I'm presently 65 here in 2014 so I have no real idea if I will still be around in 2040 or not. But, the idea that I won't have to give up my car(s) is a nice idea for today for me to think about. My mother when she was about 82 suddenly felt she wasn't safe enough to drive anymore. This was the beginning of her decline into senile dementia by making this decision because she wound up being more landlocked and declined rapidly into dementia after that. By 90 she was gone having spent from 2001 until 2008 in the best facility for people like that in my county. So, by keeping mobile and social I think people will tend to live much longer because of self driving cars.
You won't need a driver's license by 2040
You won't need a driver's license by 2040
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An engineering group says 75% of cars with be autonomous by 2040.
STORY HIGHLIGHTS
- IEEE: 75% of cars will be autonomous by 2040
- The engineering group says traffic lights will go away
- Driver's licenses may also become relics of the past
- Professor: 'By 2040, driverless vehicles will be widely accepted'
But while we know that
robo-cars are coming, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics
Engineers (IEEE) recently released predictions that autonomous cars will
account for up to 75 percent of vehicles on the road by the year 2040.
The organization went even further, forecasting how infrastructure,
society and attitudes could change when self-driving cars become the
norm around the middle of the century.
IEEE envisions an absence
of traffic signs and lights since highly evolved, self-driving cars
won't need them, and it believes that full deployment could even
eliminate the need for driver's licenses.
While this all sounds
sci-fi, we're already starting to see separate threads of this
autonomous-car future being weaved in current real-world tests.
It's been assumed that
the largest hurdle for autonomous cars is building the infrastructure.
Not so, says Dr. Alberto Broggi, IEEE senior member and professor of
computer engineering at the University of Parma in Italy. Broggi, the
director of a 2010 project that successfully piloted two driverless cars
on an 8,000-mile road trip from Parma to Shanghai, points out that two
current types of self-driving cars will need less infrastructure, not
more.
"The Google cars are
based on very precise maps and they have sensing primarily based on a
LIDAR technology," he told Wired. "The cars that we tested on the route
from Parma to Shanghai had no maps, and had sensing primarily based on
cameras. In both cases, the cars have no help from the infrastructure."
When reached for comment,
a Google spokesman declined to make a statement on this story and
IEEE's predictions on autonomous cars.
But Broggi also
delineates between what he sees as different levels of self-driving
technology as the features mature, and adds that infrastructure in the
form of centralized communication once large numbers of autonomous cars
are on the road will be crucial -- and have the greatest impact. This
could lead to traffic lights, speed limits and even driver licensing
disappearing. "Autonomous cars alone will bring limited benefits," he
says. "They would be able to locate obstacles, avoid them and follow the
road. But efficient autonomous operations would also require that
vehicles coordinate with each other."
A nascent form of vehicle-to-vehicle communication (V2V) is currently being tested in a NHTSA field trial in Ann Arbor,
allowing cars to share situational data to avoid crashing into each
other. Meanwhile, Volvo is testing the concept of using "road trains" in
Europe to allow for more efficient driving. "A train of vehicles moving
very close to each other would reach a higher throughput -- the number
of cars per road unit -- and have lower fuel consumption due to
aerodynamic drift," says Broggi.
Vehicle-to-infrastructure
(V2I) communication would also allow vehicles to share their position,
destination and intended route with a central station, Broggi continues,
that could coordinate and dispatch information about traffic and route
vehicles accordingly. "Suppose all cars are connected and a central
station knows precisely their position and destination," Broggi says.
"The central station can send speed adjustment commands to the vehicles
that enter an intersection in such a way that they do not collide and
they occupy the intersection area one at a time, optimizing their
movements. In this case, traffic lights will not be required since
coordination is reached at a higher level." We're already seeing a basic
form of this in testing going on in Europe that combines V2V and V2I
communication, collectively known as V2X.
IEEE also foresees
autonomous vehicles accelerating car sharing and helping make it more
widespread, especially for people within a wider range of ages and
physical abilities. And driverless cars may even eliminate the need for
driver's licenses. "People do not need a license to sit on a train or a
bus," said Azim Eskandarian, director of the IEEE's Center for
Intelligent Systems Research, in a statement. "In a full-autonomy case
in which no driver intervention will be allowed, the car will be
operating. So there will not be any special requirements for drivers or
occupants to use the vehicle as a form of transportation."
IEEE also predicts that
the biggest barrier to pervasive adoption of driverless cars may have
nothing to do with technology, but will be general public acceptance.
While the average driver may grasp the basic benefits of autonomous cars
-- increased fuel efficiency and safety, along with a reduction in
traffic -- it may not be enough to get them to let go of the steering
wheel. Jeffrey Miller, IEEE member and associate professor of computer
systems engineering at the University of Alaska-Anchorage, believes that
baby steps in the form of driver assist systems may help. "As more
vehicular controls begin being automated, such as parallel parking and
automatic braking, people will become more accepting of autonomous
technologies," Miller told Wired. "So by 2040, driverless vehicles will
be widely accepted and possibly be the dominant vehicles on the road."
On the other side of this if I was under 80 years of age and competent to drive I would want to drive myself mostly and not have machines drive for me. I used to program computers and though they might be better at some things whenever it rained, snowed, or the vehicle was struck by lightning I would then want a real person to be driving at that point and not software and hardware by itself.
Humans will Always need people who build and design technology that can do this without automated robotics. We will also need people who always know how to drive vehicles who do so reguarly or at least in emergencies. Otherwise, when a big enough solar flare hits earth( and this is only a matter of time (1 to 300)years and everything that is magnetic memory (anything pretty much but CDs and DVD's at this point is wiped out on that side of the earth where it hits, we are going to need people who actually know how to do things and build things without robotics and computers or else we will have to return the the stone age (or close to it to survive).
Here is wikipedia's article of the 1859 Carrington event during which you could see outside from the northern lights everywhere on earth and even read a newspaper with that light at midnight. Also, fires jumped off telegraph stations and caught papers and burned telegraph operators and telegrams could be sent without any electricity connected to the lines here on earth.
end quote from:
You won't need a driver's license by 2040
Humans will Always need people who build and design technology that can do this without automated robotics. We will also need people who always know how to drive vehicles who do so reguarly or at least in emergencies. Otherwise, when a big enough solar flare hits earth( and this is only a matter of time (1 to 300)years and everything that is magnetic memory (anything pretty much but CDs and DVD's at this point is wiped out on that side of the earth where it hits, we are going to need people who actually know how to do things and build things without robotics and computers or else we will have to return the the stone age (or close to it to survive).
Here is wikipedia's article of the 1859 Carrington event during which you could see outside from the northern lights everywhere on earth and even read a newspaper with that light at midnight. Also, fires jumped off telegraph stations and caught papers and burned telegraph operators and telegrams could be sent without any electricity connected to the lines here on earth.
end quote from:
You won't need a driver's license by 2040
Solar storm of 1859 - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_storm_of_1859
The solar storm of 1859, also known as the Carrington Event, was a powerful geomagnetic solar storm in 1859 during solar cycle 10. A solar flare or coronal ...
Wikipedia
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