As you're brushing your teeth in the morning you monitor a digital display mirror that shows all your relevant information for the day: Schedule of appointments, weather and battery levels of all your devices, including your phone and BMW i3 electric car in the garage.
As you walk into your kitchen and turn on your coffee machine, that's the cue your car has been waiting for to turn itself on and begin to warm up. Time to go: With a swipe on your touch-enabled car key, the vehicle detaches from its charging unit, pulls out of the garage and up to your front door. It's already calculated the best route to your first appointment, taking into account traffic and weather.
While driving the car detects other vehicles on the roadway and communicates with them, staying the perfect distance away for safety and efficiency. Each passing car relays its coordinates, which your car analyzes to calculate the threat of a crash potential. On uphill climbs that the car has identified in its three-dimensional topographical navigation system, the car devotes additional electric power to the engine to help conserve gasoline. At the crest of the hill, the battery power turns off so that it's ready to regenerate during braking on the downhill descent.
We've seen this film before, haven't we, where you can drive through special lanes at restaurants to pick up meals you can eat in your car, and cruise effortlessly in and out of comfortable hotel rooms at the end of a day's pleasure driving? There were others, too, about the wonderful promise of atomic power for everyone.
(Score: 3, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 24 2016, @05:23AM
> ... While driving the car detects other vehicles on the roadway and communicates with them, staying the perfect distance away for safety and efficiency. Each passing car relays its coordinates, which your car analyzes to calculate the threat of a crash potential.
Then a pedestrian steps out, your car stops and you wait for 5 minutes until that loser of a senior citizen finally gets out of the way. Once you begin moving with the traffic flow again, a hacker takes over a nearby car and defeats the transponder. You watch helplessly as the rogue car T-bones your door...and your lights go out, no airbags can protect from that kind of direct hit. You wake up in an eerily empty hospital--the self driving ambulance took you there OK, but no one had bothered to update the database with the information that budget cuts closed that ER....
(Score: 3, Funny) by JNCF on Tuesday May 24 2016, @06:13AM
Luckily the surgery robot is still functioning... it's just out of anesthetics, and its scalpels are a bit rusty.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 24 2016, @06:24AM
Sorry, I seem to have forgotten to pay the electric bill for the robot hospital, and you wake up still injured on the floor. Maybe your phone wasn't crushed and you can call someone. I don't care what happens to you because I was laid off when the hospital went full robot. I live under a bridge now.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 24 2016, @06:05AM
Your connected car will now lock you inside and drive automatically to the nearest jail for your convenience. Have a bad day, you dirty terrorist.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by khallow on Tuesday May 24 2016, @06:12AM
(Score: 2, Insightful) by yarp on Tuesday May 24 2016, @07:42AM
I find it sad that their vision of the future still has us being concerned about battery levels at all. It feels like a problem of the current time that's been absent-mindedly projected ahead to when such trivia will be irrelevant.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday May 24 2016, @08:09AM
find it sad that their vision of the future still has us being concerned about battery levels at all.
Good point. You would think that if anything could be automated, it would be battery monitoring.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by LoRdTAW on Tuesday May 24 2016, @03:00PM
Home automation is a solution looking for a problem. Like you said, food, laundry and maintenance are the laborious things that we can't yet automate. Wake me when a machine can wash, dry, fold, hang and put away my clothes.
The only thing I have so far been interested in are those zwave light switches. I sometimes forget to turn the kitchen lights off when going to bed. I also sometimes forget to turn off the porch light. I could program a schedule to control outside lights. And I can use my phone to check the kitchen lights when I'm in bed. Other then that, every other light is unnecessary to control and I wouldn't dream of using those zwave door locks (hi, please hack my house. Thanks!). My only gripe is the the system would cost me around ~$400. I can do the labor myself but $400 to control a few lights? Meh. I'll make a reminder and get my ass out of bed to flip switches.
My friend is into that stuff and he has two of those Amazon Echo things. I asked him what he uses them for. His reply: weather and controlling the lights. Hundreds of dollars spent to flip a light switch and find out it's raining. Not worth it.
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Tuesday May 24 2016, @03:40PM
Is it? I recall a reality program on PBS called Frontier House [pbs.org], where the participants volunteered themselves and their families to see if they could make it in a frontier home, with frontier technology. Afterward in the post-mortem, one of the wives pointed to the high-tech laundry and cooking machines in her home (the family was wealthy) and said something like, "See this? This machine literally saves me half the day I spent in the cabin washing clothes or making dinner. This single machine liberated me from the back-breaking labor of the woman in the frontier household."
And that's right. The little things we take for granted in our society, drinkable water from the tap, take-out food from the corner restaurant, etc., dominate the man-hours of so many from societies where those problems haven't been automated. It's an exceptional productivity gain that is so profound, yet so mundane that many overlook its impact.
You can take them singly and think, what difference does it really make to throw my clothes into a washing machine for 50 minutes when I could simply beat my clothes on a rock for 35 minutes and achieve the same result? Yay, super, I saved 15 minutes! And the machine came at a cost of hundreds of dollars; Pfah! I can find any old rock along the stream for free...
But those savings add up to economies of scale. So when you imagine a household that cleans itself, washes your clothing automatically without human intervention, and meals that cook themselves to your satisfaction without human man-hours being expended, it sounds like a pretty damn good deal for human productivity.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 2) by bob_super on Tuesday May 24 2016, @05:13PM
> Home automation is a solution looking for a problem. Like you said, food, laundry and maintenance are the laborious things that we can't yet automate.
