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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: 2) by tibman on Wednesday December 16 2015, @03:09PM
I welcome more systems that need to be programmed. Vehicle automation is as likely to replace me as those scripts i write to automate manual tasks at work. Automating manual tasks only frees me up to do more interesting work. Anyone put out of work by automation was doing a highly repeatable manual task with little creativity or problem solving involved. I'm not saying it's good to put someone in that category out of work. I'm just saying it is/was inevitable. If your work involves anything of an artistic, creative, or problem solving nature then you will never be put out of a job by a machine. Is there enough of that kind of job for everyone? I doubt it : (
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(Score: 2) by q.kontinuum on Wednesday December 16 2015, @07:24PM
s/never/not any time soon/
I don't think artificial intelligence in sufficient quality to put developers out of work will arrive any time soon, but I'd not claim it will never happen...
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(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 16 2015, @07:38PM
As a security auditor, I am ambivalent.
On the one hand I'll have more work, just like you.
On the other, the only reason why I have a booming career is because of how many mistakes programmers make. Even the tiny minority that have a fully-fledged and perfectly implemented secure coding life cycle make more than enough mistakes that my career path is starving for more auditors. Except this time, lives will be on the line. We might be forced to make the traditional engineers satisfied by forcing programmers to get an engineering license and legal liability to work on these systems.
Fact is humans are imperfect, our knowledge incomplete, and our creations inherit these traits. Often we don't know what errors we will cause until the job is already done. A new feature to solve an old problem is a sure bet to invent a whole new set of problems. Maybe those new problems will be worth it. Maybe they wont.
(Score: 2) by tibman on Thursday December 17 2015, @02:12AM
I don't think licensing will work for programmers because it hasn't worked for hardware engineers. Plenty of exploding batteries, prematurely fatigued parts, corrosion of important parts, and so on. The product has to be licensed as safe, not the people who made the product. Even a fantastic engineer can have a bad couple of months because s/he's going through a divorce. The tests may pass but those tests were mostly happy path because he didn't have the "energy" to do better.
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