I know this is a pet topic of Dean’s, so I thought I would put this story up.
Pretty amazing where the technology sits today.
A couple points to add:
I have some buddies who work in the “evil” defense/industrial complex who claim this ain’t nothin for them. Supposedly, the F-22 is loaded with similar technology. Throw in a network linking multiple vehicles together, and you’ve got something even more powerful. Just imagine if every car on the street was talking to all of its neighbors, and they are sharing pertinent sensor data.
And as usual, the biggest roadblocks to implementation will most likely not be technical, but legal. It’s amazing how much of an anchor lawyers and lawmakers can be to progress.
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Technology tends to grow at an exponential rate, getting faster, cheaper, and more reliable all at the same time. It’s gonna go like this:
Insanely expensive (your F16 boys are an example)
Extremely expensive (rich man’s toy, corporate ornament, highly specialized market applications)
Quite expensive (Some general market utility beyond publicity and ostentation)
Expensive (more direct market application, luxury for people can afford it)
Somewhat-less expensive: within the reach of middle class people
Fairly inexpensive: most people can get it
Cheap
Standard
Near-mandatory
Mandatory
(We don’t always hit the last two, but usually approach them.)
By the time it hits “cheap” it’s probably significantly more reliable than it was when it was extremely expensive.
That is counter-intuitive to how most of us think technology develops, but it’s pretty consistent how it usually goes. Cars, telephones, cell phones, computers, central heating, and central air conditioning all went that way.
The legal issues will be resolved fairly soon (as in, a few years). Legislatures are already looking at it and if they’re slow on the matter the courts will do it for them. It’ll mostly be a question of who liability reduces to when there is the (inevitable) death or injury. As much as people like to say “you can’t put a cost on human life,” most insurance agents can tell you to within a few thousand dollars just exactly how much a human life or limb costs if you take it in an accident.
The technology’s a done deal. It’s now only a question of how long before the legal issues resolve, and I don’t think that’s going to take as long as some people think it will either.
To me, there remain only two big questions:
1) How long before these things are standard, and we start to make it hard for humans to be licensed to drive themselves? 20 years? 30 years?
2) How long before the always-mentioned flying car hits? Because the truth is we’ve had flying cars for about 40 years now. The problem is they’re too damned dangerous for most people to fly so you’re better off just buying an airplane and getting a pilot’s license if that’s what you want. But when the things can fly themselves more reliably than any human pilot, you’re going to see your flying car in showrooms. Stay tuned. :-)
In practice, while autonomous cars are very close to practical use, the legal information to determine how to regulate driverless technologies is totally missing.
I wonder if the legal barriers will take longer than technological barriers because of clashes in interests.
The technology vs legal barriers.
I found the legal challenges they mentioned, especially the one about stopping for cops, to be a little strange: like, it’s some great technical challenge to have it stop for a cop? Perhaps I’m naive but these all seem extremely easy things to address. I guess we’ll see.
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