47 Replies to “I, For One, Welcome Our New Self Driving Overlords”

  1. Everyone in new urban environments has to cut across the bike lanes like this in order to turn right. Of course the Tesla probably does not adequately shoulder/mirror check for bikes as I do. Or maybe it does.

    Anyway, I will never drive those idiotic overly expensive cars, just as I do not want to talk to AI chat bots.

  2. Hate to say it and people aren’t going to like it much but self driving is in its infancy stage, the bugs will be worked out soon enough.
    “You can’t stop what’s coming…it ain’t all waitin’ on you”

    1. Newsflash, the readers of this website are primarily motivated by a fear of change. It’s a lot easier to parse the comments here when you understand that they’re likely written by a 70 year old small town man terrified of technology and the many other new things they don’t understand.

      1. Actually, Andrew, my comment below is written by a 66 year old electronics engineer who has always been on the bleeding edge of technology (which is why I went broke a couple of times :-()

        1. Some day, I will have to write about my personal war on poverty and homelessness 🙂 The government taking half of everything I earned certainly did not help.

      2. I drove professionally for 40 years.. There are so many situations on a roadway that can’t be anticipated by a blind machine, I don’t think it will ever be safe.. But hey.. You go ahead..

        1. AHH, the only time a self driving anything will even be remotely safe is when they are on rails, you know, kind of like an old fashioned railroad.

      3. ANDREW,

        “a 70 year old small town man terrified of technology”, Wow Andrew, you nailed it!
        After I get done with whining to my peers on SDA, I go to my TV and turn on reruns of the young and restless, and the occasional Dr Pimple Popper as reality is depressing, and as I can’t comprehend all this new stuff, I just want to curl up into a ball and cry for my mommy. Jeez you’re a real pompous asshole eh! it’s nice to know what you think of us, but really? Why would you even bother to come on this website and read all our small minded musings, and then comment on them? Surely you must think you are wasting your so very precious highly intelligent time with such trivial people. I can’t speak for others on SDA, but I am just in awe of your awesome insight. Please visit often to allow us to gain much wisdom from your enlightenment! I could go on….but I need to stop for a quick weep.

      4. Andrew, your mother’s calling you to supper. Run along kid, the adults are talking.

      5. It’s not “fear of change”. No…not at all. It’s wisdom to see that “change” is not always good. It’s fear of stupidity. The arrogance of the ignorant is laughable.

      6. One of the biggest proponents of auto-driving cars in our office is an integration guru. He gets systems to talk to each other in ways that make sense to both systems. One day some new data came through from one of the source systems, and shut down communications for about 3 hours. I asked him what happened. “New data came in, it was close enough in format to be recognizable, but the string was too long and it shifted all later data by one table column (after it had been accepted to the system as valid). We had to back up to the restore point an hour before the bad data and reflow everything.”

        So when the system sees something that it’s not programmed what to do with it, it shuts down and needs human intervention to restart? “Yes.”
        So if your auto-drive car sees something it can’t explain, you’re OK with it shutting down steering, braking, and airbag controls while you’re driving 120 km/hr on Hwy 2? “Uh. No.”
        Have you ever been able to design a system that has never experienced a hard crash? “Uh. No.”
        Do you still want to be an early adopter of an auto-driving car? “Maybe not, I hadn’t looked at it that way.”

        In perfect surroundings it could be very effective. Unfortunately, most of us live in the real world, and there are so many ways that machines and equipment can kill the unwary that we conservatives don’t want to adopt that which is unproven until we’ve seen it in successful use in controlled circumstances first. You go ahead and bet your kid’s lives on it, leave mine alone. That includes during busing and on their walks to school along semi-major roads.

        1. Give it ten years. The Wright brothers first flight was in 1903. First jet airliner was less than 50 years later. The transistor was starting to be used commercially in the early 1950, now there are millions of them on a single chip.

          1. Yup. And some ideas, like curing the common cold or cancer, fusion reactors, and (widely used) flying cars are always 10 to 25 years in the future. This technology has potential, but needs to prove it can make the leap to the real world.

      7. You’re not wrong. I’ve largely given up pointing out that AI, the Internet, social media sites, technology law, and machine learning Do Not Work That Way.

        There used to be a number of commenters here who were legitimate experts in their fields – I miss Loki – but with the Wuhan Coronavirus freakout this site passed the Little Green Footballs event horizon.

      8. Newsflash, we don’t take advice from millenials who think they know everything and are self-described experts at everything, but don’t know how to change a tire or change the oil.

      9. We’ve had autopilot vehicles for more than 100 years … they’re called busses. Why else would one want to get in a vehicle and NOT drive?

        So … the same people who insist we all wear masks for other people’s safety, glibly tell us to take our hands off the wheel, and our eyes off the road … because electronic sensors and computers are safer than us? More I’ll-logic from so-called “Progressives”

        And who are these people actually ASKING for a car they can personally own … yet never personally drive? Take a bus. It’s safer.

