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posted by Fnord666 on Thursday February 01 2018, @04:34PM   Printer-friendly
from the just-let-go dept.

A very small survey of people of different ages suggests that there are age and gender differences in the acceptance of riding in automated cars. In summary, 2,600 people in the US replied and of them 38% of the men and just 16% of women would be happy to ride in an automated vehicle. About a quarter of respondents said they would feel safe in a driverless car while around two thirds said they would not travel unless there was a driver. No mention was made about their opinions of sharing the road with these massive projectiles when driving themselves in traditional cars.

Source : Driverless cars: Men and women have very different opinions on letting go of the wheel


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  • (Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Thursday February 01 2018, @07:57PM (4 children)

    by Grishnakh (2831) on Thursday February 01 2018, @07:57PM (#631648)

    I don't think my examples are bad at all, when you look at things from the point-of-view of regular people rather than technologists.

    The Internet: Let's be generous and say that the Internet as we know it today came to be with HTML/web browsers, which was in 1990. The first APRANet link went live in 1969. That's about 20 years.

    To regular people, "the internet" didn't exist before about 1994, at least not in a form that they could access or care about. The MOSAIC browser was released in 1993, and that was the thing that really kicked things off, and within 7 years we had the Dot-Com boom and then bust. Regular people didn't care that academics were using ARPAnet in the 70s.

    Smartphones: Let's be *really* generous this time and call the Inter@ctive Pager 900, announced on September 18, 1996 the first smartphone.

    Again, no. I've never even heard of that thing, and I was certainly around at that time (and I do remember using MOSAIC when it was new). To regular people, the first real smartphone was the Apple iPhone, released in 2006. No one cared about WinMo and other crap that came before that; it was the iPhone's "slate" form factor and ease-of-use that really changed things and brought smartphones to the public consciousness. It wasn't long after that that Android became a real competitor, and suddenly everyone and their dog had a smartphone.

    But the first cellular phone ... was introduced in 1973, some 23 years before the first "smartphone."

    I never said anything about (non-smart) cellular phones. A phone that you can only talk on is simply not comparable in any sense to a modern smartphone. I barely do any talking on my phone; it's mostly for data and other uses: chat/texting apps, web browsing, GPS navigation, etc. This is like comparing a modern PC to a 4-function calculator. They're just not remotely the same kind of device.

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  • (Score: 2) by NotSanguine on Thursday February 01 2018, @09:20PM (3 children)

    by NotSanguine (285) <NotSanguineNO@SPAMSoylentNews.Org> on Thursday February 01 2018, @09:20PM (#631698) Homepage Journal

    Just to clarify, I wasn't attacking you. Nor was I trying to diminish your arguments. I merely wanted to point out that there's always history and (usually decades) long R&D cycles for just about everything. For example, without the work of Rutherford, Geiger, the Curies, Einstein and others around the turn of the 20th century, we wouldn't have had any real understanding of nuclear physics. Shooting alpha particles at gold foil bears little resemblance to the NIF and ITER hydrogen fusion reactors, but the Geiger-Marsden Experiment [wikipedia.org] was critical research without which atomic physics, quantum mechanics and all the attendant technologies stemming from those fields would have been set back until their discoveries had been *researched* by others instead.

    You said, and I quote:

    We've seen other places where some technology went from R&D to being rolled out en masse in a very short amount of time: the internet, smartphones, etc. [emphasis added]

    And in response to my post you said, and I quote again:

    To regular people, "the internet" didn't exist before about 1994, at least not in a form that they could access or care about.

    [...]

    I never said anything about (non-smart) cellular phones. A phone that you can only talk on is simply not comparable in any sense to a modern smartphone.

    [emphasis added]

    "Regular people" do R&D? I think not. And without that R&D, (in your examples, the Internet and smart phones) would not exist. Full stop. That's the way it has been for a long time, and will likely be so forever. The difference today is that with the Internet and ubiquitous connectivity (based on those decades of R&D), both the rate of change *and* (more importantly in the case of autonomous vehicles, IMHO) the volume of self-promotion have increased exponentially.

    I was around, and actually working in IT when Mosaic (from NCSA [illinois.edu] -- which took Tim Berners-Lee's work and made it simpler to use, but again, NCSA folks certainly weren't, and still aren't, "regular people") was released and found it much better (well, at least when there were sites to actually visit) than Usenet, anonymous FTP lists, Archie, Veronica and Jughead. What is commercially available and what's in R&D are generally pretty far apart, except in incremental (like HTML/HTTP/etc.) improvements in the technology. The basic concepts and the technologies to support those concepts took decades to develop.

