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Bob Lutz, former General Motors Vice Chair, opines:
It saddens me to say it, but we are approaching the end of the automotive era.
The auto industry is on an accelerating change curve. For hundreds of years, the horse was the prime mover of humans and for the past 120 years it has been the automobile.
Now we are approaching the end of the line for the automobile because travel will be in standardized modules.
The end state will be the fully autonomous module with no capability for the driver to exercise command. You will call for it, it will arrive at your location, you'll get in, input your destination and go to the freeway.
...
The vehicles, however, will no longer be driven by humans because in 15 to 20 years — at the latest — human-driven vehicles will be legislated off the highways.The tipping point will come when 20 to 30 percent of vehicles are fully autonomous. Countries will look at the accident statistics and figure out that human drivers are causing 99.9 percent of the accidents.
Is he right? Is the age of the automobile coming to an end?
(Score: 4, Insightful) by coolgopher on Monday November 13 2017, @11:04AM (25 children)
Yes.
Though there will still be some level of recreational driving happening. Presumably in "vintage" cars, which won't have access to a lot of "roads".
(Score: 2) by MostCynical on Monday November 13 2017, @11:24AM (11 children)
there will be a spike in 'adventure' travel, where you get to drive (control!) an actual car, in exotic locations, like Brazil, or, some African or Australian deserts.
then there will be an underground of groups keeping 'old' cars on the road (models with 'hackable' software)
Some time later, MSF and other aid agencies will be unable to deliver aid to third world disaster sites (like Florida, 2030?) without AI drones..
"I guess once you start doubting, there's no end to it." -Batou, Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex
(Score: 3, Insightful) by c0lo on Monday November 13 2017, @12:16PM (3 children)
Yeaa... naaah!
I'll buy myself a tractor. Or two. Chinese ones - simple, no software, just gear and engine.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2, Informative) by dwilson on Tuesday November 14 2017, @06:34AM (2 children)
I farm for a living, and I tell you truth, you've got no need to go looking at chinese brands if you want a simple tractor. You can buy some good, solid, made-in-(north)-america gems for rock bottom prices.
Most of these (quickly searched for to link here) models can be found still in a mostly-running condition:
http://tractors.wikia.com/wiki/Case_900 [wikia.com]
http://tractors.wikia.com/wiki/Case_930 [wikia.com]
http://tractors.wikia.com/wiki/Massey-Harris_744D [wikia.com]
http://tractors.wikia.com/wiki/Massey-Harris_Pacemaker [wikia.com]
http://tractors.wikia.com/wiki/Allis-Chalmers_IB [wikia.com]
My Great-grandfather operated his entire farm with a Case 900. We've got a 930 still in service here at our farm, it's PTO runs most of the augers, as well as the baler. it's bucket lifts anything I need lifted, including 1000lb+ bales. My brother uses an old Massey 744D as an acreage tractor, and in the winter he plows snow with it so he can get his semi out for work (He hauls fluid for a living). I'll admit I have a soft-spot in my heart for Massey, being that they were a Canadian company and briefly achieved the 'biggest agricultural machinery company in the world' status. One day I'll buy it off him and restore it proper-like.
An old tractor is nothing to be sneered at. They can be had cheap, they're easy to maintain, inexpensive to operate, and very, very easy to fix. Best part? The engineers who designed them hadn't even -heard- about computers.
- D
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Tuesday November 14 2017, @06:42AM (1 child)
Given that I'm dwelling in Australia, the made-in-(north)-america is a problem. A shipping one to be more precise.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 1) by dwilson on Wednesday November 15 2017, @03:24AM
Heh. Well, that would change things around a bit, yep.
- D
(Score: 5, Interesting) by JoeMerchant on Monday November 13 2017, @12:41PM (6 children)
So, as to that "Adventure travel" - a surprising amount of travel happens in the Continental US on surfaces that are only charitably called "roads." Private land has internal road systems, when you get into timber tracts and ranches over 200 acres you'll have miles of internal road system, some of which is just traversing an open grass field, some of which has frequent hazards like downed trees across the road, streams to ford, seasonally muddy patches that need more intelligent navigation than a Google car (or many drivers I know) can bring to bear successfully without needing to be towed out.
While it is an infinitesimal percentage of road-miles traveled, those "roads" are presently traveled by the same vehicles that travel the interstates and normal local roads. Calling an end to the self driven vehicle will deny the normal access used by hundreds of thousands of people to tens of millions of acres of land. "Solutions" like keeping a self driven vehicle on the property aren't entirely workable. Eventually, I imagine you'll see driven vehicles ferried in auto-driven carriers like horses are today, but I feel like that's much more than 20 years in the future.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Monday November 13 2017, @04:43PM (5 children)
I suspect that autonomous vehicles will eventually be able to navigate offroad, at least as well as people do. Not in the near future, of course, but eventually. When Geronimo's picture was taken, sitting in a Locomobile*, few people really thought that automobiles would dominate the landscape in this country within a few decades. Today, it's hard to imagine autonomous vehicles dominating the roadways - but it's almost certainly coming. Whether it be 2, 4, or maybe 5 decades, it's coming.
*Geronimo's Cadillac was actually not a Cadillac at all. https://indiancountrymedianetwork.com/news/geronimos-cadillacer-locomobile/ [indiancountrymedianetwork.com]
(Score: 1) by redneckmother on Monday November 13 2017, @05:06PM (3 children)
"I suspect that autonomous vehicles will eventually be able to navigate offroad" ...
Not unless the GPS maps improve.
I live in a community of small ranches, with the roads maintained (albeit poorly) by an owner's association.
The private roads have recently shown up on Garmin maps, but are highly inaccurate - roads and intersections are shown that would require crossing a fenced property line, and do not exist. I suppose someone consulted a terrain image on Google, and ass u me d that some trails and driveways are part of the communal road system. Weird.