> Wake me when a machine can wash, dry, fold, hang and put away my clothes.
People will use their app to get an automated electric car to pick up their laundry pod, wash it, automatically fold it, and return it. Then another app will unleash an army of drones to clean their floors and dust their cabinets, deliver their pre-cooked meals and mow the lawn.
Paying a maid a fraction of that amount is out of fashion.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by anubi on Tuesday May 24 2016, @06:27AM
Can we as much as even get our traffic lights synchronized?
I swear, the way I see them running in my city, many appear to be about the same sophistication I saw on the very first cars whose timing was determined by a buzz-box ( model T spark coil ).
They just seem to run asynchronously, completely oblivious to the traffic.
It frustrates me a lot ( especially in that big van ) to be required to come to a complete stop and wait... for nobody.
And have those lights transmit how long they intend to stay green. I get in traffic and I feel obliged to speed up approaching a light to "try to catch it" green, and the people behind me really get pissed if I think it's a stale green and will be red before I get there and start prematurely slowing down. If everyone knew the light was going to switch in six seconds, those of us further behind the signal could already be preparing to stop even though the light is still green. I really hate those lights which seem to tease me - as "I'm green! Hurry up!" - then right before I get to it... RED - leaving me at 40 MPH slamming on brakes.
Our Congress has put tremendous pressure on automobile manufacturers to extremely precisely time the entire engine under all load conditions. Its kinda well known if the spark plug fires at the wrong time, the engine becomes terribly inefficient. Same with these damned lights. When they go flicking stop-go without considering traffic flow, a helluva lot of kinetic energy is wasted.
However- one glaring problem... its really easy to deny one the legal use of his car by revoking his license in a database - how does one obligate a city to synch their traffic lights?
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
(Score: -1, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 24 2016, @06:39AM
It frustrates me a lot ( especially in that big van ) to be required to come to a complete stop and wait... for nobody.
Oh so you're that asshole who nearly ran me over the other night when I had the right of way but you decided not to stop at the red light because there weren't any other cars at the intersection and you don't give a fucking shit about pedestrians.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 24 2016, @06:48AM
Pedestrians are nothing more than roadkill-in-training.
(Score: 2, Funny) by khallow on Tuesday May 24 2016, @11:46AM
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 24 2016, @03:33PM
You forgot that this is an electric car...it will be making silly beeping noises automatically, to warn pedestrians. Or maybe since it's a BMW, it will be making powerful V8 noises?
(Score: 1) by anubi on Wednesday May 25 2016, @04:37AM
AC: Let me repeat: Nobody.
No cars. No pedestrians. There was nothing there.
I would not have even mentioned it had a pedestrian tripped off the light. He has as much right to cross the road as I have to drive on it. I would think AI algorithms on the lights could be programmed to optimize when to gate various traffics onto the road safely.
I had to bring a ton of metal to a complete stop for nothing. And burn diesel fuel to re-accelerate it. For nothing.
I want so a transponder that will communicate with lights to let them know the traffic flow so they can make an optimal decision.
I would even be for heavy trucks ( not mine - I mean Mack and Kentworths ) so they will kinda "set the sync" for maintaining a constant velocity of thru traffic. Wanna get from A to B without constantly accelerating and braking? Fall in behind a truck. Have parallel arteries known to be either northbound or southbound favoring, eastbound or westbound favoring, as trying to optimize both directions simultaneously is nearly a mathematical impossibility. It sure seems like with computing and AI being what it is today, there is a helluva lot of optimization that can be done to minimize all this useless braking and acceleration.
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 24 2016, @08:59AM
Some traffic lights are deliberately anti-synchronized as a "traffic calming" device.
(Score: 2) by Gravis on Tuesday May 24 2016, @05:47PM
no and it's not because of technology or even bureaucracy, it's people. stuck up people who like their "quaint" little town get into positions of power and make the street lights purposely inefficient. the reason for this is that they wish to reduce traffic by making the entire area so nightmarish that people will go out of their way to avoid it. i know this for a fact because i live near a couple of "independent cities" that do this. i've talked to the fools in charge and they are so infuriating, condescending and set in their position that i had to leave because if i didn't, i would gonna punch them. i no longer do business with anyone located in that or other independent cities.
(Score: 1) by anubi on Wednesday May 25 2016, @04:02AM
Lots of stop signs will do that same thing. A lot cheaper.
A tactic commonly used in neighborhood residential areas to discourage thru traffic.
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
(Score: 4, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 24 2016, @07:25AM
While driving the car detects other vehicles on the roadway and ...
follows the default programming for BMWs that we all know so well -- it tailgates anyone that is going slightly slower, indicating impatience by frantic flashing of headlights, and horn beeping. After all, spending extra money for a BMW means that the owner also owns the roadway. It is vital that everyone knows that a very important person must, just must, get through.
In recent years, Audi has taken out a license from BMW, and now also uses this portion of the autonomous driving software.
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Tuesday May 24 2016, @09:09AM
But how does that interact with the Mercedes' built-in right of way?
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 24 2016, @09:52AM
Cor, I think the Brits would say they "get on frighteningly well". And yes, it will be frightening!