Maybe it can drive around some of the roads in the US after it has been fed with detailed 3D maps of the whole area along with road signs. But how about in other places ? Could it ever drive in a place like India ? I don't think so.

Autonomous vehicles could completely take over in closed areas like Open cast mines , vast factories and on farms where companies could profit by cutting the driver out of the loop. From there we would see the technology slowly improve to start getting traction in the real world. Even then the vehicle wouldn't be fully automated , it would be a more advanced form of the cruise control we have today with it falling back to the manual driver especially in crazy places like India.

Also we'd need laws forbidding people from jumping in front of self driving cars etc just to f@#$ with them.

This is also a trend with automation stories in general , with several publications already predicting doom and gloom and claiming that most people would end up unemployed because of automation of their jobs. The fact is we don't even have an AI good enough to impersonate a tele marketer yet and it's decades away at best.

I'm not denying that thesis in the extremely long term but AI and machine learning are in a very primitive state for any of this to materialize any time in the next two or three decades.

I think we see driver assist AI become standard on cars for about a decade before full autonomous cars become a thing. Keep in mind right now most cars have a button that effectively lets you set a speed and the car will then hurtle forward in a straight line, blissfully revving the engine to keep you at 75 mph without being aware of anything around you. It would be nice if cruise control could follow a lane and press the brake if there was traffic. That alone would save many lives a year, and would be a feature I would use. Sure I would still drive in cities and when its raining, but next time I'm on an open road, I'd be happy to let the computer take over.

edit: Also, the latest model S update does what you describe, it has lane change assist and follow during cruise control, maintaining a certain distance from the car in front of you.

I nerds who live in a city and don't really use cars other than to move them and a little shopping around forget about farmers, post men, telecom engineers, water engineers... if I get to a job and need some tools I can get them delivered from the depot while I work on something else! If I need a mini-digger I can order it and get it. Or if I need to take a fallen tree to the dump - easy. All these things I do in my little car at the moment, I have to compromise.

Right now I have _three_ cars -- one I use for commuting, one my wife uses all day. and one (an old van) that I use for all my dirty projects. I would love to replace my commuter and project van with _more affordable_ versions of the same that also have the same flexibility. The last part is the limiting factor now -- but won't be for long (and I'm not even talking autonomous cars yet :) )

To take this to an extreme, humans driving cars manually might just become a sport.

Now the only thing I really want is being able to follow a lane and take over steering and simple line changing. Then I can sit in my car at night, take a nap and end up in san fran from seattle.

Highway driving can be severely automated since its long and tedious with a simple task of going on a straight road for ages.

Granted I don't think it would work as well in driving conditions like those found in other parts of the world, but I still think they're rather advanced in their abilities. I was impressed at least.

Much more fun would be jumping in front of the beer truck while your buddies empty the thing out the back. I would imagine crime would be a huge issue with these things. On a par with the ratio of car burglary smash and grab vs carjacking crime rates.

I would imagine those things would have elaborate and easy to use nationwide systems to shut down in case of an accident or runaway vehicle, such that no matter what antennas were knocked off or radios burned out a fireman anywhere in the nation could just pull a lever... once the criminals learn, it'll be open season. Water softener salt delivery truck is probably safe, but the beer truck is in serious danger...

Replacing licensed drivers with rentacops wouldn't necessarily save all that much money as rentacops aren't that much cheaper than drivers, and if the rentacop is sitting there doing nothing while the truck drives, some beancounter is going to demand they work, perhaps by driving the truck...

Something that's interesting to think about is people who've never worked retail have some peculiar ideas. I worked retail as a student and got to know some delivery guys and they spent surprisingly little time driving. They'd go from the warehouse to the store to gas station to bar to restaurant wheeling around kegs and 6packs, stocking store shelves by hand, and selling to the businessmen. Data entry filling out little forms and receipts for each custom delivery, etc. Stopping them from driving would have about as much effect on their employment as the deployment of hand trucks to wheel around beer. It would make the job a little easier, but not much.

Of course you could outsource the labor to the recipients, but then you go from 10 trucks and 10 drivers delivering to 100 sites, to 0 drivers and 100 reception clerks at each site to do the manual labor... Given two competitors the guy with the drivers will provide a better cheaper service than the high tech competitor, so ...

