Self-driving cars have always been a scam. I’m posting this here because Guilty-Age investment fantasy is inherent to the Dunning-Krueger world of the investment class:
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And with irony-alert comes another from Le Reg, where the concept of money as a whole comes into question, where the fact that you can’t interact with society with your penny stock means you are going to end up with a warehouse of wilted flowers.
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I’m looking forward to self-driving cars, but if I wasn’t, that sort of luddite thinking isn’t an example that I would use. He has some strange irrational belief that they won’t have child seats, he won’t be able to figure out how to change the radio station, and that he won’t be able to rent one to use as a storage locker for his golf clubs. None of that makes any sense.
There are real problems. Self-driving vehicles are still years from fully-baked and it’ll be years after that before they’re cheap and plentiful. But when that time comes, I’m sure that people will be able to change the radio station, use child seats, and even rent them for use as a storage locker if feel the bizarre urge to do so.
Aside from the length of time yet to go until they become a cheap commodity, the other major issue is that they would perform best with an infrastructure designed for them. That’s true even for human-driven cars though. Cities designed for foot traffic and the occasional horse-drawn wagon largely still haven’t adapted well to automotive traffic. Drivers having trouble dealing with pedestrians, road work, breakdowns, broken traffic lights - all of those are already problems. Avoiding automated automobiles won’t make them magically go away. But infrastructure projects are lengthy and expensive and our society focuses only on short-term results. Even while the infrastructure that we have crumbles around us, politicians have a hard time getting elected on a platform of fixing it and harder time of getting the work approved and keeping it funded until it’s actually done.
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They’re problems we can deal with trivially. The self-driving bubble isn’t even close to dealing with these issues that are a fundamental part of the spec.
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Fundamentally disagree.
About 5,000 pedestrians die in the US every year from being hit by cars.
About 600 people die every year from collisions in work zones, and if a collision happens in a work zone, it is (slightly but consistently) more likely to be fatal.
I don’t have statistics for fatalities from people having trouble dealing with broken down cars or broken traffic lights, but I can find anecdotes for both.
Have self-driving systems perfected their methods of dealing with these issues? Of course not. But when people are still dying from those issues when flesh-and-blood drivers are behind the wheel, they’re not “problems we can deal with trivially.”
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Funny, I deal with it trivially, from both ends of the problem, multiple times a day, and have done so for decades. The ultimate solution to the problem is removing the problem: cars. Taking the auto industry’s century-old imperative and creating murder bots to keep the industry going… isn’t going to be an ultimate solution to pedestrian deaths.
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Funny. About 300,000,000 people in the US aren’t you. And, as previously mentioned, about 5,000 of them (also, presumable, not you) die every year by being hit by cars.
Sure, I agree. The world would be a better place if no one drove cars. I rarely drive, partly because I want to reduce my environmental impact and because I have multiple other options to get to work, but mostly just because I hate driving.
But I still own a car, and I still drive a car, because I find it too convenient not to. And, from my experiences working in IT, people will surrender their little conveniences when you take them by force, and not before (and even then they’ll try to keep them and just hide them better).
The best solution may be ridding the world of cars entirely for reducing/eliminating pedestrian fatalities. Assuming that a proper self-driving system is developed, self-driving cars will be a much more palatable solution.
If you’re going to wallow in alarmist hyperbole (murder bots? really?), I don’t see any point in continuing to engage you. Good night, sir.
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You seem to be taking this problem, turning it into an IT issue, and then then swanning off in a huff when the inadequacy of the IT solution is pointed out.
As mentioned above, this thread is about wealth and greed and the class that wields the power they steal from the rest of us. Fantasies of vaporware are one of the scams they use. If you just want to keep this particular fantasy going, by all means do it elsewhere.
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This world is a very large place, and it is a form of privilege to have multiple good choices to get to everything you need without requiring a car.
Speaking as someone who used to work for UNIFEM and who has lived for decades on the south side of Chicago, I can tell you that women in poverty situations are eager to have access to a car. It makes a world of difference: they have access to more (and better) jobs, can get to a better/cheaper grocery store, get their kids to school (or a better school), etc.
No one has the right to tell people in general that they shouldn’t get access to cars because (relatively) wealthy people in industrialized countries have already ruined the environment by using them too much so now everyone needs to cut back. (And yes, I’ve been to conferences where such things have been suggested. The women were not amused.)
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How exactly is “requiring” a car any different from any other feeling of entitlement? It is often circumstance which makes not using a convenience more prudent, and that is not a “privilege” bequeathed by anyone.
