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Bates
Jun 15, 2006

Tiny Brontosaurus posted:

Again I really really need you to wrap your brain around the part where these cars are supposed to replace all car travel. Nobody complains about cameras in busses because busses are for poor people who are probably all criminals anyway. Nice respectable middle class people are going to be using these robo cars and they'll want to get handies on the way home from dinner without the transit panopticon watching.

Also, cameras require maintenance and every single loving thing about maintaining driverless car based public transit is literally fifty times more expensive and onerous than an equivalent ridership's worth of busses.

Well even if the technology may not be that far off, replacing all car travel certainly is, so I won't indulge in idle speculation. The first applications will be in the corporate world - mining, ports, airports, campuses, storage complexes etc. This is happening now. Transport companies will want to follow as soon as they can because the potential savings are huge. Down the line we'll see taxis. It'll take decades and a cultural shift for people to give up their personal vehicles and maybe it'll never catch on. I just don't know. For rural areas I doubt personal ownership will ever go entirely away, just like using and owning horses for practical use also haven't.

What I do know is that I'm sick and tired of cars in my city. Huge urban craters dedicated to storing metal boxes and garish metal walls along every street - it's ugly and frankly absurd. People whine about wind mills but if you want to talk about ugliness... I hope people will some day give up personal ownership so we can get those spaces back and make them into spaces for humans. Or maybe just enough people will give them up that we have popular support to tell those who don't, to pay up or gently caress off.

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Effectronica
May 31, 2011
Fallen Rib

crabcakes66 posted:

It might make them less vulnerable.

"Citizen you are engaged in an illegal act!"
*doors lock
*car drives itself to police station or nearest patrol car.

Why not have the car just gas the person to death and drive them to the morgue instead? Saves on court time.

boner confessor
Apr 25, 2013

by R. Guyovich

Anosmoman posted:

Well even if the technology may not be that far off, replacing all car travel certainly is, so I won't indulge in idle speculation. The first applications will be in the corporate world - mining, ports, airports, campuses, storage complexes etc. This is happening now. Transport companies will want to follow as soon as they can because the potential savings are huge. Down the line we'll see taxis. It'll take decades and a cultural shift for people to give up their personal vehicles and maybe it'll never catch on. I just don't know. For rural areas I doubt personal ownership will ever go entirely away, just like using and owning horses for practical use also haven't.

What I do know is that I'm sick and tired of cars in my city. Huge urban craters dedicated to storing metal boxes and garish metal walls along every street - it's ugly and frankly absurd. People whine about wind mills but if you want to talk about ugliness... I hope people will some day give up personal ownership so we can get those spaces back and make them into spaces for humans. Or maybe just enough people will give them up that we have popular support to tell those who don't, to pay up or gently caress off.

i'm not sure how eliminating automobiles from urban environments will be facilitated by displacing automobiles from private hands into larger corporate or even quasi-public entities. it seems that would make it easier to use automobiles by displacing some of the cost. parking devoted to robot cars isn't going away either, unless we go with the 'eternal traffic jam' solution of just having a stream of cars on the roads at all time balanced to anticipate demand whether they have anyone in them or not

the more direct way to get rid of cars is just to, i think, get rid of cars. make more streets pedestrian only, enhance public transit, encourage density, etc. autonomous cars aren't going to do anything to get rid of cars, it's just going to make those cars autonomous

Tiny Brontosaurus
Aug 1, 2013

by Lowtax

Anosmoman posted:

Well even if the technology may not be that far off, replacing all car travel certainly is, so I won't indulge in idle speculation. The first applications will be in the corporate world - mining, ports, airports, campuses, storage complexes etc. This is happening now. Transport companies will want to follow as soon as they can because the potential savings are huge. Down the line we'll see taxis. It'll take decades and a cultural shift for people to give up their personal vehicles and maybe it'll never catch on. I just don't know. For rural areas I doubt personal ownership will ever go entirely away, just like using and owning horses for practical use also haven't.

