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Originally Posted by midas
1. You answered all my questions with laboratory theory not facts and no costs.
Google has done over 1 million self-driven miles on California roads. There's plenty of data there. There are other programs around the world including Europe. The data shows that computer driven cars leave humans in the dust.
I'm not sure you've thought through what driving involves, and why accidents happen. Most of the reasons humans crash are caused by humans being utter morons with terrible situational awareness and low reliability. We are extremely poorly designed for car driving. Problems include:
1. Lack of situational awareness - not seeing a kid or another car, for example. Computers solve this completely by having perfect object awareness all around the car, far exceeding humans. Lack of situational awareness includes falling asleep, looking down at a phone, etc
2. Losing control of the car - driving too fast, drifting across lanes, taking corners too fast.
3. Slow or panicked reactions. Time to react to a visual stimuli and begin taking evasive action is about 1.5 seconds, which is shockingly slow, and up to about 50 miles an hour is the greatest component of stopping time. Computers have this down to milliseconds.
4. Unsafe practices - following too closely for human reaction times, driving too fast for the situation, etc.
Humans are extremely dangerous drivers...."the most dangerous part of a car is the nut behind the wheel" is very true.
Computers are already far safer drivers. These are real world facts, borne out by actual autonomous cars driving in actual real-world traffic, not laboratory theories.
A million people a year are killed on the roads, many young and healthy. About 20 million get injuries requiring hospitalization. Nearly all of these accidents due to preventable human error. Estimates are:
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Worldwide, road traffic accidents are estimated to be the 8th cause of DALY [disability adjusted life years lost], accounting for 2.6% of the total at an estimated annual cost of $518 billion in 2004
Replacing humans as drivers will wipe out a major cause of death, disability, grief and loss, particularly among the young in the West where other causes have been taken care of. For those reasons alone, governments will embrace the technology.
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3. If this tech was even close to being viable it would be used by the military. Why risk human drivers in a war zone if a supply truck can drive itself?
It certainly wouldn't. We can already easily and cheaply remote control supply trucks and we don't do that. Why not?
Last edited by ToothSayer; 08-19-2015 at 03:02 AM.