ARE SELF-DRIVING CARS A THREAT ??

In hindsight I should've been too because your follow-up response was even more useless than your first one.

 

I think the eventuality is that this also involves infrastructure which will prohibit the use of human operated vehicles in the name of "safety" and perceived convenience.
It also has to do with ownership of material goods and hard assets. GM and other large automakers are working towards leasing and licensing an individual to use their proprietary hardware/software platform ( the car).
And as car-free spaces are concerned, as far as I can see there isn't a means to move your possessions into a living space or take you away in an ambulance. Hope you like toting your couch a long distance to get it to your front door.
It also consolidates control of car manufacturing to a few automakers with the capital to make the leap, and would probably put all the mom and pop junkyards, performance shops, tuners, and aftermarket producers out of business entirely. People will lose jobs. Those jobs are not going to be replaced. Remember what they said about alternative energy jobs. Large portions of the country are still reeling from manufacturing job losses. The components to produce these "cars" are dependent on Rare Earth Elements and cheap labor.

I don't want to ride around in the same beige box as everyone else. Gearing everything towards perceived convenience and the lowest common denominator isn't what will drive human progress. Do you want to be a passenger, or a DRIVER?

Don't get me wrong, I love riding my bike and bar -hopping on public transportation; but like most folks in the US I commute and I love my Tacos. I'm not giving up driving the vehicles that I own and the infrastructure I've already paid for in tax dollars so someone else's kids can play in the roadway, or for someone who couldn't wake up 30 minutes earlier so they can shave their vag and primp their man-bun in their uberpod instead of taking responsibility for their actions and lack of time management skills.

 

We have all seen these movies before. It ends with machines and humans in an epic war. Didn't anybody watch the animatrix? Or terminator? The day my truck starts driving itself will be when the machines rise up or skynet takes over.

 

True as long as you have enough power to run the ignition and the bank of computers controlling it.

 

Spoiler alert:
Humans can survive without technology
Technology cannot survive without humans

 

But would you want to?

 

Me- of course. Most people would as we are all hardwired with a strong survival instinct- or we would not be here on the first place...

 

DARPA disagrees, as of 2005:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7a6GrKqOxeU

Slightly misleading statement. The traffic density of a flight path is nowhere near the traffic density of a road and the aircraft are spaced not by the autopilot but by the pilots through ATC. In an emergency the aircraft will avoid each other, but that's after giving the pilots a bunch of warnings to avoid the collision on their own. My understanding is that the automatic avoidance maneuvers are limited by the airframe and without much concern for the passengers. As for take off and landings, some aircraft and airports are already setup and do in fact land automatically in conditions that would normally be considered a no-go for a human pilot.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C84FEFjBj3o

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UV_vWtAJIow

I haven't seen any automatic take off for commercial aircraft, but I know that the US Navy F-18 is largely automatic for the catapult launch. The pilot actually has one hand on the throttle and the other hand on a grab handle. Once clear of the deck he grabs onto the stick:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K-bV4AQPVeU

As far as self driving cars being a threat? I think they definitely are coming. To what extent and how quickly will remain to be seen. I think that there's a large part of the populous that would benefit from it. It would free up lots of time for them to do all the crap that they do now while driving, but I'm not a strong believer that it should be integrated into urban traffic. It's going to be difficult to compensate for the unpredictability of other users of the road, not necessarily drivers, but pedestrians, animals, motorcyclists. Teslas already have established issues with lane shifts and obstacles on the edge of the road.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YIBTBxZ3NWw

Imagine if that had been a cyclist or pedestrian. Not going to get into a discussion of whether they should be on the road or not, as of now and for the immediate future they are allowed to be on the edge of many roads, so they need to be planned for. Yes, you could ban all those users from the roadway but I think it would make far more sense to allow the autonomous vehicles on freeways in designated lanes, kind of like a separate carpool lane. Let the autonomous cars do their thing at some ridiculous speed off to the side. People stuck in traffic will see the steady stream of cars and gradually more and more will move to autonomous cars. Eventually there will be a tipping point, but it will be a very gradual transition between autonomous and non-autonomous. Eventually the majority will be autonomous and you can begin integrating them into urban traffic. I do believe that systems for existing cars are not too far off that broadcast your vehicle's information (accelerating, braking, turning) to autonomous vehicles so that they can adjust accordingly.

As far as vulnerabilities in programming... Just imagine someone hacking your car and threatening to run you into a wall or off a bridge if you don't deposit X amount of bitcoins in the next five minutes. To be fair though, we're probably not too far away from that or something similar with regular cars nowdays. One day you'll climb into your Tacoma and Entune will boot up with a screen telling you where to send the money if you want the truck to start. Time to stock up on tinfoil.

 

http://fortune.com/2016/03/30/autonomous-fighter-jets-join-the-f-35/

But the spread of autonomous technologies and platforms across the battlefield is an inevitability, Work told the audience. “This is something that is inexorable,” he said. “It is going to happen.”

 

Thanks for putting this all together. It was really entertaining and informative. Those Air Force pilots have some big cahones!