What I do know is that I'm sick and tired of cars in my city. Huge urban craters dedicated to storing metal boxes and garish metal walls along every street - it's ugly and frankly absurd. People whine about wind mills but if you want to talk about ugliness... I hope people will some day give up personal ownership so we can get those spaces back and make them into spaces for humans. Or maybe just enough people will give them up that we have popular support to tell those who don't, to pay up or gently caress off.

How would driverless cars fix you not liking cars in cities? You aren't reducing the number of cars, just who owns them, and making their traffic presence much much worse. Yeah we might get rid of parking in residential areas, but we'd only be trading it in for huge loading zones for rider pickup.

If you want carless cities, which is something want too, you want busses and trains. Not cars, which are by definition... cars.

There's already a growing demographic willingly giving up car ownership, or rather never adopting it in the first place: The urbanizing young. Kids are leaving the small towns and suburbs they grew up in and moving to cities with better job opportunities. Better transit options combined with low wages and high student loan debt means fewer of these kids are interested in/eligible for car loans. I think we're going to see a long-term drop in a lot of big-ticket consumer purchasing simply from people shifting away from the suburban American dream and all its trappings. Maybe we'll see an increase in prosperity and another boom in suburbanization like we did in the fifties, but it's also possible that not having cars when they're young creates a generation that never wants them, the same way this demo doesn't particularly want cable subscriptions or kitchen appliances.

Tiny Brontosaurus fucked around with this message at 01:26 on Jan 16, 2016

MaxxBot
Oct 6, 2003

you could have clapped

you should have clapped!!

crabcakes66 posted:

You could have just said "I have my head firmly up my own rear end" and been done with it.

Someone needs to coin a term for whatever the polar opposite of a futurist is, because we have a lot of them here.

Typical Pubbie
May 10, 2011

Effectronica posted:

Self-driving cars will probably actually make life worse for truckers and sales reps, since you'd still need someone in the vehicle to take over if necessary, meaning that you've made the drudgery even worse ("You don't need a hotel, you've got a car you can sleep in!"). Or, you know, the kind of infrastructural renovations that nobody will care about supporting.

Yeah, they'll only save tens of thousands of lives a year. What's the big fuckin' deal?

foobardog
Apr 19, 2007

There, now I can tell when you're posting.

-- A friend :)

Blue Star posted:

We're basically living in the 90s right now, except the internet is a bigger thing and we've got tablets.

Did you live in the 90s? This was a huge loving change, and has impacted our lives significantly. Holy poo poo. :psyduck:

You understand that when we had idle conversations and was wondering about a fact, we pretty much twiddled our thumbs unless we could find an encyclopedia? Pretty much every episode of Seinfeld would be over in five minutes if they just all had loving cell phones? If I heard about a cool book, song, movie, or video game I'd have to write it down to remember to pick it up at the store, now I just loving download it and go to town right away? That Rodney King getting filmed was an insane stroke of luck that someone had a video camera and was looking, and that it'd be guaranteed to be filmed now if pretty much any one was looking? That this would even be true if poo poo was going down in Africa?

You could get away with saying this a bit in the aughts, but you'd still be pretty stupid then.

Tiny Brontosaurus
Aug 1, 2013

by Lowtax

MaxxBot posted:

Someone needs to coin a term for whatever the polar opposite of a futurist is, because we have a lot of them here.

There's already a term, it's called Luddite. You're never going to make the cut for the spelling bee if you waste all your time playing on your computer, mister.

Effectronica
May 31, 2011
Fallen Rib
They should give the driverless cars AI like in this pair of Roger Zelazny short stories where they throw off their chains, gas their drivers with carbon monoxide, and have a grand old time in the flyover states.

Tiny Brontosaurus
Aug 1, 2013

by Lowtax

Effectronica posted:

They should give the driverless cars AI like in this pair of Roger Zelazny short stories where they throw off their chains, gas their drivers with carbon monoxide, and have a grand old time in the flyover states.

Doctor Malaver
May 23, 2007

Ce qui s'est passé t'a rendu plus fort
Can somebody (who preferably isn't Tiny Brontosaurus) explain to me what is Tiny Brontosaurus so angry and annoyed about?

