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posted by cmn32480 on Wednesday December 16 2015, @01:44PM   Printer-friendly
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?


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  • (Score: 3, Insightful) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Wednesday December 16 2015, @03:31PM

    by MichaelDavidCrawford (2339) Subscriber Badge <mdcrawford@gmail.com> on Wednesday December 16 2015, @03:31PM (#277136) Homepage Journal

    ... by self-driving suicide bombs.

    You might think this is a bad joke but I worry about stuff like this; it keeps me awake at night.

    --
    Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 16 2015, @04:10PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 16 2015, @04:10PM (#277166)

    Yeah, because a car full of explosives is such a common thing on American streets. Why, today on my commute I saw TWO cars blow up in hellish terrorist infernos and this was a LIGHT day!

  • (Score: 2) by iwoloschin on Wednesday December 16 2015, @04:29PM

    by iwoloschin (3863) on Wednesday December 16 2015, @04:29PM (#277179)

    Well, technically it's not a suicide bomb anymore, it's a guided land missile.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 16 2015, @06:41PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 16 2015, @06:41PM (#277239)

    Or hack an occupied car to deliberately cause a pileup or run off a bridge or such, how good is the safety system and "manual" override? What if it's hacked to be remote controlled so that a kidnapping/assassination victim is first driven to an isolated area by their own damn vehicle?

    • (Score: 2) by quacking duck on Wednesday December 16 2015, @09:39PM

      by quacking duck (1395) on Wednesday December 16 2015, @09:39PM (#277317)

      A good argument for a proper partnership between major tech and car companies. The former have more years of experience in software, UI and security, while the latter obviously have more years building cars.

      And to halt the obvious objection: No, the major techs aren't perfect at security, but neither are car companies perfect at safety, are they? But we *do* know that car companies trying this on their own have already released some insecure drive-by-wire that can be hijacked over a wireless connection.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 17 2015, @01:33AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 17 2015, @01:33AM (#277431)
    We already have those. They're called cruise missiles. We don't have one that goes on land though, yet, much easier to make it go through the air. Less stoppable that way.