[h4nnib4l]

I'm disappointed that you can't interface with a computer like in Johnny Mnemonic. "I'll crash you from here, man..."

This post has been edited by h4nnib4l: 11 January 2013 - 09:50 AM

[magius96]

If I could have anything from the movies, I want the hover board. Imagine flying to work on my hover board and getting sent to the morgue after I lose my balance while attempting to Ollie over traffic on a highly busy interstate.

Seriously though, flying anything that can carry a human and is available for the mass public is a dangerous proposition that just beckons idiots to practice auto-magical population control while enabling them to take a few non-idiots with them.

When flying cars become a reality, I'm going to find myself a nice sturdy underground home and try to make it self sufficient so that I can live there the rest of my life or until the world has finished committing mass-automotive genocide.

[WolfCoder]

h4nnib4l, on 11 January 2013 - 09:46 AM, said:

I'm disappointed that you can't interface with a computer like in Johnny Mnemonic. "I'll crash you from here, man..."

Isn't that the game where trying to "use" any computer terminal results in getting your brain flash-fried?

No thanks.

[Creecher]

And Nvidia car would be great!

[lordofduct]

magius96, on 01 February 2013 - 02:58 PM, said:

If I could have anything from the movies, I want the hover board. Imagine flying to work on my hover board and getting sent to the morgue after I lose my balance while attempting to Ollie over traffic on a highly busy interstate.

Seriously though, flying anything that can carry a human and is available for the mass public is a dangerous proposition that just beckons idiots to practice auto-magical population control while enabling them to take a few non-idiots with them.

When flying cars become a reality, I'm going to find myself a nice sturdy underground home and try to make it self sufficient so that I can live there the rest of my life or until the world has finished committing mass-automotive genocide.

Not saying I don't agree.

Just saying these kind of statements were made about cars themselves at one point in time. Stating that the average person couldn't handle the responsibility and technical prowess of operating a vehicle.

Yet here we are a 100 years later and 16 year old kids high as a kite drive them down the highway at 80+ miles per hour with a foot hanging out one window, texting, all while receiving head. (what you never did that? You haven't lived)

[h4nnib4l]

What the fuck are you talking about? It's a movie. But google could have told you that.

[creativecoding]

jon.kiparsky, on 09 January 2013 - 11:48 AM, said:

Cars fly now. Vertically, even. There's just more "down" than "up", and you can't do quite as much steering as you're really like while you're doing the flying part.

Also, the landings are a bitch.

AthenaDX, on 09 January 2013 - 12:25 PM, said:

Hell, I figured self-driving cars would be a thing, at the very least. Though Google is working on it at least.

"I know, put a bunch of cars on the road, controlled by computers. What could possibly go wrong?"

Google's car has only been in two accidents, once in manual mode and once being rear-ended at a stoplight. After that they had 300,000 miles accident free. I'd say computer-driven cars created by some very smart people will logically be the next step at reducing accidents and fatalities, and increases the speed we are able to move people at.

This post has been edited by creativecoding: 01 February 2013 - 10:30 PM

[jon.kiparsky]

Google's car has been on the road with a lot of people who are better at responding to unexpected situations than computers are. You really don't want to see what happens when it's on the road with a bunch of computer-driven vehicles.

To be perfectly honest, I don't see the motivation for this. If you want people to be able to get around without having to pay attention to the road, that's easy enough: improve public transportation. Frankly, I've had to get around by bus in San Mateo and Santa Clara counties. It's pretty terrible, but a little of that google ingenuity could probably do wonders, and also reduce the number of private wheelchairs cars on the road.
I know, that's a little less exciting, but at least it's not stupid.

[creativecoding]

Except, they're not. One person couldn't break fast enough to avoid hitting a stopped car, at a stop light. And I don't see why I wouldn't want to see it on a road with a bunch of computer driven vehicles, where they all follow street laws and go at a similar speed and (hopefully) communicate with each other.

The motivation is both speed and safety. That's the whole point of cars, to get people somewhere faster. But I also agree public transportation would be a smarter way to go. If only the two can come together where the only things that are on the roads are computer-driven buses. I don't see why computer driven cars are stupid however. It may not be totally efficient but it's a heck of a lot better than what we have now.

Driving under the influence? People running red lights? Speed limits? That'd all be a thing of the past.

[jon.kiparsky]

creativecoding, on 02 February 2013 - 01:20 AM, said:

Except, they're not. One person couldn't break fast enough to avoid hitting a stopped car, at a stop light. And I don't see why I wouldn't want to see it on a road with a bunch of computer driven vehicles, where they all follow street laws and go at a similar speed and (hopefully) communicate with each other.

You have more faith in computers than I do. To me, a vehicle operated by a computer is a vehicle that could be completely out of control at any moment.

