I've made this point before. Autonomous vehicles don't have to be perfect to be better than human drivers. They really just need to match a reasonably competent, rested, and alert human driver to provide a benefit. People entrust their safety to other drivers all the time -- chauffeurs, taxi drivers, Lyft, bus drivers, etc. -- and those other drivers aren't necessarily that much better, if any, than they are. Just being sober and alert is a huge plus.
That being said, I think the techno-enthusiast crowd seriously under-values just how good the human brain is at certain kinds of things like object recognition and ignoring irrelevant sensory clutter.
My mother is a Fox News addict and Trump supporter and I really think she determines the success or failure of his actions based on whether or not they drive the liberal members of our family nuts.
Agreed. One of the things which floors me constantly - about liberals more then conservatives - is that ability to look at policy decisions, assume they are somehow aimed other then they are, and then get twisted in a knot when describing the outcome. Trump and many of his supporters want to eliminate immigration of Hispanics from south and central America. He does it because it keeps him in power. They do it because they believe (wrongly) it will bring back their lost prosperity and "place" in the world. But they are all very clear on why they are doing what they are doing. Which means that people deciding to give up trying to come here is indeed a win for them.
We've had this conversation before. People in general well and truly suck at driving. They suck because people are actually very bad with regards to:
1) Situational awareness - most people can't seem to be aware enough of their surroundings on a sidewalk or in a store so as to avoid impacting the people around them in negative ways, Put them in a vehicle, where they are further cut off from environmental stimulus, and it gets so much worse.
2) Paying attention - related to 1), while driving, people like to eat, and drink, and talk on the phone, or to their passengers, or fiddle with the radio, or get emotional, etc. One thing they rarely do is actually focus all of their attention on driving.
3) Actually knowing the correct action to take in an emergency and having the reflexes to perform that action. Or the correct action to take in non-emergencies (how many people utterly fail to signal a lane change). Or just the physical limits of their vehicle, and their abilities (how many people with 4WD or AWD end up in the ditch after every snowfall because they incorrectly assumed they could drive fast).
4) Ability to estimate acceleration, deceleration, or simple velocity of their own vehicle, or the vehicle of others (or bikes, or pedestrians).
Need I go on? In short, your moment-by-moment decision making is almost always seriously flawed in most people.
And such issues become significantly more pronounced with age (among the young, and the old).
How much of the cost of a modern car is tied up in automatic safety systems that exist solely to protect us from our own folly, or the folly of others?
Autonomous cars will, at some point in the near future (well before we get fusion power), be better at piloting a vehicle than people. When that happens, when they become (statistically) significantly better (not perfect, mind you, just better than your average driver), you'll start seeing them take over. And this libertarian is fine with that. There is nothing in libertarian philosophy that says a person should be free to pilot a 1+ ton missile around in public, as long as other, competitive options exist to allow for the freedom of movement.
This is one of my favorite things about growing a beard.
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