You gonna be busy for the first few miles.

To derail this entire idea.

Has the many accidents that occur with driver-occupied cars derailed the idea of drivers?

Huge self-driving truck full of precious company stuff running on a public freeway has to suddenly "decide" whether to squash 5 people in a car or avoid them and go off road, causing the loss of all precious company stuff. What do you think the software will be programmed to do?

decisions on its own, that era will have passed and both vehicles will be part of a grid that prevents such stupidity.

The reason it happens today is because the "computers" that control each vehicle are separate and we would rather kill each other than talk. One of these days wealthy people will say screw this and automate it so their cargo and employees will reach an efficiency they can't today. Or maybe because they can make a lot of money bringing the internet to driving. Or we decide to invest in the needed infrastructure to bring us into the last century. Something.

Btw - your medical car, your car, and your finances are increasingly being done by software, and there is nothing but more of it in the future.

Enjoy.

Google has done a lot of work regarding the development of self driving cars. From what I've read, their cars have been pretty successful navigating around the streets of Mountain View and San Francisco. They've been involved in several accidents, but most of those were the result of another motorist rear-ending Google's car at a stop sign or red light. The last I read, they were pretty happy with the performance in good weather conditions but were still working on how to deal with heavy rain and snow.

that some of the tests that were run by other entities went poorly due to poor infrastructure, ie- crappily painted lane stripes. Have you heard any of that? Being from Ohio, I know what crappy roads look like. The freeze and thaw eats them up.

and look at the historical films of cars before there were roads.

Most people had the same low opinion of cars then, but we've spent a hundred years building and rebuilding and making it easy to burn that fuel.

Yes, I have seen some of that, which tells us that we now we have a whole 'nother round of building to do - both in "hardware" and software.

"and look at the historical films of cars before there were roads."

For starters, we had roads before we even had film. But I digress. Ancient civilizations had roads.

see the pictures of them going a mile in the mud - far different than today.

But you prefer to waste your only opportunity to say something to me on this? lol. off to ignore...

Running away from an argument is a sure sign you're wrong.

4th century road in Greece made of stone:



Macadamized (rock) road in the US, around 70 years before film or cars:



Discovery of corduroy road under a modern road, built during civil war:

http://www.trbimg.com/img-567adb46/turbine/ct-civil-war-cedar-log-highway-20151223-001/500/500x281

If the ground is covered in snow or ice, then the computers can't see the lane lines. I know where I live people are often times still expected to go places in those conditions. I'm sure they have ways to make that work, but it's just another thing that adds to the complexity of the systems.

(moved to DFW in 92). I remember, a lot of time, lanes were made by the people in front, and might not actually correspond to where the lane actually is. I wonder how these systems would adapt.

"The automated cars are much safer, whether the science deniers think so or not."

We haven't had a fully automated car hit the road yet. There is no data to make such a claim. And there won't be an automated car in the next 50 years.

PS - before you bring up Google...that is not an automated car.

And robots help people and the economy how exactly?

In industrial economies raw materials are the most expensive part of a companies budget. In service economies labor is the most expensive. So companies will always try to reduce that. Look how many jobs computer and the internet wiped out. Neither party -- including Sanders -- has addressed how we will treat workers put out of jobs by technology.

just how much cash they have to offshore.

...at least say "thank you."

Will they program the car to try one?

Not surprised.

It's been going on since people made sharper sticks, and even before that. The lion gets the closest or slowest zebra, not the one way out in front that they have to expel more energy to get. Workers have been a necessary evil. If you can reduce that cost, and still get all the money, why would anyone pay the cost? Bosses are a necessary evil from the worker point of view too. If you can get the money without the boss, why would you put up with the boss?

for goods (the heart of consumerism).
Take labor out of the exchange, and there is no exchange, and the economic system crashes and burns, for both the owner-investor class and labor. (If labor has no money they can not consume the goods they made, and the owner-investor goes broke because they can not sell their machine made goods. Robots do not consume.)

We've had technological innovation since we learned how to pick a rock and hit food with it. Technological innovation changed how we worked but never threatened to make work obsolete. We are close to a point where anything a human can make a machine can make better and faster.

We need to change the economic system to reflect the world where physical labor is unnecessary.

(The Lion/Zebra conflict is evolution not technological innovation. Lions take slow zebras. Zebras evolve to run faster. Lions get hungry. Slow lion dies. Faster lion catches faster Zebra. Rinse and repeat.)

Not long ago, many here sung the praises of Uber because using Uber was cheaper than a taxi and people could become uber drivers to make a little extra money. Taxi drivers who were forced to follow rules were undercut by Uber and saw their middle-class incomes vanish into the wallets of the owner-investor.

We're so into evolution now that we can't wait for it. We want to force it to happen. That's tough to do, so we use technological innovation to evolve the relatively weak human body. Not that whatever it is that we've come to call evolution has a direction. Plus we don't really like the more messy parts of what we call evolution, like where the slow lion or zebra dies. We just like the part of evolution that we picture as going to the top right of the graph in a diagonal fashion.

I agree, we will need to change the economic system because of all that. Like anything else in life though, doing that will have some upsides, and it'll have some downsides.

farm animals it can be guided through technological innovation.

What we can do as a society is recognize what technological change is doing and move proactively.

We should be working harder to innovate an economy that deals with the obsolescence of work. Broadly, there are two ways we can go.
The first way is to create a Star Trek economy where people are liberated from menial work and everything is provided by or creations.

The other way is to develop a small class that owns the technology and leave the rest of humanity to eke out a living as best they can.

I prefer the former but, at this point, think the later is more likely to occur.

Or at least what it's come to mean. As though it has a direction, meaning, or reason. Why can't we evolve already! Those Republicans need to evolve! Like we're moving beyond something purposefully.

I find the word adapt to be much better. Adaptation has less of an ascending feel to it. It's messy. It's dirty. It's circumstantial. That's the zebra doing whatever it needs to do to get away from the lion, and the lion doing whatever it needs to do to get the zebra.

Anyway, I agree, and to me, since the value of gold is an abstraction, and paper money is a further abstraction, and digital money the most recent abstraction, the future is some form of a basic income. I doubt it will go smoothly, from either an economic, political, social, or even personal aspect, but yeah, if people are increasingly not needed, it'll lead to some interesting adaptations.

It is impossible to stop a living language from changing.

Sorry that it might successfully put some drivers out of work.

As someone who will be legally blind in the future like my older siblings, I welcome self-driving cars! I doubt that I'll live long enough to utilize them, but they could help blind people in the future.

Bumper to bumper 75mph going through the Squirrel hill tunnel

Exits signs up in the beams on bridges

And, in the 90's I was staying at a Sheraton downtown doing an audit. When I got to the audit site I figured I needed to find out how to get back to my hotel. Mind you I could see the hotel from the warehouse I was auditing. I got three completely different sets of directions. Then one of the drivers - professional local driver, with his hands on his hips LOOKING AT THE HOTEL, said "I don't think you can get there from here."

Chicago is the craziest place that I've seen for FAST bumper-to-bumper traffic.

I was extremely impressed by their reaction times there, never seeing a massive pile-up like I expected.

I hope that none of the old people who live in my area are foolish enough to drive on the highways near Chicago. Needing five seconds to realize that a traffic light turned green won't cut it.

People prone to road rage should avoid it too. Drivers there WILL cut you off in order to reach their exits. Slow down to let them change lanes or get hit.

eventually we'll all be far better off without the drunk drivers, make-up appliers, texters and road ragers on the roads.

Although I'm sure I'll be terrified the first few hundred times, I doubt it will be much worse than driving with my 17 year old.