Self-Driving Cars Are Nothing More Than A Pipe Dream

The recent fatality in Arizona illustrates this point.  You simply cannot create an algorithm that sufficiently predicts human behavior. Uber tried to spin the accident as unavoidable to even a human driver. The police released the video, and it is clear to me an alert human driver would have had time to react.  The Uber which was driving along came around a curve, and the woman was just right of center in the middle of the road.  The Uber didn’t even attempt to swerve, break or otherwise slowdown.  It just mowed her over.  Viewing the footage, an alert human driver could have swerved around the woman in either direction avoiding the collision entirely or at the very least slowed down lessening the extent of her injury.

The only way self-driving cars are going to work is if they are on a closed circuit where pedestrians and human drivers have to give the automated car the right of way.   

Surely, as scientists and engineers make greater and greater advances into the realm of artificil intelligence, they will be able to design a car capable of driving as well if not better than the average non-inebriated human being.

Of course by then the self-driving cars may decide to run over human beings on purpose.

It's always something.

I think I should have qualified my original thoughts to say at this time the technology isn’t there.  Personally, I think it is more than 20 years away.  The self-driving companies are so eager to push this tech through and there is so much corporate money to be made by eliminating truck drivers, I suspect common sense will be thrown out the window.  I think a lot of folks are going to die and get injured as a result.  

The good news is that Arizona suspended Uber from testing in the state.  That is kind of ironic given that Arizona stole the business away from California when California insisted on safety measures that Uber said were too onerous. 

I disagree.  Good chance most kids born today will never get a drivers license.   The technology is about 90% of the way there (and that took all of, what, 5 years to develop?)    One fatality is not going to stop the move forward.

The real problem is the automizaition of jobs performed by people who drive for a living.     Its a shitload of people and I dont think anyone has really modelled the impact yet.