On a personal level, this requirement can be turned around to further disadvantage people. Such as prospective employers who have “required” that I drive a car as a basic measure of competence when I live less than a mile away. Or cops harassing people for the crime of being pedestrians in an affluent area where “everybody” drives.
On a societal level, this sounds like a misguided “me too” effect where a small percentage of people live an a shortsighted, unsustainable way, so the remedy is proposed to enable this of more people, rather than ending the practice.
As a single parent who makes about $2k per year, I am well aware that access to a car would be convenient. But my dally life has demonstrated that it is certainly not a necessity. And I resent the notion that me not having a car is any kind of “privilege”. That notion is as fatuous as saying that you are privileged by (presumably) not having a private jet.
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I suggested that as the Final Solution to the Pedestrian Problem, i.e., that the pedestrian problem is actually part of the Car Problem.
The point, again, isn’t necessarily about the theoretical usefulness of magic future cars, it’s the fact that the purveyors of magic car investment opportunities haven’t even put a dent in the list of actually difficult features of ground-level machine piloting. What they’ve done already existed before in drones, aircraft autopilots and the like.
Beyond little routines like lane following and supervised parallel parking, it is vaporware. It is used to take bits of your 401k to “balance” the risk in your portfolio, it is used to justify letting public transit go to shit, it doesn’t address the very real Car Problem. It’s just a cloud of bullshit to maintain business-as-mediocre-usual.
In large areas of this very large world, you can meet thousands of people who have never been in a car in their entire lives, yet they get to where they need to go just fine.
I know people see cars as essential for all the reasons you just listed, but that overlooks the fact that they live in a geography designed for cars in the first place.
I’m actually into self-driving cars, insofar as they fit into the current car-centric landscape but (at least in some business models) encourage people to stop seeing cars as something which is personally owned. Which, with any luck, will pave the way (heh) towards more public transportation.
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Tell that to the girls who can’t go to school because someone in the family has to walk many miles every day to get water and/or the fuel (wood, peat, dung, etc.) necessary to boil it.
Yes, people manage. But when you ask them, they’ll tell you they’d like to have a turn themselves at the conveniences we take for granted.
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Indeed. When all the infrastructure is designed for cars, and the safety signals are designed for people who can drive cars, without considering the safety needs of people who can’t drive cars… When I look up safety risks of turn signals, I keep finding manuals explaining that it’s illegal for photosensitive people to drive, I know that, I can’t find any studies of how the things make it more dangerous for us to cross the fucking street, or how the things could be made less dangerous.
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Self driving vehicles have the potential to reduce car use, car storage, fuel consumption, and many more aspects of the car problem. But potential is just that, and techbros are not interested in the good it can do in the world even if it is also profitable.
You will never get rid of cars without humanity being exclusively urban either. Cars are critical for low-density areas - though they could be more modest and efficient if not so heavily marketed.
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Tell them they have to walk all that way because of poor infrastructure and poor urban planning? Okay. Because it’s true.
If they had potable water and usable fuel closer at hand, they wouldn’t be car-poor. If car-generated sprawl didn’t put them in suburban wastelands, they wouldn’t be car-poor. If they had better than a token public transit system (or any usable transit system at all), they wouldn’t be car-poor.
The company I used to work for moved their downtown office to some middle of nowhere in the exurbs. The CEO gleefully told us at the announcement meeting that we wouldn’t have to pay for parking anymore because the new building had a lot which employees could use for free. It took several of us to explain that at the downtown location, few of us drove there at all. Most of us didn’t use cars to get to work. Many of us couldn’t afford to buy a car just to get to work, or lived somewhere it would take forever to drive from to the new location.
They were not ready for how many people quit over the location move. Because, of course, all the executives drove.
So again – one benefit of driverless cars can be, downshifting on the model used, making it more clear what kind of transportation infrastructure is needed.
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I didn’t get a car 'til I was 32. There was no way in hell I could have afforded one before then. So yeah, I know a thing or two about the managing part.
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If it’s an unworkable scam, all the better for the bros.
Yes, rural areas typically have poor urban planning.
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Rural areas depend on each household having their own infrastructure, ie: well, heating supplies, and to some extent food sources.
The previous argument was that cars mitigate the need for local infrastructure. Anyone who’s ever lived in a rural area and had the roads impassable from bad weather (where I grew up, that means snowstorms) knows cars help but don’t solve anything.
What does help is decentralising and making wireless infrastructure items like power and communications.
A friend of mine has cousins who all live in rural Zimbabwe. Thanks to solar panels and cell phones, they’ve gone from no electricity/no telecomm to electricity and Internet access in under a decade. They still don’t have cars though.
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