      10. Andrew….This very old fart has been driving to Florida for decades and has driven over 8 million miles and haven’t bounced off a tesla or any other experimental piece of crap. Tech is only as good as those creating it and because man is creating it it will always have bugs. Just how many times is your computer, “updated” every year? One thing todays “youngsters” have not been taught is that not everything works as they think it should. When there are too many variables to account for the variables have to be reduced with things like magnetic strips, rails, etc, in other words more controls and less freedom. As Kenji said, take a bus.

    2. “… self driving is in its infancy stage …”

      I’ve been self driving for several decades. What they are trying to introduce is someone else driving, always, and that someone won’t be driving in real time, they’ll have done all the driving beforehand, in their imagination, and passed on their decisions and instructions about the drive – which will normally be in places they themselves have never seen, very often never heard of – to a machine.

      There’s something about all this that reminds me of a line in a movie, set in Soviet Russia, when a police investigator driving his official car with a passenger who comments that the KGB has better cars and he points out that KGB cars don’t always take you where you want to go. I know where I want to go and how to get there, I still haven’t heard anything from any advocate of so-called “self-driving” cars that makes me want to pay them instead of paying for a human to drive a taxi or a bus when I don’t want to do the work myself.

      1. Nicely put, Tooner. I have a rear-view video on my dash for backing up. I am used to checking left, right and behind. The tech has not solved a problem for me or made me safer.

        Which brings me to school area traffic speed cams. They have been introduced in this city to enforce 40km/hr speed limits in “school zones” for “safety” purposes. Now, how many school children been run down outside school before these devices were introduced and how many now? This is a solution looking for a problem as I don’t remember hearing of any school children being run down in the school zones in Ottawa (except by school busses, of course).

        So, why do it? Well, taxes. You can get a speed ticket at 45km/hr during school hours, even if the school is not in attendence. And, outside of school hours, such as at 7 AM when it is not open, you get a ticket for being over 50km/hr.

        In other words, they keep working at collecting taxes 24/7, even though their justification is school children safety. Of course, the city is using this as a Trojan Horse. Once the population has become inured to these robo-traffic cops, their deployment will be expanded. And, of course, the police will be logging all license plates as they pass each camera, speeding or not, to track averyone. This is not paranoia on my part, see the story below.

        1. well here is vision zero toronto, they have already started by reducing traffic to 30kph in some school zones, followed by installing speed humps, and the aforementioned robocameras. The bike council is continuing to push for 30kph on all streets, while reducing 4 lane roads to 2 lane roads plus bike lanes, and will probably push for 20kph in school zones.

          1. We can fix these virtue posturing bicyclists by simply enforcing traffic by-laws that have been in existence for over 60 years in most municipalities. Make them purchase an annual licence for their bikes and be required to pass a written drivers test, rules of the road and all that, just as for automobile drivers. The fines will drive a revenue stream that could be quite significant.

          2. “Make them purchase an annual licence …”

            Good idea but I don’t like half measures. just remove prostate masseurs from the roads. Period. End of story. This isn’t fucking China.

          3. colon, china is a very advanced country, I had the opportunity to talk to a very well to do friend this weekend, who travel;s to China on a regular basis, and he said, and I agree, that Bejing and Shanghai (18 million and 21 million pop) are far beyond NA capabilities to function as well as they do. You are one of those who has some very strong opinions, driven completely by a complete lack of knowledge. Have you ever been outside of Canada, and Pearson doesn’t count?

          4. Oh so now you have a friend? When did that happen? Are you sure he is your friend? Maybe he is just being nice to you because he does not know you well enough?

            Never mind, good that you have changed your tune and you no longer bullshit about visiting Chicomland shopping for your bride who never came (yes yes Wuhan flu she got detained, nothing to do with you blah blah blah). It is a friend now. Ok then.

            You sound like western useful idiots who visited East Germany during Cold War. Look up Potemkin Villages imbecile.

            Oh and I have traveled through a lot of countries, willing to bet that I got more stamps in m passports than you. Mine is bigger yours, again.

          5. JD, we will soon be travelling at the speed of the horse and buggy. Won’t that be great.

      2. Nicely put, Tooner. I have a rear-view video on my dash for backing up. I am used to checking left, right and behind. The tech has not solved a problem for me or made me safer.

        Which brings me to school area traffic speed cams. They have been introduced in this city to enforce 40km/hr speed limits in “school zones” for “safety” purposes. Now, how many school children been run down outside school before these devices were introduced and how many now? This is a solution looking for a problem as I don’t remember hearing of any schoold children being run down in the school zones in Ottawa (except by school busses, of course).

        So, why do it? Well, taxes. You can get a speed ticket at 45km/hr during school hours, even if the school is not in attendence. And, outside of school hours, such as at 7 AM when it is not open, you get a ticket for being over 50km/hr.

