Driverless Cars

[sapphirebreeze]

GM envisions driverless cars on horizon

I gotta say, my reaction is pretty well split between, "Cool!!" and, "ogodogod, let me know when these things are first getting on the road so I can get off it for a bit." I'm not quite sure why I'm getting that second reaction, though. I mean, when you think about it, can they really be that much worse than

Comments

[bsting]

I remember a study of a decade ago about automated cars and it was already possible back then, but to a lesser extent. They had a setup where a string of cars could drive really really close to each other at high speed as sort of a 'train' to prevent congestion. The cars were unmanned for the test however and the idea was that in the future you would switch on the 'auto' mode on the freeway only and that there would be a reserved lane for these trains of cars that could travel more compact and at high speed without interfering with regular (slower) traffic.

Never heard of it again.

Aren't there already cars that can park themselves?

[sapphirebreeze]

Well, the thing is, this stuff always sounds real good in theory, but... what happens when things come up outside of their programming? There will still be humans on the road, too, and humans do erratic things.

For that matter, so do the cars. If you look at the article, the DoD sponsered a driverless car race a bit ago, and they had one incident where a car randomly charged a building, and another where a car parked itself for no apparent reason.

[bsting]

I don't know if you've ever heard of robot soccer, but it basically faces the same problems: the 'rules' of the environment are reasonably set, but it still takes the teams a lot of diffuculty to 'teach' robots how to score a goal. Because there's so many random factors of the environment to take into account (like the opponents' players) and because it's pretty hard to write software that is bug free.

Robots after all are still created by humans, so they're just as erratic at times, because of flaws we made. I wonder how that works for big alien robots. ;)

[seryan]

But it's 2008! Will they be flying driverless cars! :P *runs away*

[the_s_guy]

My guess is that they will work brilliantly for about six to twelve months, and then some security or code flaw will result in a hyper-massive pileup at about 200mph.

These kind of things really need to be decomputerized a lot - I'd much prefer to see a system heavily based on mechanical interlocks and multiple failsafe mechanisms than something with an extremely small physical footprint but reliant on a lot of digital tapdancing.