It seems to me that that the first, lonely, autonomous cars will/do have a harder time technologically than subsequent versions because they'll have to comprehend/compute more by themselves.

Once 1000s of cars are on the road all communicating with one another ..and pedestrian mobile devices, signs, nearby buildings etc things could get easier. An economy of scale that is a result of ubiquitous mobile devices and sensors.

Snowy roads are actually much better in many ways for cars (theoretically) than humans, because cars have much shorter reaction time. As for obscured road signs, if self-driving cars become the norm, road signs will likely disappear, because (A) they will use wireless communication to transmit information to cars, rather than visual scanning, and (B) a lot of information contained on road signs would simply be irrelevant or redundant for self-driving cars.

Remember that modern cars are already very autonomous, even though they "feel" manual. Recently, I drove a car[0] that will actually automatically steer the car back into a lane if it senses that the driver is veering on the highway (ie, if he/she falls asleep or is drunk).

We don't think of this as "self-driving" because the improvements are incremental and the driver is still present and feels like he/she is in control, but drivers have been slowly giving up control over cars for several decades now. Self-driving cars are actually much less of a leap from the status quo than people realize; it's simply[1] the final step in a long series of incremental automation of automobiles[2].

[0] Subaru, I believe.

[1] Not that it isn't still an impressive feat, of course.

[2] Let's not forget the prefix or etymology of the world automobile - it's not accidental!

My current car has a lot of automation, and all of that automation falls apart in the winter. The automatic windshield wipers don't know how to handle snow or freezing rain, the automatic brights try to go bright when it's snowing heavily, I would never dare try to use the automatic cruise control on anything but bone-dry roads... even the rear-view camera doesn't work without frequent cleaning due to the aerodynamics of the tail of the car coating it with sand and snow in almost any conditions.

The only two automated parts which work as intended during the winter are the anti-lock brakes and automatic four wheel drive.

This is what control systems get very good at and apparently the traction control firmware in many cars that controls anti-lock brakes can include code that detects incorrect steering in icy scenarios and compensate for it. (sorry no reference - I heard this on NPR a while back)

I'm in India, and there are so many times an hour that driving here makes me wonder what autonomous cars is all about.

For example, that guy driving on a two wheeler on the wrong side of the road, with 4 kids somehow balanced on the rear seat? How will an autonomous car parse that, or how would it parse a road where someone decides to take an illegal U-turn just because they can?

Even today, I saw something that surprised me, despite having see just about everything. A bus playing chicken with another bus, so that it could overtake from the wrong side and barrel through an intersection. While I fully understand, that a car will be able to respond through a shared data base of reactions, its still a situation which requires far more of a car than what is being promised right now.

I think the promise of a fully automated city transportation grid is actually what is being discussed. When all traffic obeys the same rules, the cost for automation and the expected degrees of freedom get drastically simplified.

"that guy driving on a two wheeler on the wrong side of the road, with 4 kids somehow balanced on the rear seat" ... what's to parse? A moving object, try to avoid. Stop to avoid danger.

In montreal, trains user rubber wheels. It totally makes sense to have auto-bus lanes and auto-highway lanes where every car on the lane has to be in automatic advanced cruise control mode.

The only problem is a legal one - it's inevitable that at some point a driverless car will hit someone. Even if the total number of pedestrian collisions drops dramatically (which I'm sure it would) the questions of responsibility and culpability become a problem.

So, I really don't think it's as much of a problem as you think it is.

And the vehicle manufacture would only be considered "at fault" if the vehicle fails safety regulations.

The only time the consumer (driver) would be at fault is if they tampered with the vehicle, or entered it knowing it was damaged.

Thats how insurance works in the state that I live in.

One minor problem is I'm not sure exactly what the average driver experience age is, but I know new teen drivers are incredibly expensive to insure and after 10-20 years of primary driver experience cars start getting pretty cheap to insure (until your kids are teens, of course).

Changing a cars primary driver without informing the insurance company will get you cancelled. I can't basically gift my old car to my teen cousin while paying "safe old man rates". They'd be more than happy to insure my old car, at "crazy teen boy rates". So I suspect a software upgrade of the driving system would require insurance company contact.

Observationally, today's github release will be insured at a small integer multiple of "crazy teen boy" insurance rates.