Mas cerveza por favor.
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Monday November 13 2017, @06:24PM (1 child)
Don't be blindered1 by current state of the art. GPS is only an intermediate step. It will be continually useful in "new locations", but in the future (10 years? 15 years?) cars will learn the local terrain the same way people and rats do. They'll remember where they've been and the path they took to get there.
Please note that this is going to take a lot more computer capability than they currently have, but Moore's law isn't dead, it's hit slow points before. And anyway when they need to they can do 3-d stacking of circuits, possibly with laser signaling between the layers to allow cooling, or possibly some other approach. It was done in labs a decade ago, but hasn't yet been needed. (There are already chips with internal liquid cooling, but I'm not sure that's the right answer.)
Remember, technology isn't only advancing along one front, it's advancing everywhere from aardvark management to zebra monitoring. We may not always like the direction of the advance (cheaper rather than more durable is annoying), but it's happening.
1. Blindered: To wear blinders such as those worn by a skittish horse, which prevent distraction by events from peripheral vision.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 14 2017, @06:15PM
It's not advancing fast enough. https://www.technologyreview.com/s/608911/is-ai-riding-a-one-trick-pony/ [technologyreview.com]
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday November 14 2017, @02:31AM
I worked for the Florida Department of Transportation in 1987, at that time the official state maps weren't 100% accurate, even for well traveled paved roads. I found an interesting route home from work on the official map one day, drove there in person to find a canal bisecting my route, with no bridge - not a tiny error, and not the only one like that in the county.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Monday November 13 2017, @08:11PM
I think the near-term solution will be manual takeover mode, illegal on the public roads, but permitted and necessary when off of them.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 13 2017, @11:33AM (3 children)
Probably more than just "some level".
1. such a transition will not happen all over the world at the same time, so there will not only be different generations doing different things with their cars, there will be different nationalities doing different things.
2. horses are still routinely kept for riding, sometimes in professional settings (i.e. farmers keep them for roaming vast farm-land). in the same way, people will keep cars for fun, but some people will need their all-terrain vehicle for complex tasks, and construction vehicles will most likely be controlled by humans directly for a longer while.
I would be very happy if we had true AI (capable of adapting to changing outside conditions as well as a human driver, for instance driving through a forest fire or going off-road to avoid a tornado, but it seems to me that any such sufficiently smart agent would have its own ideas, and may actually want to watch TV rather than drive us around.
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 13 2017, @12:23PM (1 child)
).
Argh.
(Score: 2) by acid andy on Monday November 13 2017, @03:51PM
Making a point of closing your bracket gave me a nice fuzzy feeling. The closest mod I could find to say thank you for that was a Touché.
If a cat has kittens, does a rat have rittens, a bat bittens and a mat mittens?
(Score: 3, Interesting) by HiThere on Monday November 13 2017, @06:39PM
You're confusing intelligence with motivation, and also assuming the existing of such a thing as general intelligence. The "find your way from here to there" part of intelligence doesn't require sophisticated AI. Things like Alexa show that reasonable interactive guidance can be achieved with only moderately "intelligent" systems. So instead of a driver a car can have a conductor (music analogy, not electric) who will be able to say things like "get me out of here FAST" to impart a sense of urgency, and "this place is dangerous" to heighten caution. As well as things like "take me to the coffee house I was at last Tuesday that I came back so late from". Note that I'm not saying that Alexa can handle these things, Alexa is not only more primitive, Alexa is designed to facilitate ordering stuff. Neither is a general intelligence, and I doubt that such is possible. Certainly most humans aren't a general intelligence. There are many skills that appear to be rather simple that all tested humans have difficulty handling. This was made clear by the paper "The magic number 7 plus or minus 2" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Magical_Number_Seven,_Plus_or_Minus_Two [wikipedia.org] by George A. Miller. I'm not sure I believe his exact thesis, but the general idea is certainly correct.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 13 2017, @12:28PM (7 children)
It will happen if we allow it. I suspect that large groups of motivated people will fight for their right to drive. I suspect large city cores will be the first to mandate automated driving. Hopefully smaller cities should be safe for a long time.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 13 2017, @01:23PM (3 children)
When you say "safe", you mean 40k deaths per year? Just trying to calibrate.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday November 13 2017, @02:04PM
Sounds reasonable to me.
(Score: 1) by Sulla on Monday November 13 2017, @03:48PM (1 child)
Give me liberty or give me death
Ceterum censeo Sinae esse delendam
(Score: 4, Insightful) by DannyB on Monday November 13 2017, @04:35PM
Give me liberty or give me something of lesser or equal value. Or a coupon for it.
To transfer files: right-click on file, pick Copy. Unplug mouse, plug mouse into other computer. Right-click, paste.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by DannyB on Monday November 13 2017, @04:40PM
When you get a drivers license they make it clear that driving is not a right.
Other people fight for their supposed 'right' to smoke. To pollute the air and water with chemicals for their own profit. To improperly park in handicap spaces. In some places even, to defecate on the sidewalk.
When someone wants to live among other people, they don't always get everything they want.
To transfer files: right-click on file, pick Copy. Unplug mouse, plug mouse into other computer. Right-click, paste.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 14 2017, @07:59PM (1 child)
i will be building my own road warrior autos between now and then. fully equipped with various weapons systems.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 18 2017, @07:29PM
Thank you Mad Max, I'll look forward to seeing you in Thunderdome.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Monday November 13 2017, @08:34PM
It saddens me to say that Bob Lutz hasn't driven off of a paved road since he went too senile to remember what the implications of "offroad" are to self-driving vehicles.
🌻🌻 [google.com]