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from the how-long-could-they-last-in-Boston? dept.
A little while back, I saw the following tweet:
I can print mostly. My wifi works often. The Xbox usually recognises me. Siri sometimes works. But my self driving car will be *perfect*.
The tweet has since been deleted, so I won't name the author, but it's a thought-provoking idea. At first, I agreed with it. I'm a programmer and know full well just how shoddy is 99.9% of the code we all write. The idea that I would put my life in the hands of a coder like myself is a bit worrying.
[...] The reality is that self-driving cars don't need to be perfect. They just need to be better than the alternative: human-driven cars. And that is a much lower bar, as human beings are remarkably bad at driving.
[...] Self-driving cars don't get tired. They don't get drunk. They don't get distracted by friends or a crying baby. They don't look away from the road to send a text message. They don't speed, tailgate, brake too late, forget to show a blinker, drive too fast in bad weather, run red lights, race other cars at red lights, or miss exits. Self-driving cars aren't going to be perfect, but they will be a hell of a lot better than you and me.
Related: The High-Stakes Race to Rid the World of Human Drivers
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 04 2016, @02:15PM
Self-driving cars are easy. Even if you're dealing with a winding country road on steep hills covered in leaf litter that was frozen and then snowed on, with one wheel slowly losing air and a drivetrain that's getting sloppy with age.
Wake me when we have a self-driving truck. One smart enough to nudge that ornery cow, without hurting her. One that can crawl between orchard trees at just the right pace for the workers on the back to throw down bags of manure. One that ....
aaah, who'm I kidding? It'll never happen. We'd need at least horse level AI (and horses are as dumb as a box of rocks) and the amount of computational power that would involve wouldn't leave much payload on your truck.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 04 2016, @02:46PM
They had Knight Rider back in 1982, so why not. It had 5000 megabits of RAM.
Until A.I is developed enough to be similar to KITT (Knight Industries Two Thousand), don't even think about self-driving cars.
And even then KITT's auto-mode was only engaged when the driver was not available or could not drive.