Waymo drives through Police Standoff.....

[Richard Cranium]

Reminds me of the movie, RoboCop.

More like Total Recall.

 

[QuickBpBp]

It would never work around my house.
You couldn't see the lines on the side of the road this morning (much less the road in places).
And I don't think GPS is accurate enough to keep the car on the road within the required distances.
(Perhaps I'm wrong there.)
We have dirt roads in places etc...

You have lines on your road?? At night in the rain here you just have to drive until the trees are scrapping the sides to know if you are going off the road!!!

 

[SlingLow]

If I see a driverless car at a stop light or sign, I'm going to be seriously tempted to push it through the intersection with my truck just to see what it does.

Will it go into reverse and push back? Doubt it. Will it try to outrun me? Maybe. Will it be entertaining? Absolutely!

 

[BSB67]

….It's weird to think about people not knowing what they don't know in that regard.

Every generation before us said the same thing about the next.

My parents, who lived through the Great Depression, stated many time how great-full they were that they didn’t have to live through what was in store for our generation. And now you’re saying it for the next generation.

 

[JackR]

Waymo’s can get on Phoenix freeways now. I have noticed that nearing the airport if I’m just to the right rear of the Waymo when the right blinker comes on……they won’t speed up or slow down and do miss the exit.

 

[Detective D]

Every generation before us said the same thing about the next.

My parents, who lived through the Great Depression, stated many time how great-full they were that they didn’t have to live through what was in store for our generation. And now you’re saying it for the next generation.

My Grandparents did too. They never said that once. they said the opposite, told my parents how lucky they were, and my parents told us the same thing. And they were right. My siblings and I were super lucky to be able to grow up on a family run small farm with a simple life of very hard work in a golden era of dairy farming. I got to watch that era shrivel up and vaporize never to be seen again. Multiple generations and 150 year old farms washed away in less than a decade to tech and "progress". The farm I grew up on was built pre-1885, before there was a map of the area and before the county it was in was actually a county. 1885 was when the house was built, but we knew the barn predated it by years and years based on the construction. The farm went to auction in the late 90's as my Dad tried to decide between putting up a manure pit, a new milk parlor and a free stall barn that covered 5 acres like the new neighbor did after consolidating three of the previous neighbors farms, or try to stick it out. He chose to let someone else use the land and try to preserve the homestead. But that neighbor folded too and now the entire homestead has been gone for about 9 years. The feilds are still worked by a mega farm 12 miles away, but the homestead is gone.
Now I am watching our beloved cars and trucks turn into rolling computers stuffed with AI that drive themselves and call the police and pull themselves over if you try to buck the carefully planned system. 90 years of automotive tech advancment and now the best they can come up with is to remove the driver from the equation! We have fallen so far from the 50's and 60's and car culture, from gearheads getting excited about the lotus 7 as a track car and muscle cars on the street and drag strip. now we have cars where you can sit in the back seat and look at your pocket screen, and they want to pass laws requiring this tech for everyone. For "safety".
I don't tell my kids they are in a sucky place, because they have to have some hope and live their life. But they are going to have to deal with a lot of BS. I watched things in my life be taken away that had existed since the industrial revolution, and some things from before that. but not nearly as long a list as my children are going to see. And it is not stuff their parents(me) used to do, it is me, their grandparents, their great grandparents, maybe their great great grandparents had and did that will be taken from their lives.

We are throwing away more good then we are bad with the endless push for "easy" and "safe". Bob Lutz laid out the plan about the "mandatory autonomous driving modules" 20 years ago already. We may be able to drive ourselves.... in some places. But we may soon find ourselves outlawed from driving on interstate roads and maybe even major state roads in the future. Bob said that was the plan years ago. He may be wrong, but he was pretty high up the chain and this stuff isn't thought up a year or two in advance and the self driving cars are being pushed out right now.

 

[OneWheelPeel]

There are two officers sitting at consoles in Star Trek "driving" the ship. They don't ask Alexa to take them to the neutral zone at warp 5. Turns out the most positive future tech sci fi show written has people driving the space ship.

