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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: 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.