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GM’s big bet on driverless cars turns sour
(www.theverge.com)
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
I’ve encountered so many edge cases over my many years of driving that I seriously doubt fully autonomous cars will truly be a thing for many decades to come. Computers / AI needs to get to the point where it can intuit what to do when a situation arises that it hasn’t been explicitly trained to handle.
Road specs and markings will also need to evolve to support the technology. There will eventually be roads that are approved, and others that are not, and an evolution will have to occur where roads are brought up to spec so they can join the system. It sounds silly until you realize we’ve already done all this with the road markings and lighting and grading specs and lane width specs and signage standardization and and and and everything that goes into today’s roads. Right now all the focus is on making the cars adapt to a world not designed for them but in the long run it will be a convergence of cars and road systems that will happen.
I really feel as though the easiest way would be to rip the bandaid off and allow only robo cars.
But that comes with a slew of other issues such as peoples sovereignty.
It's also depressing, because all these organizations will spend all things money rather than just build the trains that would actually solve the transportation problems.
When I was reading Heinlein and Asimov and I got to their stories about rolling roads and highways I was like "ha ha, that's cute but stupid".
Now, I'm starting to wonder how far the American transport industry will really go just to avoid doing trains and buses.
Just let 'em all go in a dead city, but give them features to use as facial expressions.