"Easy" or worst of all "for safety" has brought innovation but cost us so much. It is all small things, but it adds up. Complex tech makes life complex. For all the "safety" stuff, life expectancy hasn't shot up like a rocket, it has moved maybe a year or two up in 30 years, and you have to include medical practice for a lot of that. All the fear of being "unsafe" and the restrictions put on us and stuff like this self driving car BS are not going to make us happy, not going to make us wealthier, and certainly not going to make us live longer. In fact, I suspect two out of three will actually decline from this technology for the average citizen.

Of course, you have to have lived through better times to realize there were better times. I suppose when I am gone some day, the kids of that era won;t know the difference. It's weird to think about people not knowing what they don't know in that regard.

Well if you fast forward to Star Trek TNG the ship is flown by AI wrapped in a friendly android. And yes in some episodes he was corrupted/controlled.

 

[Kern Dog]

If I see a driverless car at a stop light or sign, I'm going to be seriously tempted to push it through the intersection with my truck just to see what it does.

Will it go into reverse and push back? Doubt it. Will it try to outrun me? Maybe. Will it be entertaining? Absolutely!

That is some funny ****. My guess? It will lock up the brakes, skidding as you continue to push. NO critical thinking skills to look left and right for obstructions and proceeding forward despite the light being red.

Every generation before us said the same thing about the next.

My parents, who lived through the Great Depression, stated many time how great-full they were that they didn’t have to live through what was in store for our generation. And now you’re saying it for the next generation.

No offense man but one generation being pessimistic (when for many, it improved) does not devalue the argument that societies can get worse.
I'm the opposite of a doomsayer-pessimist but when I have thought of the concept of time travel, I've though that there is no way I'd want to go to the future. I see it as a bleak, totalitarian, dystopian mess.
Even today, look at what is better and what is worse.
Are there more or less divorces compared to 100 years ago?
Look at the rates of teen suicide, poverty, taxation, unwed births, crime, transgender nonsense and any of the other things that plague a society.

 

[GTXDAN]

They released Waymo in ATL this summer. There have been 4 instances of it driving around stopped school buses letting out kids already. One of the local tv stations did some investigating into this issue and found in Austin TX there have been 19 instances of a Waymo car driving around school buses. Waymo people have made software changes they say but it continues to happen. Local people are screaming to shut them down but no luck yet. It appears they can't distinguish an emergency vehicle/school bus that is stopped from a regular vehicle and just drive on by.
What will happen when it runs over a child, and who will be held responsible?
The laws here about passing a stopped school bus have been changed since a little girl was killed here in my county by a woman that passed a bus stopped. I think she is in jail for life now. It's a $1000 fine and 6 points on your license and if you're under 21 you just lost your license. Some buses with cameras can send you a ticket in the mail, and buses without cameras the driver can just tell the police your license number and boom you have a ticket.

 

[YY1]

In ST they DO say "computer...figure this out".

It's a classic "whatever computer" concept, used a LOT in fiction of any kind.

 

[BSB67]

one generation being pessimistic (when for many, it improved) does not devalue the argument that societies can get worse….
…..I've thought that there is no way I'd want to go to the future. I see it as a bleak, totalitarian, dystopian mess.

Of course, when viewed through your lens.

Even today, look at what is better and what is worse.
Are there more or less divorces compared to 100 years ago?

100 years ago it was illegal to get a divorce without extreme cause. Laws did not come into play until the 1970s that allowed choice for divorce.

Women could not get a bank account until the 1960s.

Divorce peaked in the 1980s and has steadily gone down since. The exception is for Boomers, today their divorce has tripled.

My parents knew of folks in abusive, cheating and terrible marriages that they simply could not get out of.

Look at the rates of teen suicide,

Suicide was at an all time low in 2000, but up considerably since, but not much above the average since WWll, and way lower than before WWll. Probably because of all of the f***ed up marriages before WWll that people could not get out of.

poverty,

Poverty reached an all time low of in 2019 since WWll. And has been steady in recent years.

taxation,

Taxation is complicated to get complete picture. Individual Federal Taxation has been all over the map in the past 100 years, sometimes above 50%.

Interesting that some want more government involvement in autonomous driving.

There are plenty of things today that are not the way I want them to be, but that’s just me. And, autonomous driving and EVs don’t make my top 100 list of concerns.