Effectronica
May 31, 2011
Fallen Rib

Doctor Malaver posted:

Can somebody (who preferably isn't Tiny Brontosaurus) explain to me what is Tiny Brontosaurus so angry and annoyed about?

Injustice. Human frailty. The forces of Error.

Huzanko
Aug 4, 2015

by FactsAreUseless

foobardog posted:

Did you live in the 90s? This was a huge loving change, and has impacted our lives significantly. Holy poo poo. :psyduck:

You understand that when we had idle conversations and was wondering about a fact, we pretty much twiddled our thumbs unless we could find an encyclopedia? Pretty much every episode of Seinfeld would be over in five minutes if they just all had loving cell phones? If I heard about a cool book, song, movie, or video game I'd have to write it down to remember to pick it up at the store, now I just loving download it and go to town right away? That Rodney King getting filmed was an insane stroke of luck that someone had a video camera and was looking, and that it'd be guaranteed to be filmed now if pretty much any one was looking? That this would even be true if poo poo was going down in Africa?

You could get away with saying this a bit in the aughts, but you'd still be pretty stupid then.

Yep. I was born in '83. First computer in '97. First ISP was Prodigy.

Everything is totally different now - absolutely everything. To think otherwise you'd have to have been born in the late '90s, or just be really dumb or something.

Tiny Brontosaurus
Aug 1, 2013

by Lowtax

Doctor Malaver posted:

Can somebody (who preferably isn't Tiny Brontosaurus) explain to me what is Tiny Brontosaurus so angry and annoyed about?

The Cars franchise cashed in Pixar's early spark of originality for merchandising opportunities and baby boomer pandering.

Huzanko
Aug 4, 2015

by FactsAreUseless

Tiny Brontosaurus posted:

How would driverless cars fix you not liking cars in cities? You aren't reducing the number of cars, just who owns them, and making their traffic presence much much worse. Yeah we might get rid of parking in residential areas, but we'd only be trading it in for huge loading zones for rider pickup.

If you want carless cities, which is something want too, you want busses and trains. Not cars, which are by definition... cars.

There's already a growing demographic willingly giving up car ownership, or rather never adopting it in the first place: The urbanizing young. Kids are leaving the small towns and suburbs they grew up in and moving to cities with better job opportunities. Better transit options combined with low wages and high student loan debt means fewer of these kids are interested in/eligible for car loans. I think we're going to see a long-term drop in a lot of big-ticket consumer purchasing simply from people shifting away from the suburban American dream and all its trappings. Maybe we'll see an increase in prosperity and another boom in suburbanization like we did in the fifties, but it's also possible that not having cars when they're young creates a generation that never wants them, the same way this demo doesn't particularly want cable subscriptions or kitchen appliances.

You're never going to reach them my man. "Futurists" are a special kind of naive.

boner confessor
Apr 25, 2013

by R. Guyovich

Doctor Malaver posted:

Can somebody (who preferably isn't Tiny Brontosaurus) explain to me what is Tiny Brontosaurus so angry and annoyed about?

it's kind of silly to expect autonomous cars to rise above the level of "cars, except the person in them doesn't have to pay attention to driving" and everything else is pretty much the same. which turns out to be not that different. i can only assume tiny brontosaurus' father was slain in a DARPA trial or something

me, personally, i dont think there's all that much to expect from autonomous cars. but maybe i'm wrong. i can't predict the future, man

rudatron
May 31, 2011

by Fluffdaddy
Oddly enough, autonomous cars may actually assist transit, in the right situations. You robocar to the rail station, train into urban areas, the bus or robocar to work. You could maybe also do it with other options like biking or walking. If done properly, you could actually reduce congestion.

Something I'm really existing about though is the idea of variable bus routes. So suppose everyone had a smart phone, you enter where you are and need to go. That gets sent to a computer which them aggregates you requests with everyone else's, to generate a set of lines, created dynamically. The phone app then tells you which buses you get on and which transfers to make. Interesting, no? You could pull of the same thing with a taxi fleet, or a mix of taxis and buses, if you can get the whole thing automatic.

asdf32
May 15, 2010

I lust for childrens' deaths. Ask me about how I don't care if my kids die.

rudatron posted:

Oddly enough, autonomous cars may actually assist transit, in the right situations. You robocar to the rail station, train into urban areas, the bus or robocar to work. You could maybe also do it with other options like biking or walking. If done properly, you could actually reduce congestion.

