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Comments about "Robot car to tackle city streets"
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10 Comments on this article:
"With 43,000 deaths on the road every year, countless lives could be saved "
Ummm. You just counted them :-P
awwww, that's funny (above). i'd probably write something similar.
The social implications of an invention like this are enormous. Certainly, it would create a new industry assembling the modular autonomous vehicles, but hundreds of thousands, if not millions of low skilled delivery and bus driver jobs would be lost in the US alone.
And those fields are heavily unionized so these are often fairly well paying blue collar jobs.
This field is just one of many effected by the increasing feasability of autonomous components.
Ultimately, I'd say within 30 years or less, the world may have very few low skilled jobs left. You heard me right. Billions will be unemployed, forever. Any job which is scriptable will be automated.
They won't be job creation enough to employ them ever again.
Lets hope that the global governmental reaction to these irreversible and far reaching sea changes, which will occur fairly quickly, won't be war.
The argument that technology/computers/robots will replace people has been around a long time. 30 years ago the argument against computers was that they would put people out of a job. Sometimes they did, but people adapt. 15 years ago it was prophesied that with new object oriented coding practices computer programmers would be out of a job. I haven't seen that yet. Sometimes people are cheaper than technology (millions of illegal immigrants can testify to that). Times change, people adapt. The human potential is still largely untapped.
If someone successfully create a human level artificial intelligent car then it will replace all the jobs by bus,trucks,cars, even motorcycles. But it will also save lives by having a more superior driver.
Won't people prefer 43,000 deaths caused by other humans to even one death caused by a runaway robot car <gasp!>.
Automation sometimes replaces skilled jobs too. Look at craftsmen who have been relaced by machines. Sometime automation de-skills jobs so that someone only needs to press a few keys etc. But it sometime creates more skilled jobs if wealth is created. I wish a computer could do my job then I could do something more interesting.
Okay, not to rain on the parade, for I find this topic very interesting and very cool. But with my father being a mechanic, and me taking a lot of time in the shop to work on my own racecar, I can definitely see the downside of an autonomous car such as this.
What would happen if the sensors that were supposed to detect braking and accelerating broke? Cars wouldnt' be able to communicate with each other, and that could lead to just as many accidents as there are now. Not to mention how much it would cost to replace sensors, and how much time it will take for mechanics to learn all the new things about installing them. That's probably close to millions in labor and repairs just in America.
I think that the autonomous car is an excellent idea, but everything has it's drawbacks. And until this whole thing is mastered, I'll stick with my own method; hands on the wheel.
All I can say if these guys made a car to go by itself to a specific spot in the desert after driving through obstacles for 132 miles they will surely make one reliable enough to run in a city. Impressive.