost no one qualified to work on a self-driving car is also qualified for doing medical research.
(Score: 2) by Lunix Nutcase on Wednesday December 16 2015, @04:28PM
I never said they would be which is why I was purely talking about the funding. The funding for the cars could be spent to actually solve problems that account for the deaths of 100s of times more people a year than all deaths due to accidents.
(Score: 3, Touché) by q.kontinuum on Wednesday December 16 2015, @05:13PM
Maybe we should also shut down cinemas, theaters, football/baseball/whatever league, fast food restaurants and so on. It's also quite a lot of money which could be used to fund medical research.
We might live so much longer... Or, at least it might be perceived as living longer due to boredom :-)
Registered IRC nick on chat.soylentnews.org: qkontinuum
(Score: 2) by VLM on Wednesday December 16 2015, @09:45PM
So which is scarier AC, the people who write and maintain the code for self driving cars not being "safety of human life qualified" like avionics, or the limited pool of IQ 140+ people currently writing "safety of human life qualified" avionics working on cars instead, such that planes fall out of the sky? It is a zero sum game over time periods shorter than multiple human generations.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday December 17 2015, @08:56AM
(Score: 4, Insightful) by NotSanguine on Wednesday December 16 2015, @04:41PM
Not really. The money spent on driverless cars could be spent on curing diseases and other societal problems that amount for magnitudes more deaths than automobile fatalities. Cardiovascular disease in the US alone kills more than 20 times the people who die due to cars.
All you're doing is pointing up the misdirected resources in our society. Yes, you're much more likely to die of heart disease than in a car crash, but then, you're more likely to die being struck by lightning than in a terrorist attack. Does that mean we should spend more money on preventing lightning strikes than terrorist attacks?
We should (both from economic and societal standpoints) address issues in proportion to the actual risk of death and/or injury.
I would love to see the amounts of money currently being spent on "national defense," "drug interdiction" and "counter-terrorism" scaled to the actual risks and have some part of the balance applied towards auto safety (including driver-less cars), health care and health education, substance abuse treatment and other areas which have higher risks of death/debilitation/injury.
No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical. --Niels Bohr
(Score: 2) by aclarke on Wednesday December 16 2015, @06:41PM
That's an interesting question. I realize this isn't particularly sound research, but it's the best I could do with the 5 minutes I was willing to dedicate to it. I'll also just use US numbers.
Apparently some guy estimated that the US spends $1B per year fighting terrorism.
I decided for "preventing lightning strikes" I'd just go with the cost of adding lightning rods to houses. My first Google result for "lightning rod cost" came up with $2500. I think that's for a retrofit, not a new build, but I'm also ignoring commercial buildings, cost of surge protectors, insurance claims due to lightning strikes, etc. etc. etc. So there. Number of US households: 118,000,000. Average age of house: 35 years.
118M / 35 = 34M houses built per year.
$34M * $2500 = $8.4B per year in lightning rods.
So, you're apparently spending an order of magnitude more per year fighting terrorism than we are on installing lightning rods. Who knew.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by NotSanguine on Wednesday December 16 2015, @07:09PM
That's an interesting question. I realize this isn't particularly sound research, but it's the best I could do with the 5 minutes I was willing to dedicate to it. I'll also just use US numbers.
Apparently some guy estimated that the US spends $1B per year fighting terrorism.
I decided for "preventing lightning strikes" I'd just go with the cost of adding lightning rods to houses. My first Google result for "lightning rod cost" came up with $2500. I think that's for a retrofit, not a new build, but I'm also ignoring commercial buildings, cost of surge protectors, insurance claims due to lightning strikes, etc. etc. etc. So there. Number of US households: 118,000,000. Average age of house: 35 years.
118M / 35 = 34M houses built per year.
$34M * $2500 = $8.4B per year in lightning rods.
So, you're apparently spending an order of magnitude more per year fighting terrorism than we are on installing lightning rods. Who knew.
Thanks for the analysis. However, I spent ten seconds and got this [pewresearch.org]. According to that article, U.S. government intelligence agencies (that does not include TSA, CBP or DOJ, and certainly doesn't include state and local spending) spend more than US$16 Billion per year on counter-terrorism. That increases the comparative amount spent on combating terrorism vis a vis death by lightning strike significantly.
I'd also point out that death from lightning strikes usually occurs outdoors and isn't normally associated with buildings being struck. This is pointed out here [weather.com]:
And so, while it might be useful to outfit residential homes with lightning rods, doing so wouldn't impact death by lightning strike friend.
