Driverless Cars

Google is giving them a big push, and they're progressing rapidly. A few states in the US are even considering legislation to legalize them (other parts of the world?). I'm sold, but I'm also remind of difficulty I discovered while developing systems for physician assisted diagnostics. The problem is partly a seemingly innate distrust of machinery, but the biggest problem is that their mistakes (while fewer) are characteristically machine-like, making them seem frighteningly alien. A near-perfect diagnostic device that diagnoses a man with cervical cancer quickly erodes trust, even if the symptoms were perfectly logical for a computer not programmed to "know" about human gender. I'm hopeful for this technology, but I'd guess that one slightly abnormal accident could greatly slow its rate of adoption

Thoughts? Anyone with firsthand experience?

Here's a demo video at TED:

http://www.ted.com/talks/sebastian_thrun_google_s_driverless_car.html

Why would you want your car to go anywhere without you?

~2

To pickup your kids after sport or music lessons.

It better not drive by the BMW dealer on the way to check out the topless models though.

#3/4 :)

I hate the idea of driverless cars, but I think that's just the control freak in me that hates to be bossed around by pieces of machinery. (This is why I turn off any app that tries to speak to me on my phone or my laptop, and why I never use cruise control on my car). But hell, our airplanes are basically driverless, so why not cars?

I'm excited about the technology, but I'd honestly have preferred something that cleans the house.

#6 I drive (no word play intended) my wife nuts since I use cruise control frequently in *reasonably* heavy city (Chicago) traffic. A friend of mine also never uses CC - he is a control freak as well - and that drives me nuts. In the boonies, CC helps me decrease the flow of speeding tickets.

I have seen a couple of articles positing that within a few (20-30?) years, we will generally be piloted around by Hal, especially in Interstate travels.

>8 bookblotter: The news report I heard yesterday on National Public Radio (US) quoted a Google spokesperson a estimating they were about 10 years away from an affordable model. Sounds optimistic, but the videos are impressive.

It will be in trouble when Google Maps has a bad day.

I think any safety engineer who came up with the idea of humans with minimal training driving two-tonne lumps of metal around at 100km an hour without any kind of automated guidance and collision prevention system would be laughed out of the house - we only allow human-driven cars because we have had them for so long.

>7 MartyBrandon:
I have a floor-sweeping robot: it does a pretty good job, but it certainly doesn't take all the work away.