        In other words, they keep working at collecting taxes 24/7, even though their justification is school children safety. Of course, the city is using this as a Trojan Horse. Once the population has become inured to these robo-traffic cops, their deployment will be expanded. And, of course, the police will be logging all license plates as they pass each camera, speeding or not, to track averyone. This is not paranoia on my part, see the story above.

    3. The bugs will be in place for a VERY, VERY long time. That is, if they are ever ironed out. The stuff they are doing now isn’t even in the infancy stage. When the time comes to introduce risk based logic, the whole thing will fall apart.

    4. Teach it to drive a large vehicle through protests and blockades.
      Ah Shit!!!
      Don’t give the Gropen-Furher any ideas

  3. I worked on a V2X project, that’s where cars communicate with cars and road signs, traffic lights, busses, etc.). It’s a big happening thing and cities, particularly, are supporting it, making rush-hours easier to organize (and, perhaps, collect more taxes?).

    The unit had all the doo-dads, including GPS. This was precise enough to determine which side of the road the vehicle was (i.e. +/- 5 feet, actually about 10cm with maximum number of satellites in view).

    Until, however, the firmware in the GPS device was up-revved. It took a couple of weeks to convince the client it wasn’t our unit causing the problem, but the change in the GPS device’s firmware.

    So, I expect Teslas to do this sort of thing occassionally.

  4. I’m all for self driving cars. To put all those idiots out there who can’t drive in them. They will then be identified, and when I see a testicle car, I can be cautious.

  5. From the beginning it has been clear,those seeking to IMPOSE the self driving car,have next to zero driving experience.
    They seek to remove the “unreliable” human component while appearing oblivious to the non standard nature of their subject.
    Same type of persons who extrapolate Linear doom from nonlinear data.
    I fully support the concept of a self driving car.
    Just not for me and not on roads shared with human drivers,wildlife and weather.
    And I will be most interested in purchasing the “after market” override software for emergency use.
    Command ;All make righthand turn.
    Emergency override for when I am late for coffee.

    The automobile allowed freedom of a form the Power Mad just cannot tolerate .

    1. There are driver-free haul trucks at a number of mining operations around the world. If a company wants to use them, they are in a segregated portion of the mine where no one can enter the system while the self-driving trucks are in motion. There are too many ways to kill someone at an industrial site, and we don’t trust the self-driving system enough around our workers yet.

      1. I would guess that you wouldn’t have to program people/animal avoidance making it simpler and more reliable.

        1. They’re still programmed in, the current use is largely a test bed. Safety is a major part of the business in the western world, but we need to be able to keep up to our competitors. We want to be ready to rely on the technology when we’re sure it’s ready.

          We know that there’s huge gains to be made by using AI operators that don’t need lunch breaks or to go to the washroom (So gain about 3 working hours a day over manned equipment) but we’re still determining whether the machines can do everything else as well as a trained human.

  6. Where I live they have had self driving cars for decades …. they’re called buses and they are what all the techno wienies like Andrew should be riding! Leave the driving to the real women and men of Canada.
    Further more my Acura RLX Sport Hybrid has self driving if u keep ur hands on the steering wheel and it sucks donkey dick.
    It hates faded lines, any little bit of snow or slush on the road even wet dry contrast can upset it. Enron Musk can stick his Testicle e car where the sun don’t shine.

  7. Technology really is making us all dumber. A pretend online friend (we really don’t know these people after all, can’t really call them friends) who lives in Spain, didn’t even realize they’d done their time change. His computer, phone, even his stupid “smart” watch, it had all done it for him. We all prattle on about how great this is, and how smart we all are, most people now could not drive without the multitude of safety systems in our car. If the power went out today the fortunate ones would freeze to death before dying of thirst or starvation.

  8. Wait, if it cuts across the bike lane it can actually be not completely useless after all…

      1. I think it was Larry Niven that had a short story where a senior cybernetics detective was recounting a years old missing persons case. The last time the highly aggressive and abusive man was seen before his disappearance was in an automated restaurant. It was theorized that he stormed into the kitchen to complain to the management. He bypassed the “no humans beyond this point” sign, and probably was mistaken for a meat delivery by the auto-butcher.

        Many of the masters of Sci Fi liked the idea of stupidity becoming terminal again.

    1. I bet your ass is six axe handles wide. That’s why you hate bikes so much, either that or your dad never taught you to ride one.

      1. So you lost a bet. Hope you can cope.

        I hate cyclists not bikes. And that is because they’re sanctimonious, holier than thou, progressive roadblocks who routinely get in the way of drivers. Also, they routinely ignore the rules of the road. Also, I hate men wearing spandex.

  9. Simple solution. Give traffic tickets to the car, since it is driving itself. And if the car accumulates too many tickets in a given time, suspend its license, like you do to a real person. That means that car won’t be able to drive itself. If it did, you can’t put it in jail, but you can give the owner a hefty fine for driving without a license, say four or five figures.

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