My original point being that since it's enormously more likely that one will die in a car accident or from heart disease, why do we spend so much more money on stuff (such as counter-terrorism) which has a much, much lower likelihood. It seems to me that it's not just counter-intuitive, but downright stupid to do so.
No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical. --Niels Bohr
(Score: 2) by aclarke on Wednesday December 16 2015, @08:14PM
Agreed. I was just curious about that, and since I'd done some simple maths I figured I'd share them.
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Wednesday December 16 2015, @09:02PM
First, I disagree with the heart disease thing. Maybe you're more likely to die of heart disease than car crash, but I'm quite sure that I am not. Not everyone has even remotely equal risk for medical things like that. Some people are at high risk for heart disease, other people are at very low risk for it, and being physically healthy is a huge part of that (basically obese people are the ones at high risk). So to me, dying in a car crash is a big worry, it's probably the most likely way I'll die if not of old age.
As for spending money, what we *should* be spending money on is building SkyTran systems. Driver-less cars sound good in theory, but in practice there's a ridiculous number of variables to consider unless the car is just cruising on the freeway. And driverless cars will never fix the other problems that cars have, such as low speeds, wasting time at intersections, high energy usage, etc. SkyTran fixes nearly all of those, since it operates in 3 dimension (so no stoplights or intersections requiring stops) and uses small, lightweight cars on maglev rails (so very low energy usage compared to driving 3-4000 pound vehicles on rubber tires on asphalt, a high-friction surface). With elevated rails, you don't have to worry about things like cars hitting children or small animals in the road (birds might be a problem though), or cars and pedestrians interacting at all. Cities would be far safer and nicer for both pedestrians and cyclists. And the noise level would be much lower too: even EVs make a lot of noise because of the tires.
Of course, the main problem with SkyTran is that it'd have to be run as a government service (either directly or through a public benefit corporation like NYC's MTA), and the US seems to generally do a miserable job of that. Maybe we could solve that by simply outsourcing the operation of the system to the Scandinavians, since they don't seem to have all the problems with corruption and idiocy that we do in our government at all levels. Or the Japanese; their subway systems are reportedly excellent though a bit crowded.
(Score: 2) by NotSanguine on Wednesday December 16 2015, @10:52PM
First, I disagree with the heart disease thing. Maybe you're more likely to die of heart disease than car crash, but I'm quite sure that I am not. Not everyone has even remotely equal risk for medical things like that. Some people are at high risk for heart disease, other people are at very low risk for it, and being physically healthy is a huge part of that (basically obese people are the ones at high risk). So to me, dying in a car crash is a big worry, it's probably the most likely way I'll die if not of old age.
Just so I understand, you're saying that since you're a statistical outlier, we should base our public policy on your life and experience, correct? Or are you saying "fuck you, jack! I got mine!"? Or are you saying, "I don't give a rat's ass about anyone but myself. And since this isn't affecting me, why are we having this pointless conversation?" Or is it something else you're trying to communicate, friend?
I'd point out that in many cases, a poor understanding of health risk factors makes people more unhealthy. Hence my suggestion:
I would love to see the amounts of money currently being spent on "national defense," "drug interdiction" and "counter-terrorism" scaled to the actual risks and have some part of the balance applied towards auto safety (including driver-less cars), health care and health education, substance abuse treatment and other areas which have higher risks of death/debilitation/injury. [emphasis added]
No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical. --Niels Bohr
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Thursday December 17 2015, @05:07PM
Just so I understand, you're saying that since you're a statistical outlier, we should base our public policy on your life and experience, correct?
If I'm a statistical outlier because I'm *not* obese, then this country has some serious, serious problems and we should definitely make some huge changes to our public policy.
Anyway, my point was only that for those of us who aren't obese, the risk factors are very different, and instead of worrying about heart disease, we have to worry a lot more about our lives being cut short by auto accidents, so for us, focusing on auto safety is more important. Sorry if that hurts your little feelings. I never realized relatively-healthy people were such a tiny minority.
(Score: 2) by NotSanguine on Friday December 18 2015, @01:40AM
If I'm a statistical outlier because I'm *not* obese, then this country has some serious, serious problems and we should definitely make some huge changes to our public policy.
Gee, that's funny. I thought that was the initial point I made. It only took three tries for you to get it. Maybe there's hope for you after all.
No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical. --Niels Bohr