Tuesday, January 22, 2013

Will Self-Driving Cars Change the Rules of the Road?

Will Self-Driving Cars Change the Rules of the Road?

TIME-Jan 14, 2013
Not long ago, self-driving cars seemed like science fiction. But Google is now operating so-called autonomous cars in California and Nevada, ...
I wasn't able to quote more than this here. So, if you want to read the whole article please click on "Will Self-Driving----" word button above.
I personally am not looking forward to having to drive with Priuses not driven by anyone a lot. Because my first career in this life from college was as a computer programmer I do not have confidence in programs being safer than humans. There is a saying among computer programmers of the 1960s "Garbage in Garbage out" and no matter how perfect any computer program is there will eventually be errors. So, even if your program worked perfectly for 1 year or 5 years eventually driving under a power line or having a solar flare will destroy your programs running your car and you could die. This is a statistical given. So, it is only a matter of time before any computer program fails and has to be reinstalled from something like a DVD. So, maybe if programs were reinstalled once a month it would up the chances of long term  physical survival for humans without a driver. 
The main problem as I see it is the ways people would die from driverless cars and trucks would be unbelievably stupid and  ridiculous and completely different than they do now. Because computers are all stupid, no matter how intelligent the programmers are. 

However, it is possible in the main that driverless cars, 95% of the time might be safer than the average driver in the U.S. or world (and that is actually saying something). Because of the many people who do not drive or cannot drive and have to ride the bus, train or subway instead which might be dangerous, this might help those with enough money to buy a car individually or in a group to better physically survive their lives and increase the quality of their lives. So maybe people with infirmities that prevent them from driving a car might pool their monies and buy a car and this might really lift the quality of those people's lives worldwide. So, in this sense this might be a really big boon to mankind now and into the future.

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