When do you plan on making this point?
Self-Driving Cars
- Thread starter loopstick
- Start date
+48V
hi-fi or die
LOL. Woosh!
toups
Well-Known Member
Have to vote maybe. For all the reasons stated, I don't think the technology is quite there yet. (Or not if people are also driving!) However, if the day quoted above ever comes, it might just be the solution.
Would you like some help?
Technology issues aside if this becomes a reality millions of people in this country and around the world will lose their jobs. Delivery trucks, tractor trailers and even factory forklifts could be fitted with driverless technology. This would have a domino effect on several other industries. These jobs would not be offset by people building self-driving cars and technology because several futurists predict that car ownership will decline in part because of the "uber" effect and because the ensuing job loss will depress wages even further. Limited funds will make the convenience of car ownership a luxury in the future.
s-petersen
Scott
I work in a beverage can plant, and the vision system to detect defects, in cans, runs at over 2000 cans a minute and can reject a can for a pinprick sized dent, or off color, without missing a beat.
We have just delivered a tractor trailer of beer across the country driver-less to the loading dock.(does not back into the dock yet)
We have for 8 or so years had driver-less forklifts in our warehouse, (works great until the computer crashes,then sucks)
I voted maybe, because the tech may not be ready before I am ready to buy my last car.
Last edited:
I bet there's a lot it doesn't do "yet". Any links?
s-petersen
Scott
I was a little mistaken with the distance,not quite cross country.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/arti...th-budweiser-makes-first-delivery-in-colorado
http://www.cnbc.com/2016/10/25/driverless-beer-run-bud-makes-shipment-with-self-driving-truck.html
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/arti...th-budweiser-makes-first-delivery-in-colorado
http://www.cnbc.com/2016/10/25/driverless-beer-run-bud-makes-shipment-with-self-driving-truck.html
Last edited:
OK cool - that kinda puts it into some context.
Computer processing is all about doing a lot of simple things very quickly. You can increase the number of things to do and you can increase the speed but you're still stuck in this groove of sequentially processing a bunch of simple things quickly. Visual data is fed into this groove in a raster sequence and contextual / situational awareness is gradually built up to some threshold where a decision is made regarding the control of the vehicle - ignoring hard interrupts which force "fail safe" behavior.Not at first but when they are proven to be significantly safer than humans yes. They will become safer as more of them are on the road. I think that when I am old, the majority of cars will be self-driving.
Today machine vision is way more advanced than machine perception. Simple creatures that evolved millions of years ago have better instantaneous seven-dimensional (x, y, z - height, t - time / motion, RGB - color) perception than today's machines. So - if we're waiting until the algorithms produce a level of machine perception equal to that of simple life forms - let alone that of humans - IMHO we have a very long wait ahead of us.
We could have systems in which the cars are self-propelled but not autonomously controlled. These could be mandated in congested metropolitan areas and the vehicle interacts with a traffic control system that uses both satellite and ground communications / control. Slot cars without the slots. An undergrad CS major could probably write the software.
It doesn't require the entire perceptive capability of a human to drive; it mostly just requires that the sensors are operating. The processor controlling a self-driving car will, hopefully, not have to fish in the glove box for the directions, not have to exchange texts with its buddies, not have to apply mascara at 60 mph, etc., etc. The sooner self-driving cars are ready for prime time, the safer we all will be.
That's like saying that life is mostly the five senses - and you really don't need a brain as long as your nose works, your ears work, your eyes work, your taste buds work, your nerves work. Very simple organisms bring more to the table than that. And they've benefited from millions of generations of genetic algorithms.
Well, driving isn’t living, but since you mention it, the entire plant kingdom manages perfectly well with no processing power at all. Fairly sophisticated behavior can be driven by minimal processing. For instance, the foraging behavior of social ants can be generated using an algorithm that only has 3 or 4 decision rules. And you missed my main point, which is that all the processing power in the world will do you no good if the sensors are pointing in the wrong direction, which – given that the average member of Western society has the attention span of a fruit fly – they only too often are.
Meh. I'm awaiting my teleporter, and will accept nothing less.
Bees do this little dance that tells the other bees where the flowers are. But algorithmically that's probably nowhere near as sophisticated as visual perception. For a smart car sensor to have true depth perception - not radar ping ping ping - it would need two separate cameras and the brains required to process parallax virtually instantly across the field of view. Assuming it could accomplish this then it would need further brains to interpret this processed depth perception.
Maybe at that point the car would ready to follow a small set of decision rules. But we and other animals have visual perception hard-wired. It happens "in hardware" in the background - we take it for granted while the "software" side of our thinking controls the vehicle. The next time you're in a self-driving car keep in mind that compared to you it's barreling forward in world of darkness collecting impulses from a suite of widgets.
Would you mind making such an argument? I realize it's easy to be impressed by modern technology cuz of smart phones and computer generated special effects in movies. But these were easy problems for which the answers were already known - all that was needed was the for the hardware to evolve to the point where the implementation of these answers became practical. The answers for the problems of self-driving cars are not dependent on the evolution of hardware - they are dependent on the evolution of algorithms.
Similar threads