Think about it. We've had networked computers for close to fifty years now, and networks still go down every day. In my office, as a matter of fact, we had an outage today, because something went wrong somewhere. Our network guys got it back up in about fifteen minutes, but imagine what that means in your scenario: all of a sudden every driver on the road just went blind, for fifteen minutes. At absolute best, that means you've just turned a city into complete chaos. More likely, you've probably just killed thousands of people, because the people in those cars were not ready to take control of their vehicles.

And why do we want this plan? So that people can have what busses do for them already, only without ever actually encountering other people.

That's the stupidest part: all of this effort goes to get you absolutely nothing that we don't have already. You've gotta be pretty damned smart to be that stupid.

Quote

If only the two can come together where the only things that are on the roads are computer-driven buses.

Why do they need to be computer-driven? What's the advantage?

Quote

Driving under the influence? People running red lights? Speed limits? That'd all be a thing of the past.

How you figure? Consider:

Quote

Yet here we are a 100 years later and 16 year old kids high as a kite drive them down the highway at 80+ miles per hour with a foot hanging out one window, texting, all while receiving head. (what you never did that? You haven't lived)

You think that's going to go away?
What you're doing is not eliminating the old modes of failure. You're just introducing a whole slew of new and exciting modes of failure.

[farrell2k]

jon.kiparsky, on 02 February 2013 - 06:46 AM, said:

all of a sudden every driver on the road just went blind, for fifteen minutes. At absolute best, that means you've just turned a city into complete chaos. More likely, you've probably just killed thousands of people, because the people in those cars were not ready to take control of their vehicles.

if(carCanSee) {
    drive();
}
else {
    stop();
}

[jon.kiparsky]

farrell2k, on 02 February 2013 - 02:16 AM, said:

if(carCanSee) {
    drive();
}
else {
    stop();
}

/>

Yes, that was my "absolute best" case. Stop up any major city's traffic for 15 minutes during the day, and you're going to be untangling that mess well into the night.

That assumes that every car is capable of stopping in a coordinated fashion, and we don't have, for example, one car coming to a dead stop in the middle of an intersection while another car (possibly driven by a machine, or possibly by LoD, high as two kites and with his personal needs being attended to at 80MPH) comes through the same intersection crosswise. If that assumption fails, then you start counting bodies and looking around for terrorists to blame.

Again, you trust these machines a lot more than I do. You also trust the engineers designing them a hell of a lot more than I do. Have you not seen the crap we get up to?

[creativecoding]

well, yeah, it's certainly a pipe dream. But it's a step forward in a better direction.

Quote

You have more faith in computers than I do. To me, a vehicle operated by a computer is a vehicle that could be completely out of control at any moment.

Think about it. We've had networked computers for close to fifty years now, and networks still go down every day. In my office, as a matter of fact, we had an outage today, because something went wrong somewhere. Our network guys got it back up in about fifteen minutes, but imagine what that means in your scenario: all of a sudden every driver on the road just went blind, for fifteen minutes. At absolute best, that means you've just turned a city into complete chaos. More likely, you've probably just killed thousands of people, because the people in those cars were not ready to take control of their vehicles.

Well it's not like they're going to slap an internet connection on it, have the whole thing rely on that, and say "well if it fails I guess they'll have to take control of this speeding car!". Right now the current computers are all onboard. So of course while having an internet connection would be a huge plus, it's not a necessity. Losing internet connection would probably result in slowing down of the car, not mass panic and chaos and thousands dead because some guy unplugged the ethernet cable.

Quote

That's the stupidest part: all of this effort goes to get you absolutely nothing that we don't have already. You've gotta be pretty damned smart to be that stupid.

And you have more faith in human drivers than I do There are 7.9 automobile accidents a year (estimated), 1.9 occurring in the United States alone. That's 21,644 accidents a day. Don't you think computers can do a little better than that? Especially equipped with a 360 view, traffic mappings, and ability to quickly calculate risks?


I suppose we're looking at different ideas here. I'm looking at the big picture - where this may lead and the future it'll bring us - where as you're leading at the fastest production and putting it immediately onto the streets. This sort of stuff will take decades, centuries even, before it gets to a point where even a fifth the drivers on the road are computers. And with the rate technology is going right now, I'm sure some of the reliability issues will be looked into.

[farrell2k]

jon.kiparsky, on 02 February 2013 - 07:27 AM, said:

Again, you trust these machines a lot more than I do.

Trust the machines? I've seen all three Terminator movies, plus the sucky one. I don't think so!

This post has been edited by farrell2k: 02 February 2013 - 12:41 AM

[WolfCoder]

h4nnib4l, on 01 February 2013 - 08:54 PM, said:

What the fuck are you talking about? It's a movie. But google could have told you that.

Google could have also told you it was an FMV game featuring Isaac Hayes.