Something I'm really existing about though is the idea of variable bus routes. So suppose everyone had a smart phone, you enter where you are and need to go. That gets sent to a computer which them aggregates you requests with everyone else's, to generate a set of lines, created dynamically. The phone app then tells you which buses you get on and which transfers to make. Interesting, no? You could pull of the same thing with a taxi fleet, or a mix of taxis and buses, if you can get the whole thing automatic.

Yes it is good for public transit. One constraint of existing systems is the cost of the human driver which generally means its only economical to run large buses. This means fewer routes running less frequently. With no driver van sized public transit becomes more feasible and allows more routes or higher frequency.

Automomous vehicles don't directly reduce congestion or environmental concerns, but their side affects ooen up a lot of possibilities.


Though disclaimer: none of this is happening at relevant scale for decades. My 1 month old child is going to own a car with a wheel.

Bates
Jun 15, 2006

Popular Thug Drink posted:

i'm not sure how eliminating automobiles from urban environments will be facilitated by displacing automobiles from private hands into larger corporate or even quasi-public entities. it seems that would make it easier to use automobiles by displacing some of the cost. parking devoted to robot cars isn't going away either, unless we go with the 'eternal traffic jam' solution of just having a stream of cars on the roads at all time balanced to anticipate demand whether they have anyone in them or not

the more direct way to get rid of cars is just to, i think, get rid of cars. make more streets pedestrian only, enhance public transit, encourage density, etc. autonomous cars aren't going to do anything to get rid of cars, it's just going to make those cars autonomous

Distributed ownership means distributed parking. While the people on a street may agree to use the road for storage if they all need to store something, it's another matter if nobody needs to store anything. People might agree that Uber et al should use some other place as a parking lot and we should instead expand the sidewalk or plant some greenery.

Personal cars is the default and for that reason we cater to them by default. It's a struggle every time a street is made pedestrian only or a road lane is taken to make a bike path or a parking lot turned into a park because too many people are personally and emotionally invested in their cars and will fight anything that encroach on them. If you remove that personal connection you can have a more rational conversation about the use of public resources. In addition, if people become accustomed to public cars there will be less of a psychological barrier to other forms of public transportation.

Predicting the future is en exercise in futility but I HOPE autonomous cars come soon and it causes most people to eventually give up personal ownership. It will change how we think about cars, public transportation and infrastructure and we need that.

boner confessor
Apr 25, 2013

by R. Guyovich

asdf32 posted:

My 1 month old child is going to own a car with a wheel.

congrats

Anosmoman posted:

Distributed ownership means distributed parking. While the people on a street may agree to use the road for storage if they all need to store something, it's another matter if nobody needs to store anything. People might agree that Uber et al should use some other place as a parking lot and we should instead expand the sidewalk or plant some greenery.

'distribted parking' just means 'spends more time moving than not moving' which means, traffic

i mean uber could use a centralized parking hub, me, i call that a garage. when a vehicle is in motion, it's on the road, when it's not, it's parked. whether or not a human is in the vehicle doesn't matter. this means that if a person walks up to a car to enter it, or summons one from a smart phone, either way a car has to be stored locally or it's in part of the transit cloud aka traffic

Anosmoman posted:

Personal cars is the default and for that reason we cater to them by default. It's a struggle every time a street is made pedestrian only or a road lane is taken to make a bike path or a parking lot turned into a park because too many people are personally and emotionally invested in their cars and will fight anything that encroach on them. If you remove that personal connection you can have a more rational conversation about the use of public resources. In addition, if people become accustomed to public cars there will be less of a psychological barrier to other forms of public transportation.

i don't see how increasing the distance of ownership between a person and a vehicle from directly owning to temporarily owning reduces vehicle use. it seems more efficient to remove the vehicle from the equation rather than increase the distance of responsibility

Anosmoman posted:

