Even wilder than that will be some form of social compromise in fully-autonomous vehicles.
People won’t want to part with the flexibility of driving their own cars, and once things are standardized and safety records are proven, people will eventually find acceptance in automated vehicles.
I hypothesize that major thoroughfares/highways will be fully-automated and only surface streets will be self-driving. This is a sort of hybrid-solution which generally addresses a great deal of traffic issues.
As many people as there are who won’t want to hand over control to the car computer for various reasons, there are A LOT of people who would rather be on their phones than drive (many of whom currently try to do both simultaneously 😬)
There are parallels to when autopilot first began to proliferate in aviation. I’d have to do some research to confirm, but I am certain there was at least a segment of people who would have said they trusted pilots to fly more than autopilot. Now it’s 99% autopilot. The pilots of scheduled air services typically hand control to autopilot fairly shortly after departure, and for quite a long time before arrival. In some cases there are even autopilot-coupled approach to landings… and nobody bats an eye.
We collectively spend millions of hours in traffic, and lose thousands of lives to preventable accidents (like drowsy/sleepy/influenced driving).
Aviation made the switch to save lives, and eventually drivers will, too.
When we look back, we’ll wonder how we were such savages about insisting we drive manually.
I bet at least 50 years after autonomous driving works correctly manual driving will be outlawed and only be done by enthusiasts on dedicated race tracks.
Or maybe not outlawed but most people won’t have a license. Seeing a normal car might be a similar novelty as seeing a horse carriage.
99% agree. We will find it as absurd as considering horse-drawn carriage as a contemporary mode of transport, and while legal overall, their use is prohibited on interstate highways, as will be manually-driven vehicles. And we might not even have to wait 50 years!
Nope, autonomous driving will probably evolve into a drive by wire system, where you drive the computer that drives the car, that means that you are kept in a safety bubble where your inputs are validated to be safe by the computer before they are performed.
Even wilder than that will be some form of social compromise in fully-autonomous vehicles.
People won’t want to part with the flexibility of driving their own cars, and once things are standardized and safety records are proven, people will eventually find acceptance in automated vehicles.
I hypothesize that major thoroughfares/highways will be fully-automated and only surface streets will be self-driving. This is a sort of hybrid-solution which generally addresses a great deal of traffic issues.
As many people as there are who won’t want to hand over control to the car computer for various reasons, there are A LOT of people who would rather be on their phones than drive (many of whom currently try to do both simultaneously 😬)
There are parallels to when autopilot first began to proliferate in aviation. I’d have to do some research to confirm, but I am certain there was at least a segment of people who would have said they trusted pilots to fly more than autopilot. Now it’s 99% autopilot. The pilots of scheduled air services typically hand control to autopilot fairly shortly after departure, and for quite a long time before arrival. In some cases there are even autopilot-coupled approach to landings… and nobody bats an eye.
We collectively spend millions of hours in traffic, and lose thousands of lives to preventable accidents (like drowsy/sleepy/influenced driving).
Aviation made the switch to save lives, and eventually drivers will, too.
When we look back, we’ll wonder how we were such savages about insisting we drive manually.
I bet at least 50 years after autonomous driving works correctly manual driving will be outlawed and only be done by enthusiasts on dedicated race tracks.
Or maybe not outlawed but most people won’t have a license. Seeing a normal car might be a similar novelty as seeing a horse carriage.
99% agree. We will find it as absurd as considering horse-drawn carriage as a contemporary mode of transport, and while legal overall, their use is prohibited on interstate highways, as will be manually-driven vehicles. And we might not even have to wait 50 years!
Nope, autonomous driving will probably evolve into a drive by wire system, where you drive the computer that drives the car, that means that you are kept in a safety bubble where your inputs are validated to be safe by the computer before they are performed.
Similar to that of fighter jets today.