Looks like we have an avid TTAC reader in DA' house.

I am fairly certain that on takeoffs and landings the pilots operate the plane, other than that is done thru computers, but yes they are still needed.

I work in the trucking industry. I was a driver, then trainer, now management...

Self driving trucks are at least 20 years away, though much likely more than that. We dont even talk about it. If this technology was "on the cusp" it'd be all over our radar. Granted we are OTR but even then we'd at least be looking into it. If you want a revolution in the trucking industry it'll be either rail devouring us alive or us eventually going electric once batteries come along enough.

CR England (awful, horrible people) did some of that radar cruise thing last year and they wrecked like 4 of their trial trucks. And that's just a system that maintains a 7 second following distance.

Could you imagine a drone truck driving around Chicago? It would barely move. All the safety software would freak out every time it was cut off (about every 15-20 seconds). It'd never be able to merge because people here are assholes to other people much less job thieving robots, and those aforementioned safety overrides would just sit there waiting for a gap that never materializes.

The dirty little secret of the trucking industry is that for all the preaching about safety this industry relies on drivers pushing the envelope. A computer programmed to avoid everything would never just force its way into a lane when it needed to.

I work in the trucking industry. I was a driver, then trainer, now management...

Self driving trucks are at least 20 years away,

I think the self driving car is our generation's technological folly that gets laughed at 50 years from now. "THEY ACTUALLY BELIEVED THEY COULD DO THAT? WHAT WERE THEY THINKING HAHAHAHA"

Except they already exist.

Except they already exist.

Yea and Ford dropped an obscene amount of money developing a car with a nuclear reactor in it because they just knew one day the technology would get there. Ooops.

The Google Car has never seen a public road either. It exists, sure, but its not doing what everyone just assumes it can.

Yea and Ford dropped an obscene amount of money developing a car with a nuclear reactor in it because they just knew one day the technology would get there. Ooops.

The Google Car has never seen a public road either. It exists, sure, but its not doing what everyone just assumes it can.

in 700,000 miles of test driving on public roads, no Google test cars have caused any accidents (even though other cars have hit them and a driver manually moving one rear-ended a Prius), but Urmson still thinks society will have to eventually accept them and the fact there could be failures just like cars today have failures.

Maybe it's the centrality of the man-driven automobile in the American experience (inventors of it (sorta), assembly line, etc) that causes people to resist the self-driving car concept.

As rpb's article noted, other countries are ahead of us in implementing these things.

Maybe a self-driving car needs to win the Daytona 500 before Americans will accept them en mass.

Anyone who takes a ride in one, they say, is immediately converted. that's where services like uber will come in. a light/low risk way of exposing people to self-driving cars.

Google self-driving cars drive all over public roads. All the time.



http://www.freep.com/story/money/cars/d ... /21759099/


interestsing that 'America' is in the trucking industry. It's usually outsiders who come in with new tech to disrupt existing, calcified industries. And often times established industry giants can't see the future very well. Recall AT&T owned the patents for cell phone technology but dumped the tech off to a baby ball cuz they didn't think there'd be a market for mobile phones. Today there are more active cell phones lines than people on the planet.

well, they'll be running bus routes in a couple dozen major cities in the next year. Granted,it's likely dead easy to program a self-driving bus to tool up and down Harlem avenue on a predetermined route. But it's a start. And programming Uber cars to handle navigating the streets of chicago should similarly be a no-brainer for this software.

I have a feeling 'America' will be riding around in self-driving buses/cars/trucks (like the self-driving airplane he's no doubt ridden on) and still doubt that they'll happen.

You may be gullible enough to write for Forbes. We cant even program trains to run driverless yet. Fucking trains, they cant even turn.

For instance they were never taught that Columbus was a slave owner.

You have to be incredibly naive to think that computers can't handle driving and do so better than humans in the near future.

On a recent weekday test drive, the safety drivers were still an essential part of the experience, as Uber’s autonomous car briefly turned un-autonomous, while crossing the Allegheny River. A chime sounded, a signal to the driver to take the wheel. A second ding a few seconds later indicated that the car was back under computer control. “Bridges are really hard,” Krikorian says. “And there are like 500 bridges in Pittsburgh.”

Bridges are hard in part because of the way that Uber’s system works. Over the past year and a half, the company has been creating extremely detailed maps that include not just roads and lane markings, but also buildings, potholes, parked cars, fire hydrants, traffic lights, trees, and anything else on Pittsburgh's streets. As the car moves, it collects data, and then using a large, liquid-cooled computer in the trunk, it compares what it sees with the preexisting maps to identify (and avoid) pedestrians, cyclists, stray dogs, and anything else. Bridges, unlike normal streets, offer few environmental cues—there are no buildings, for instance—making it hard for the car to figure out exactly where it is. Uber cars have Global Positioning System sensors, but those are only accurate within about 10 feet; Uber’s systems strive for accuracy down to the inch.

There is a long way to go.

For instance they were never taught that Columbus was a slave owner.

Not like there used to be. Computers can figure things out exponentially faster than we can.