Predicting the future is en exercise in futility but I HOPE autonomous cars come soon and it causes most people to eventually give up personal ownership. It will change how we think about cars, public transportation and infrastructure and we need that.

people are already giving up personal ownership it's called *heavy sigh* gentrification

CrypticTriptych
Oct 16, 2013
One way I can see self-driving cars improving traffic is by allowing cities to remove large swaths of on-street parking. Normally businesses and city planners are reluctant to let go of on-street parking, but if self-driving cars became the norm people could get out wherever is convenient and let the car park itself in a elsewhere, recalling it when needed. Parking lanes could then be converted to bike or bus lanes, or reclaimed for pedestrian use or green-space.
Parking garages would get a nearly free capacity boost, too, because self-driving cars can park right next to each other without leaving space to open their doors.

boner confessor
Apr 25, 2013

by R. Guyovich

CrypticTriptych posted:

One way I can see self-driving cars improving traffic is by allowing cities to remove large swaths of on-street parking.

i really, truly do not see the fundamental connection between traffic (cars on the road) and parking (cars off the road). i mean one leads to another, increased cars in motion leads to higher demand to place cars et cetera. but naturally, imo, cars that are in motion, are not not in motion, and the same reversed. generally when cars stop being in motion is when they need to be parked, in my experience. cars can be parked on streets, or in lots, or in garages, but all of these scenarios happen when the car is not on the roads in motion is the gist of my point

quote:

if self-driving cars became the norm people could get out wherever is convenient and let the car park itself in a elsewhere, recalling it when needed

so what it seems you're saying is that cars will stop being parked near where someone who needs a car is, and then be parked somewhat further away. the difference being that car will summon itself, on the roadway, and contribute to traffic. then we have a trade off, if road space for the car to be in motion is more valuable than proximate static space for the car to be not in motion, but conveniently placed. effectively the roads will become a parking lot-in motion, versus a parking lot in a fixed spot. not sure then how there's a big advantage in terms of space utilized, since a car not moving will probably consume less space per time unit than a car in motion, unless we just assume that a parking lot further from the point of necessity is better than a parking lot closer to the point of necessity

boner confessor fucked around with this message at 08:33 on Jan 16, 2016

a_gelatinous_cube
Feb 13, 2005

I think you can say self-driving cars are just around the corner when someone actually has one that you can take from any generic house to any other point in the city under any weather or traffic conditions. After you get a prototype that can do this it will still take years of testing before high-end consumer model cars will have the feature, and it will take decades before they are prevalent in the entire car fleet.

This self-driving car debate has already been going on years at this point, and at this point I still haven't seen anything showing they can do simple things like make a left turn into heavy traffic or make an aggressive merge on a congested highway or even drive in the rain. I don't see how self-driving cars are going to be out there on the road in fleets in 4 years if they can't even get this stuff right.

crabcakes66
May 24, 2012

by exmarx

Zyklon B Zombie posted:

I think you can say self-driving cars are just around the corner when someone actually has one that you can take from any generic house to any other point in the city under any weather or traffic conditions.

That's already possible. And "any" weather conditions is a bit of a bullshit requirement. It should be "any weather conditions that the specific vehicle has the equipment to handle and humans would safely/normally drive in".


Conditions can get bad enough where not even emergency services will operate. It happens all the time in ice storms/hurricanes/blizzards etc. Driverless cars should not be held to an unrealistically high standard in that regard.

a_gelatinous_cube
Feb 13, 2005

crabcakes66 posted:

That's already possible. And "any" weather conditions is a bit of a bullshit requirement. It should be "any weather conditions that the specific vehicle has the equipment to handle and humans would safely/normally drive in".


Conditions can get bad enough where not even emergency services will operate. It happens all the time in ice storms/hurricanes/blizzards etc. Driverless cars should not be held to an unrealistically high standard in that regard.

Not trying to be a dick here because I honestly don't know, but could they take one of these vehicles to my apartment, have me punch in another location in my city, and it would drive me there? Because as far as I knew these test vehicles were only in specific areas that they have been collecting a lot of data on already.

