Quote:
Originally Posted by Phanuthier
Well regardless of your social inequality concerns.... lots of companies are doing massive hiring and have large teams (in industry, not academia) to do this and launch it before 2020. The technology has been known for decades, but advancement takes some time. Maybe the first vehicles won't be fully autonomous (society sometimes wonders why science doesn't take a quantum leap forward, but realistically they take small steps in between big steps forward) but the eventual goal will be to automate the process as much as possible. The first 90% is the easiest, each 1% thereafter gets harder and harder.
|
Technologically, yes. But the greatest hurdle for something like this will by far be how it's accepted and implemented into the general population. As mentioned, the tech has existed for a while, it's about how do we integrate it to the point that the average person is able to use it and comfortable with it. And how does the infrastructures of our cities and roads need to change in order to accommodate it.
When science DOES leap forward, society generally holds it back with figuring out what to do with it. The internet is the most revolutionary thing that we ever created and that went live in the 80's for the first time. We are still not even close to adapting to it the way we can and should be. Alternative energy tech exists now, but society holds it back by assigning prohibitive "costs" to the things needed to make it viable. It won't be any different with autonomous cars. As seen in the other thread, people can't even adapt to something as simple as bike lanes, now we have self-driving cars? Will they share the road with non-self driving cars? Or will anyone on the road HAVE to use them? Will there be zones (major traffic arteries) where human-controlled cars are not allowed? Those things will take decades for people to decide on at least.