This develops into other problem areas. At some crossover point its going to be cheaper to hire a human driver... My gut level engineering guess is it'll never be cheaper to run an autonomous car on shared roads than to run an autonomous train on dedicated (elevated?) rails, so throwing capital at the problem is a losing strategy, you'd come out way ahead financially building elevated monorails or just going with modern intermodal trains.

> ...

> I can't basically gift my old car to my teen cousin while paying "safe old man rates"

I don't think you understood what I meant by "insuring the vehicle, not the person". If cars are autonomous, then the car owner ("driver") becomes completely irrelevant to the insurance price calculation. There is now no such thing as "crazy teen boy" prices.

So in other words, to contradict your final paragraph, at NO POINT will it be cheaper to insure a human driver. And given how empty roads will become once cars are autonomous, it seems crazy to build a whole new transportation infrastructure.

Stage 1. Limited self-parking cars. These will only be self-driving in large parking lots that have been designated as allowing self-parking. These parking lots will be at shopping malls, stadiums, concert halls, large grocery stores, home improvement stores, and the like.

When shopping at a place with a designated self-parking lot, you manually drive to the front of the store, get out, and your car drives to a parking spot at the far end of the lot (leaving the spots closer to the door for people who do not have self-parking cars). When you are done shopping, you summon your car via your smartphone, and it comes pick you up.

With a little planning, such as a little separation between where people enter/exit their self-driving cars and where manually parking people will walk, it should be possible to arrange it so that people who are skittish about self-driving cars don't come to close to them.

Stage 2. Limited street access for self-parking cars. Some parking lots and garages in cities will be designated as allowing self-parking, and some street routes leading to those lots will be designated as allowing self-driving cars to travel between designated points and the parking lots.

Essentially these designated spots will be like bus stops, except for self-driving cars. You manually drive to one, get out, and your car self-drives to a nearby parking lot. When you want your car, you go to one of these designated spots and summon it.

The participating lots, the drop-off/pickup spots, and the routes between the former and the latter would be chosen to keep the self-driving confined to a few well labeled streets, so that people who do not yet trust self-driving cars can be extra alert on those streets or avoid them.

Also there would be freeway access for self-driving cars during stage 2.

Stage 3. Expansion of stage 2. Designated routes expand, and when there are enough of them we flip to allowing all routes except designated forbidden routes. Drop-off/pickup can happen anywhere near a designated route (and later, anywhere that doesn't require using a prohibited route). Parking flips from only allowed at designated lots to allowed anywhere except designated forbidden lots.

The focus in stage 1 and stage 2 is use in limited areas at low speed, while the public gets accustomed to the presence of self-driving cars. The reason for the emphasis on parking is that for most suburban or city driving (outside of rush hour commuting) the driving to your destination is usually not overly annoying. It's dealing with parking, or carrying your purchases a long distance to your car, that is the most annoying part.

In stage 3, the network of available routes has expanded enough to span from your home to your destination, so you can let the car self-drive the whole trip.

It is for those of us who don't rely on the service industry for a living. 10 million jobs lost.

A self driving car is an amazing feat of Human engineering. What would be an even more amazing feat would be what to do with humans thrown under the bus of progress. Capitalism is great for anyone with enough mental agility to stay in the technology power curve, but it's really terrible for everyone else who simply want to live their lives, raise their family and be happy.

What are we going to do with all those humans displace by automation?

This, combined with proper economic policies like a basic income, I feel could allow those who lose their jobs due to rapid technological change to develop new, employable skills.

But you're right, if everything else stayed the same and just something like autocars happened, there'd be riots.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technological_unemployment

What are we going to do with all those humans displace by automation?

If one innovation was to disrupt a segment of the service industry which affects 10 million jobs - those affected have every opportunity available to create new innovations of their own, or pivot their careers to a more prosperous area of the economy - of which there would be many, in a true free-market capitalist economy.

Yes, in aggregate, over long timespans (read: multiple generations), people will figure out other things to do. But as we've seen from the automation of manufacturing jobs in the US, a huge number of people haven't retrained, nor have magical jobs "we couldn't even imagine" erupted en masse to absorb a chronically un- or under-employed work force.

I submit that the oversimplified notion that people who lose their jobs to technology will be fine and find something else to do is mainly a device to make people like us feel better - it isn't a notion that actually helps the displaced.