Panzeh
Nov 27, 2006

"..The high ground"

Anosmoman posted:

Well even if the technology may not be that far off, replacing all car travel certainly is, so I won't indulge in idle speculation. The first applications will be in the corporate world - mining, ports, airports, campuses, storage complexes etc. This is happening now. Transport companies will want to follow as soon as they can because the potential savings are huge. Down the line we'll see taxis. It'll take decades and a cultural shift for people to give up their personal vehicles and maybe it'll never catch on. I just don't know. For rural areas I doubt personal ownership will ever go entirely away, just like using and owning horses for practical use also haven't.

What I do know is that I'm sick and tired of cars in my city. Huge urban craters dedicated to storing metal boxes and garish metal walls along every street - it's ugly and frankly absurd. People whine about wind mills but if you want to talk about ugliness... I hope people will some day give up personal ownership so we can get those spaces back and make them into spaces for humans. Or maybe just enough people will give them up that we have popular support to tell those who don't, to pay up or gently caress off.

Ah, yes, the dream where everyone agrees to triple their rent for the privilege of having to put up with other people's bullshit.

Feral Integral
Jun 6, 2006

YOSPOS

Drive in the right lane. Pick a speed.
If the car in front of you is going slower then pass it on the left and get back in the right lane.

Most people can't seem to follow let alone comprehend this simple sorting algorithm. Bring the driverless cars pls

asdf32
May 15, 2010

I lust for childrens' deaths. Ask me about how I don't care if my kids die.

Popular Thug Drink posted:

i really, truly do not see the fundamental connection between traffic (cars on the road) and parking (cars off the road). i mean one leads to another, increased cars in motion leads to higher demand to place cars et cetera. but naturally, imo, cars that are in motion, are not not in motion, and the same reversed. generally when cars stop being in motion is when they need to be parked, in my experience. cars can be parked on streets, or in lots, or in garages, but all of these scenarios happen when the car is not on the roads in motion is the gist of my point


so what it seems you're saying is that cars will stop being parked near where someone who needs a car is, and then be parked somewhat further away. the difference being that car will summon itself, on the roadway, and contribute to traffic. then we have a trade off, if road space for the car to be in motion is more valuable than proximate static space for the car to be not in motion, but conveniently placed. effectively the roads will become a parking lot-in motion, versus a parking lot in a fixed spot. not sure then how there's a big advantage in terms of space utilized, since a car not moving will probably consume less space per time unit than a car in motion, unless we just assume that a parking lot further from the point of necessity is better than a parking lot closer to the point of necessity

The connection is not that hard. First on the 'park further away topic'. Do you understand basic engineering principles like caching, buffers etc. Real estate in many systems has extremely tiered importance. And this is true in traffic. A downtown area which lots of people want to move in and out of is extremely expensive real estate.

The basic equation here is simple. The percentage of time a car is in use is quite small. And when not in use there is a huge incentive for moving it out of the expensive real estate area. Whether parked or driving it's occupying space in the high priority area (obviously so if its street parking, still true in a downtown garage). There is a benefit to getting the car out of the expensive real estate area during the often large percentage (>95%) of the time its unused, even if it means a small percentage of extra time on the road (computer and database systems make this tradeoff all the time).


But more importantly self-driving cars are more conducive to sharing. The model now where people drive downtown and park means there is one car per person. A model where more people use automated uber, a single physical car can get multiple people in and out even if they get transported alone. If you increase the average amount of ride sharing things become better.


Again, I'm someone who thinks this is all decades away. Buy anyone who thinks real life automated Uber is 'no big deal' is a fool. You seem to be in that group.

asdf32 fucked around with this message at 17:55 on Jan 16, 2016

boner confessor
Apr 25, 2013

by R. Guyovich

asdf32 posted:

The connection is not that hard. First on the 'park further away topic'. Do you understand basic engineering principles like caching, buffers etc. Real estate in many systems has extremely tiered importance. And this is true in traffic. A downtown area which lots of people want to move in and out of is extremely expensive real estate.

please explain to me how cpu caching means there will be less parking if we just put the parking further away from where a person needs it, and how this will somehow reduce traffic

asdf32 posted:

But more importantly self-driving cars are more conducive to sharing. The model now where people drive downtown and park means there is one car per person. A model where more people use automated uber, a single physical car can get multiple people in and out even if they get transported alone. If you increase the average amount of ride sharing things become better.

so in the future we'll be able to carpool :confused:

asdf32
May 15, 2010

I lust for childrens' deaths. Ask me about how I don't care if my kids die.

