old_windbag wrote:I wasn't being serious about the type of intelligence being reflected in the car, rather being light hearted about how intelligence does not always reflect itself as we would wish it too. But where vehicles are concerned it will be an interesting learning curve, literally. I do think there are many other avenues where autonomous control can be applied to our benefit and in a more controlled area( trains being one, trams another ). The data gained from such in terms of feedbacks such as machine vision etc can then feed into cars/lorries at a more refined level perhaps than at present. There seems to be a sudden rush to get on this autonomous vehicle boat and in many respects it may not be necessary at all. I do think taking drivers out of the equation can be beneficial but not quite sure if the final goal is what the public will buy into.
I've mentioned above (and in other threads) that I think there's too much of a rush to get it to market.
Whilst it's difficult to predict what consumers will buy I'm pretty confident that there'll be a market for self driving vehicles. Given the option of getting 40 winks or Facebooking whilst going to work few will be able to resist the appeal (and that's before you include the cachet of owning a self driving vehicle).
The natural progression is anti collision, through AI supervision to self driving.
Anti collision is already happening. AI supervision is possible on some top end cars but is really work in progress. Once you have the supervision sorted then the self driving is merely icing on the cake. My timeline would put mass produced supervision at around 5 to 10 years and self driving a couple of years after that.
Once self driving cars exist then it's much more difficult to get a handle on where we're likely to end up.
Will folk, particularly youngsters forgo licenses if they no longer need them? (Legislation should in theory allow driverless cars to consider all its occupants as passengers).
Will insurers be keen to allow folk manual control? (I suspect if manual control is supervised then to a large degree this is moot since they shouldn't be any more dangerous).
Will folk even want a car parked on their drive anymore? (If cars can drive themselves to outside of your house from 'pools' would most folk want to own one?)
Overall I think the short term is fairly well mapped out. Longer term I've no idea although I know what I'd like to see.