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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: 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