On 11/11/2017 6:49 AM, Ted Roche wrote:
On Fri, Nov 10, 2017 at 4:22 AM, Alan Bourke alanpbourke@fastmail.fm wrote:
I doubt we'll see widespread adoption of fully autonomous road vehicles in any of our lifetimes.
I doubt the automobile will replace the horse. People want to feel in charge, go where they want to go, and cars are so unreliable, breaking down all the time.
I think it did take more than a lifetime for the vehicle to replace the horse (counting the development all required technology).
Apart from that, my view is that self-driving cars are fine if they are still personally owned. If the "state" owns them and we have to use them we'll be in big trouble. Injury and deaths due to self-driving accidents will have no recourse for the injured parties. That is, the government has the power to prevent its citizenry from suing (this is the case even now in other areas of government responsibility).
What would eventually happen is politicians would assign themselves priority use of vehicles and traffic lanes. Then, heck, why not refuse to let any of the self-driving cars go to facilities that are "questionable" to the government (aka known institutions that speak out against the government - kind of like how Lerner and the IRS did a few years ago).
And lets not forget those fun-loving hackers. If you think they are headaches when trying to grab credit card info, just wait until they can shut down whole cities.
But really, we already have "self-driving" cars: a taxi. Sure the "self-driver" is a person instead of software, but you don't have to manage the traffic. Maybe self-driving taxis would be cheaper. But as others have pointed out, the same level of liability would be on the owning company. And boy, for decades we've witnessed the stupidity of lawyers trying to argue details of technical implementations. So I can only imagine the court cases that may come from those accidents.
And of course, we are all disabled in one way or another. The most dangerous thought, however, is that some of us are more disabled than others, or that some of us are just "better" than others. That leads to the thinking that ultimate power should be given to a few to control masses. In that case, empirical history shows that is the recipe for truly horrible atrocities. That may seem like a long stretch from self-driving cars, but if the justification is that a few of us are just better and smarter and have more "rights" to control those other inferior folks.... I hope the correlation isn't lost.
-Charlie