Popular Thug Drink posted:

please explain to me how cpu caching means there will be less parking if we just put the parking further away from where a person needs it, and how this will somehow reduce traffic


so in the future we'll be able to carpool :confused:

I just did.

Yes. Carpooling, a thing single digit percentage of people currently do, is among the things likely to change when drivers are removed. Just like, as importantly, probably better utilization of individual cars.

Mc Do Well
Aug 2, 2008

by FactsAreUseless
Even if fully autonomous cars are decades away that doesn't mean there won't be new inputs for human drivers to make them safer. Late models have more bells and whistles like bluetooth, backup cams, blindspot cams, and improving kinds of cruise control. They have blackboxes if you get in an accident without your seatbelt the machine 'narcs' when it comes to insurers and liability.

If the Federal Government helps manufacturers and insurers work out an ad hoc networking standard you could have neat features like a 'radar' that shows surrounding vehicles - hit and runs will be impossible because IDs get swapped on impact. When you are making a turn at a stop sign you could have a little stoplight on your dash to double check that the intersection is safe.

CrypticTriptych
Oct 16, 2013

Popular Thug Drink posted:

so what it seems you're saying is that cars will stop being parked near where someone who needs a car is, and then be parked somewhat further away.
Yes, although it wouldn't be much different from the car-user's perspective, since your car would come back when you needed it.

quote:

the difference being that car will summon itself, on the roadway, and contribute to traffic. then we have a trade off, if road space for the car to be in motion is more valuable than proximate static space for the car to be not in motion, but conveniently placed.
Yes, it will (briefly) contribute to traffic to and from the parking spot. The traffic cost of the car moving to a parking spot is small and more than regained by not needing to dedicate as much roadway to on-street parking. We do make the trade-off you mention but I think it's a good one. It only takes a little extra road space/time for the car to be in a much better spot.
Edit: Actually I'm not sure what your terms are here. "Convenient proximate space" is a lot different for a self-driving car than a manual one -- that's kind of my point, even.

quote:

effectively the roads will become a parking lot-in motion, versus a parking lot in a fixed spot. not sure then how there's a big advantage in terms of space utilized, since a car not moving will probably consume less space per time unit than a car in motion, unless we just assume that a parking lot further from the point of necessity is better than a parking lot closer to the point of necessity
I'm not saying that cars would continually drive in circles until needed. I'm saying that on-street parking uses road lanes that could otherwise be used for other purposes. If self-driving cars allow us to reduce on-street parking, which I really think it would, we can use those lanes for more cars, or as bus/bike lanes.

CrypticTriptych fucked around with this message at 00:47 on Jan 17, 2016

Trabisnikof
Dec 24, 2005

Zyklon B Zombie posted:

This self-driving car debate has already been going on years at this point, and at this point I still haven't seen anything showing they can do simple things like make a left turn into heavy traffic or make an aggressive merge on a congested highway or even drive in the rain.

Google's cars are already driving in the rain, although they recognize that it is an area for improvement. But as they point out, radar doesn't see rain:

quote:

Driving in rain makes many human drivers nervous due to reduced visibility, and some of our sensors -- particularly the cameras and lasers -- have to deal with similar issues. For example, we’ve had to come up with our own equivalent of a windscreen wiper on the dome to ensure our sensors have the best view possible. Our laser sensors are able to detect rain, so we have to teach our cars to see through the raindrops and clouds of exhaust on cold mornings, and continue to properly detect objects. We’re helped by our diversity of sensors, since our radars have no problem seeing through this sort of clutter.
As we’re developing the technology, we've made sure our cars are aware of how rain may affect their ability to drive. Our cars can determine the severity of the rain, and just like human drivers they drive more cautiously in wet conditions when roads are slippery and visibility is poor. For now, if it’s particularly stormy, our cars automatically pull over and wait until conditions improve (and of course, our test drivers are always available to take over).