    As for smartphones, without the cellular (or Wifi -- whose forerunner AlohaNet, actually predates Ethernet -- developed in the early 1970s) networks designed to carry data (often referred to as "packet radio") were developed along with AlohaNet back in the early 1970s.

    ARPANet, AlohaNet, "portable" computing, continued miniaturization and density of transistors (first observed, but already in progress, in the mid 1960s) as well as a number of other technologies required *decades* of R&D before anyone could commercialize the Internet or create smartphones.

    "Regular people" didn't know/see/care about that stuff until it was ready to be commercialized, and (as you pointed out in the case of smartphones, not even for a decade after it was first commercialized).

    Even for the Internet, there were commercial entities doing business there long before Mosaic.

    Back to your initial post, I agree with your reasoning and reticence to make predictions. There are too many unknowns at this point -- even with some cars on the road -- we're nowhere near ready for commercialization.

    That said, R&D into autonomous vehicles has been going on for a long, long, time. Trains are a great example of that, as I linked i my initial post.

    If you think that R&D begins when a corporation decides to design a product for mass distribution, you misunderstand what R&D is. I have neither the time or the inclination to to teach you the history of technology. There are many good books about it, and If you don't like to actually *read*, check out stuff like How We Got To Now [pbs.org] and other (inferior to books on the subject) audiovisual offerings.

    --
    No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical. --Niels Bohr
    • (Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Thursday February 01 2018, @09:46PM (2 children)

      by Grishnakh (2831) on Thursday February 01 2018, @09:46PM (#631715)

      Maybe I misspoke about the R&D thing, but as far as the internet is concerned, while the underpinnings of the internet (packet-switched networking, TCP/IP) were around long before the WWW, how long was it between the invention of HTML, HTTP, the WWW and its wide adoption by regular people? It wasn't very long. Obviously, they rely completely on those other technologies I mentioned, namely TCP/IP, but it's the same with self-driving cars: they rely on 1) cars (chassis, engines, suspensions, etc.; we have this stuff down pretty well at this point), 2) computer hardware (that's quite mature as well), 3) operating systems (also quite mature), 4) various sensors (radar cruise control and blind-spot monitoring is pretty commonly available these days on pedestrian cars), 5) GPS navigation (not quite as mature as the others, but millions of people use it daily), etc.

      Same goes for smartphones; sure, they depend on the cellular technologies, just like self-driving cars depend on suspensions and brakes, but that stuff is old, mature technology, just like cellular tech was by the time the iPhone came out.

      So my whole point is that once the enabling technologies are in place and converge, it frequently doesn't take that long for something built on top of them to take off commercially and become common. Most of the enabling technologies for self-driving cars have been around for ages (ICE engines, computers), and others are fairly mature as well. The "new stuff" is really the algorithms to make it all work. Also, don't forget, self-driving cars have been around as R&D projects for probably a couple decades now. I think there's a self-driving car from the 1990s at the Smithsonian. However, these older projects were used off-road, though in the 00s I think they started doing on-road projects.

      So far, the research vehicles are showing great promise, and remarkably low failure rates. And when there is some kind of accident or incident, it's almost always the fault of some human driver who ran into the autonomous car, frequently because the robocar follows the traffic laws too well and isn't as aggressive as human drivers.

      • (Score: 2) by acid andy on Thursday February 01 2018, @10:54PM

        by acid andy (1683) on Thursday February 01 2018, @10:54PM (#631743) Homepage Journal

        You're missing out the fact that for safe mass adoption they also need:

        6) Advanced neural AI with the ability to improvise when new problems present themselves and decades of knowledge of the many social cues and habits of human drivers.

        --
        If a cat has kittens, does a rat have rittens, a bat bittens and a mat mittens?
      • (Score: 2) by NotSanguine on Friday February 02 2018, @12:33AM

        by NotSanguine (285) <NotSanguineNO@SPAMSoylentNews.Org> on Friday February 02 2018, @12:33AM (#631791) Homepage Journal

        Yes. I agree wholeheartedly.

        As I said from the beginning, I don't disagree with your arguments, I just thought the examples you used weren't that good.

        So why don't we just agree to agree and snatch victory from the jaws of victory?

        --
        No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical. --Niels Bohr