Maybe twenty years but not ten years. That's a big maybe.
It's extremely difficult to do. That's assuming that people actually want to do it.
I've done design work with vision systems. I've talked about it with engineers who worked specifically with vision systems for cars. This is not about technology or computing power. We already have enough tech to do it. This is about trying to figure out how the heck to interpret a bunch ones and zeroes.
A vision system is just recording light levels - one pixel at a time. Let's say you have a grey road (which is not solid grey). To skip several steps, let's say you have a darker line across the road. Let's say that darker line is a hundred pixels wide. What might that darker line be? Could it be a tree laying across the road? Could it be a shadow of a tree that is off to the side of the road? How do you tell the difference?
Modern tech can easily do the processing. But you have to tell it how to do it. If you are using 8 bit grey scale and one pixel is 200 and the next pixel is 225, what does that mean? Using newer tech that's 16 bit, or 32 bit, or 64 bit doesn't help answer that question.
We don't need more tech. We need to know how to interpret one pixel that is 200 and the next pixel is 225 and the next pixel is 10. How would YOU interpret those numbers? If you can't interpret them, how is a computer supposed to?
u I seriously doubt they will ever be more than a fad, if they become a serious reality at all. They might catch on in cities, but even then I'm not so sure.
A lot of people won't trust them, and many others just don't want to give up that much control. I work in Technology, and I wouldn't trust a self driving car with my life. I see technology malfunction all the time. None of it works reliably 100% of the time. I sure as hell wouldn't trust it in the snow.
Additionally, even if/when they do end up on the road, they will likely be programmed to make some accomodations for being on the road with actual drivers, but they'll never be able to account for everything, or everyone.
There will be accidents, and even if/when those accidents are caused by other drivers, it'll shake confidence in self-driving cars, because people will naturally blame the unproven technology.
It's possible that I could be wrong, though; a lot of people didn't trust computers at first, either, or bicycles, or artficial light, etc. None of those involved giving up the amount of control you're sacrificing with a self driving car, though.
So, I would say there are some significant hurdles for the technology to overcome, if they want to be successful.
Been watching too many terminator movies? Fearing judgment day is here? Skynet about to gain self awareness?
Self driving cars will become more prominent. But you've got to be living in a really deep paranoid delusion if you think a driverless car will "take over society".
No. The technology may exist within 20 years but I do not think they will be as common as some people are predicting. I think that companies such as Tesla will have refined the technology to a point where it is mostly reliable.
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52Opinion
Yes and no.
cars will become more and more autonomous and will communicate with each other more and more.
there are however huge obstacles to over come.
for example pedestrians would have priority, and the car would never move if a person was in front etc. this rules out any self driving in town.
Then you have a lot of situations where the driver can take a course of action far different to a 1’s and 0’s solution. A driver can speed up, slow down, manoeuvre and all of them, where as a vehicle will likely take the safe option of breaking, but that may not always be safest option.
Self driving cars are already on the road. Unfortunately, they cannot replace human intelligence when it comes down to making split second decisions about what the vehicle software is seeing. In Phoenix , a self driving car hit a pedestrian in the street and killed the woman. In Florida, a Tesla owner was traveling in self driving mode when he encountered a tractor trailer across the roadway. The Tesla software didn't recognize the scene and continued full speed through the tractor trailer resulting in the top of the Tesla being torn away and the driving being decapitated.
Even if it worked there are at least a couple of problems with it.
Firstly people would troll them, you wouldn't save anything by not having a human driver because you would have to have a human to chase away the trolls.
Secondly and more importantly, who is accepting responsibility for the car? The owner? The guy that programmed the car? What about the mechanic who just did work on it? If you start trying to make the mechanic responsible then good luck finding a mechanic to work on your car.
No, but possibly in the next 50-60 years. "Gearheads/Petrolheads" have existed since the invention of the automobile and will exist long after the average person has gone fully electric.
But even then, overall adoption will be a generational thing. We've seen it in the past. Even after seatbelt laws were passed, a lot of older drivers took pains to make it impossible to wear one, even to the point of cutting them completely out of their cars. As these drivers came off the roads, more people began wearing them, and as the technology improved, it became unusual to see someone NOT wearing one. With the advent of the back-seat shoulder strap, usage has become almost ubiquitous.
To see the future, look to the young. In this case, look to the high school kids taking driver's education. Ask them what their dream car is. That will be the pattern for the family car of tomorrow.
Yes because the insurance rates will be half of what they are now... It is always about money.
All indications are that most of western civilization will collapse long before that happens. Nobody will be worrying about self-driving cars when they can't find anything to eat or 500+ person sized gangs are walking into neighborhoods & doing whatever they want.
It will be commonplace for new cars to be capable of (optionally) driving themselves on larger roads (motorways and A roads). I don't see them being capable of driving in most cities (perhaps in a few "early adopter" cities willing to invest a lot in it) or on narrow country lanes etc within that timespan, and there will still be cheap and shitty econoboxes that do without with such expensive technology altogether (probably including a lot more cars from Chinese brands).
The reason elon musk had to stop the self driving program was because of the calculations needed to make it safe. The car had to take all the data and make all the calculations. In order for this to work properly you're going to need input from the city itself. Lest it be traffic like input. Stop sign input. The way self driving gets better is not the car sensing the stop sign being there but there being a sensor on the stop light telling the car its there.
Nope. Not a chance. If someone isn't there to defend their car, those things will get attacked, destroyed, and dismantled for parts. Any passengers that are subject to the attack will not be able to manually drive evasively and run over their attackers as they escape. Thieves will exploit safety and remote turn off features to hijack vehicles. Anyone held prisoner inside one of those jelly bean capsules will likely be beaten or killed.
Not in my household. I don't even like automatic gears and cruise control. I learned to drive when the car just concentrated on running the engine faster if I pushed the accelerator and stopped if I push the brake.
Onboard computers fuck up driving as a skill.
Nope, GPS is not reliable enough in the mountains here as it is now, plus people could hack them and take control. Imagine how easy kidnapping will be, hack your car and drive it to the place to extract you.
I doubt it but I guess it depends on how much effort we put into developing them. We already have automatic braking systems that are better than an unsupervised human. Personally I don't think self-driving cars will ever be a thing unless we develop special roads for them to use.
It depends on how good the technology becomes. If they always take the shortest or quickest route and if they are 100 times less likely to have and accident then people, then self-driving cars will take over.
Nope, the future is funny like that. When i was kid theyd say wed all be flying in cars in the future, by the year 2000 lol. Instead cars are basically the same and we now have computers that fit in our pockets.
no, theyver got a LOT of work to do with them yet, maybe when every single car/van/truck/bus/bike/pedestrian on or near the road is controlled by the same software but i dont think we are there in that time frame
In some parts of the world. I am waiting for those robotaxis. But we also need to invest in removing all those hard to navigate spots. So it won't reach all parts of the world in my lifetime.
I have read about the technology and think it is possible. I think unions might try to hold it up and there will be a pushback from people who will be afraid of it. Personally I would love to watch a movie while I drive to work.
Not entirely self driving but onboard computers will control things like speed or space between cars.
Under Moore’s Law, the computing power of the world doubles every year. Airliners fly scheduled flights with the autopilot turned off for an average of under a minute. If a computer can fly a plane, it can drive a car.
Yes... they will be used for population control.
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