As cool as it is, you absolutely cannot substitute a pair of human eyes and hands when behind the wheel of a car. You just can't. There is no replacement.
You're absolutely right. A computer and some cameras won't take their eyes off the road to ogle a pretty girl in a dress in the summer months. They won't have the imprecise inputs to the wheel that the average driver has. It certainly won't need to answer this phone call "really quickly, I've done this a bunch of times before".
A lot of people simply love to drive.
A minority of drivers do.
Taking that away from the human race over the next however many years and totally phasing out manual real human driving before younger kids can get to experience driving is a mistake in my eyes.
Who said anything about removing it permanently?
Read the book called The Giver if you want an idea where the world is going. The human factor in anything is slowly diminishing in many ways and will eventually be gone, and while I might not be around to see it, the world is seriously in trouble and is doomed to fail. If you can't see it, then you need your eyes checked.
So, a fictional book made for middle schoolers? The dystopic genre makes for great cautionary reading, but let's be real here.
Yep. We're sacrificing so much just to dive into a new age of ultra-laziness, as I'd like to call it. I fear that these are the small signs of the human race declining into a lazy, dull and unintelligent civilization in which all manual labor, easy or hard has become nothing but a simple automated process.
If I have hours upon hours of dull highway driving in front of me, getting to sleep on the way there so that I'm well rested instead of cutting into my time at the destination seems like a plus, not a minus, to me. And that doesn't even touch on the concept of cars communicating amongst themselves to aid traffic flow. Lazy/poor drivers are the reason we have such lousy traffic jams in major cities; the amount of time that could be saved with automated systems would be huge.
There's times when driving a car is great fun, and times when it's just a chore that needs to be done to get from A to B. I see nothing wrong with eliminating the chore part, because there's nothing that says it has to get rid of the fun part too.
Enthusiast cars will always exist, just like there's still enthusiast hikers, horse riders, sailors, and every other sort of transportation that is no longer strictly the most efficient but is still kind of fun.
A thousand times this. Automated cars could satisfy a number of current demands for the automobile, and leave the enthusiast market to continue to serve those who crave it. Just like the examples Imari mentioned.
There is still too much flaw for them to be effective, period. You still need to be alert and paying attention, no matter how long the trip. Making an automated car where you still have control over speed would be pointless because you really aren't gaining anything over a normal car, except for the fact it can steer itself, which, IDK about, but parts wear out and I for one am not willing to get into a car and have no control where at this rate won't even have a steering wheel in the next couple decades. Just no. I for one, and I'm sure others agree, do not want to live in a world where a car is a couple of seats and a bunch of buttons.
There's too many flaws in human drivers, but we allow them on the road. What are you getting at with parts wearing out, too? Because I'm willing to bet the majority of drivers are worse on their cars in a wear-and-tear sense than an optimized automated car would be. I don't think you have anything to worry about with the wheel disappearing either; it still makes the most sense as an input device, so long as cars will still be on the road and not flying. Sure, some folks at Mercedes have played with a joystick, and there was the drive-by-wire rage in concepts a decade ago that meant you could move the wheel from one passenger to the other, but nothing more has come of those.
What is fun about them when they go a set speed and that speed only and you have absolutely no control over it all? All you do is punch in a GPS where you want to go and it takes you there. Sooner or later road speed limits are going to be programed into GPS units so the car knows what speed to travel. You get back to me when riding a train 35 mph is more fun than racing a couple of cars around a track.
You get back to me when riding an escalator down at the mall is more fun than skydiving. What, did someone say that's a ridiculous comparison? Automation has nothing to do with racing; it has to do with how cars the world over are utilized the majority of the time; as a form of transportation. Your commute shouldn't be as fun as racing a bunch of cars around a track; if you're racing other cars heading to work, you're a danger to yourself and others on the road. And personally, I'd rather skip the boring drudgery of the point-A-to-point-B driving so that I
can focus on the fun parts of cars more, in controlled environments where, by dint of automation weeding out the commuters, I'd be surrounded by those like-minded individuals who get it too.
While it may not come to this any time soon, there is no doubt in my mind that it will come to that eventually someday. It absolutely increases the laziness of society. Once they start giving us fully automated cars, what will be next? You going to come up with some sort of device that feeds me too because you don't want me to lift my arm to put food in my mouth? I mean come on dude. You may as well make everything automated and put people out of jobs even more than they've already done with robots and computers in the last 25 years. The average lifespan will begin shorten rapidly the more they come up with because we can't be bothered to be self sufficient.
...which is why the average lifespan has shot up drastically in the past 100 years, only recently hitting a plateau precisely because we're already shoveling too much food into our mouths.
Also, isn't this topic about automated cars, not some tinfoil-hat idea about what
might happen in other aspects of life?
I actually think he has a fair point there. I mean think about it. Fun to drive would be extinct if the car is controlling itself. If there is no human interaction then what fun is driving?
This isn't a chose one or the other scenario; there's no reason to think both could exist.
