I mean… self driving cars probably will. Just not as soon as they think. My guess, at least another decade.
Not until a self driving car can safely handle all manner of edge cases thrown at it, and I don’t see that happening any time soon. The cars would need to be able to recognize situations that may not be explicitly programmed into it, and figure out a safe way to deal with it.
As someone said on this thread: as soon as they can convince legislators, even if they are murder machines, capital will go for it.
Borrowing from my favorite movie: “it’s just a glitch”.
I doubt it. The liability would be far too great. Ambulance chasing lawyers would salivate at the chance to represent the families of pedestrians struck and killed by buggy self driving cars. Those capitalists don’t want endless years of class action cases tying up their profits.
Alternatively measures could be put in place to eliminate certain edge cases. You can see similar concepts in places with separate infrastructure for things like busses or HOV lanes. Places you could still ostensibly allow “regular” vehicles to travel but limit/eliminate pedestrians or merging.
there will be a massive building in like india with many thousand of atrociously paid workers donning VR goggles who spend their long hours constantly Quantum Leap finding themselves in traumatizing last second emergency situations that the AI gives up on. Instantly they slam on the brakes as hard as they can. They drink tea. there’s suicide netting everywhere. they were the lowest bidder this quarter.
Plus, as soon as the cars can drive themselves people will stop needing Uber in many cases.
No parking? Just tell your car to go park on a street 10 blocks away.
Drunk? Car drives itself while you sleep.
Going to the airport? Car drops you off and returns home. Car also picks you up when you are back.
This is combined with the fact that people will do more disgusting things in an Uber without the driver there. If you have ever driven for Uber, you know that 10% of people are trying to eat or drink in the car. They are going to spill and it’s going to end up like the back of a bus.
Not sure if we’re agreeing and saying exactly the same thing here, but Uber’s business model is to get suckers who are bad at math to own the cars. Uber’s business model does not work if they have to own their own cars. Self-driving Uber doesn’t work because Uber would have to own the cars and therefore has to cover vehicle insurance, vehicle depreciation, and so on out of its own margin.
Their accident rate continues to decrease and things like quorum sensing and platooning are going to push them to be better than humans. You’re never going to have a perfect system that never has accidents, but if you’re substantially better than humans in accidents per mile driven and you’re dramatically improving throughput and reducing traffic through V2X, it’s going to make sense to fully transition.
I imagine some east Asian countries will be the first to transition and then the rest of the world will begrudgingly accept it once the advantages become clear and the traditional car driving zealots die off.
“handle” is doing a lot of heavy lifting there. The signs are already there that all of these edge cases will just be programmed as “safely pull over and stop until conditions change or a human takes control”. Which isn’t a small task in itself, but it’s a lot easier than figuring out to continue (e.g.) on ice.
Just like all humans can do right now, right?
I never see any humans on the rode staring at their phone and driving like shit.
The problem with self-driving cars isn’t that it’s worse than human drivers on average, it’s that it’s SO INCREDIBLY BAD when it’s wrong that no company would ever assume the liability for the worst of its mistakes.
Self driving taxis are definitely happening, but the people getting rich in a gold rush are the people selling shovels.
Uber has no structural advantage because their unique value proposition is the army of cheap drivers.
We’re a century away from self-driving cars that can handle snowfall
Just this year farmers with self-driving tractors got screwed because a solar flare made GPS inaccurate and so tractors went wild because they were programmed with the assumption of GPS being 100% reliable and accurate with no way to override