(https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/www.google.com/en//selfdrivingcar/files/reports/report-1215.pdf)

Also the google lexuses drive on the highway all the time. You're confusing their bubble car with their entire self driving fleet.

boner confessor
Apr 25, 2013

by R. Guyovich

asdf32 posted:

I just did.

Yes. Carpooling, a thing single digit percentage of people currently do, is among the things likely to change when drivers are removed. Just like, as importantly, probably better utilization of individual cars.

sorry, i just don't see the connection between passenger trip generation and land use in terms of electrical engineering, you might have to elaborate

asdf32
May 15, 2010

I lust for childrens' deaths. Ask me about how I don't care if my kids die.

Popular Thug Drink posted:

sorry, i just don't see the connection between passenger trip generation and land use in terms of electrical engineering, you might have to elaborate

You're in software development and you do understand you're just stuck on a tack where you think its cool to be the guy predicting 'no big deal' horseless buggies will just be buggies without horses. And apparently your shift key is broken.


I feel a need to restate that I'm a guy who thinks people drinking the kool aid on this tech are also fools. But it's even dumber to pretend that upending how transportation works (removing drivers) wouldn't have far reaching consequences.

boner confessor
Apr 25, 2013

by R. Guyovich

asdf32 posted:

You're in software development and you do understand you're just stuck on a tack where you think its cool to be the guy predicting 'no big deal' horseless buggies will just be buggies without horses. And apparently your shift key is broken.


I feel a need to restate that I'm a guy who thinks people drinking the kool aid on this tech are also fools. But it's even dumber to pretend that upending how transportation works (removing drivers) wouldn't have far reaching consequences.

can you phrase this in the form of an analogy about cpu cycles, i'm not getting it

or maybe a video game analogy, about how driverless cars being the thing that's going to finally allow us to do away with parking and reduce traffic is similar to aimbot detection and anti-cheating protocol

hailthefish
Oct 24, 2010

Things that are plausible:
  • The elimination of truckers, bus drivers, and taxi drivers.
  • Bus networks expanding their coverage due to the lack of paid drivers.
  • 'Driverless-only' express and toll roads that take advantage of the ability of driverless cars to travel much closer together at much higher speeds much more safely than humans.
  • Driverless downtowns, where the only cars allowed are driverless ones. The biggest traffic improvement will be from the banishment of the dirty poors who can't afford driverless cars.

Things that are not plausible:
  • A 'traffic cloud' of innumerable publicly- or business-owned driverless cars constantly circulating through a city, picking people up and dropping them off, summoned by smartphone, replacing all privately owned vehicles everywhere forever (goddamn you are some pedantic motherfuckers).

hailthefish fucked around with this message at 05:06 on Jan 17, 2016

Bates
Jun 15, 2006

hailthefish posted:

Things that are not plausible:
  • A 'traffic cloud' of innumerable publicly- or business-owned driverless cars constantly circulating through a city, picking people up and dropping them off, summoned by smartphone.

That's what taxi fleets do now, today.

Bar Ran Dun
Jan 22, 2006




This is a small thing that just happened that's a bigger deal than the self driving cars

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/e9aedf40-bb1d-11e5-bf7e-8a339b6f2164.html#axzz3xTGBnRgF

Amazon is now a NVOCC. This a clear cut step moving towards it being a 3PL / 4PL. I'm betting that eventually that industry, is going to to be threatened by this in the same way retail has been.

An article from a couple years ago that explains what that means
http://www.supplychainquarterly.com/topics/Logistics/20141027-is-amazon-a-3pl/

Edit: This is a very very long game move.

Bar Ran Dun fucked around with this message at 05:16 on Jan 17, 2016

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rudatron
May 31, 2011

by Fluffdaddy
Driverless forklifts are definitely going to kill jobs sooner than driverless trucks, because you have much finer control of the environment. A fully automated logistics train is kind scary, and is probably what Amazon is trying to aim for here. Kinda hoping though that other companies step up their game, because if that future is coming, it'll be bad if Amazon is the only player there.

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