My personal long-term view (beyond just automated cars) is that we will automate away millions of jobs - but that's fantastic as it probably doesn't make sense for everyone to work anyway, a basic income guarantee can allow people to live lives with much more time for leisure, creativity and enjoyment.

Yes, and we've never suitably addressed the problem of displaced labor.

You're mistaking aggregate, macro-scale changes in the economy for micro-scale effects on people.

Bob the factory worker loses his job because of automation, the economy at the same time creates new jobs in other categories. From an aggregate scale the economy is still humming along - a contraction of labor demand on one side is offset by an expansion in labor demand on another side.

But what about Bob? Is Bob qualified to take one of these newly created jobs? How will he gain the qualifications to work this new job? Are these new jobs in Bob's geographic area, or does Bob have the financial means to move to new job centers to pursue work?

This is the problem - you've mistaken "there are new jobs" for "there are new jobs for the displaced workers". The assumption that there is even much of an intersection between these two things is pure supposition - supposition that gets trotted around a lot because we don't like to think about the notion that maybe Bob - who has 30-40 years left on his lifespan - may simply be chronically unemployed or underemployed for the entire rest of it.

In reality there are going to be millions - if not tens of millions - like Bob, who have lost their jobs and are unable to retrain into a field that the economy has created. Others will take those new jobs, but Bob and his cohort are just plain fucked. The invention of new job categories does not remove the reality that Bob, and millions of others like him, are permanently out of work.

I agree, it doesn't make sense for everyone to 'work' and with any luck the future holds for us more time for leisure, creativity and enjoyment - but when you consider my argument above, perhaps a more sustainable, morale route to achieve such a vision is by means of a healthy, fair and open economy - one that makes it easy for anyone to earn a living by pursuing their own interests, passions or hobbies.

We need to find something between accepting mass poverty and creating a total welfare state which, even if it works economically, will be a disaster for human happiness. People need to feel productive, useful and self-reliant. What that is, I don't know.

I'm encouraging my kids to become technocrats, like me.

Same here. My family is covered. But the hard reality of unemployment still bothers me. I feel that if we were TRULY an advanced society, we would have already solved this problem. It's a problem. And problems are solvable. We just have to want to solve it.

Think about it - if your parents' jobs were permanently eliminated right now, what are the odds that they can successfully shift into programming?

Do they have the funds to go back to college?

And - apologies for making some assumptions about your parents - how do you think the interview will fare for someone in their 40s or 50s (or 60s?) who just finished learning basic programming and is ready for an entry-level position?

Be honest about that one - we work in the same industry - we know exactly how it treats middle-aged people.

So yeah, we've created new jobs at the same time others are being eliminated. People are taking these new jobs - but it's a mistake to think that these two groups are largely the same people, they are most emphatically not.

So the question is: if your parents' jobs were eliminated permanently, what do they do for the remainder of their lives?

This isn't remotely close to possible. While it is technically true that cars spend most of their time sitting idle, the demand for transportation is lumpy. A huge percentage of the population works, sleeps, shops, and eats at approximately the same time. That means that with only 2.4 million cars available for use at any one time, the US economy would almost completely shut down. If the majority of those were Uber cars, surge pricing would be in effect most nomral hours....literally only the reviled "1%" could afford to go to work or do anything else from sunrise to sunset.

Similarly the car can take you to some point 3 miles away, you switch to a larger car ("bus"), get within a few miles of your destination where another car takes you to you final destination. The wait times can be very small, and again you'll have a financial incentive (discount) or can pay full whack for a completely private experience. The time and places where there are the highest demands on transport are the ones where self driving vehicles and financial incentives will be most effective.

Deliveries will become way cheaper too. Instead of each place managing their own delivery as currently happens, a delivery company can pick up things from multiple unrelated places. Suddenly there is no need for businesses like fast food to all be in high traffic areas.

Everyone will have the ability to make decisions based on price for each journey. Want to spend more for privacy and luxury? No problem. Happy to spend way less and take a few minutes more? No problem.

I'm sure PricewaterhouseCoopers must have thought about this.

http://www.detroitchamber.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/Aut...

I have no idea what they were thinking. What I do know, however, is that there are more than 2.4 million people in the US expected to be at work or school between 8-9am. Using your example, there are few people that can afford $50 to and from work ($100/day - $2,000 per month for those on a 5 day work week - around the cost of leasing a very high end Mercedes).

However, this just slants the playing field in favor of an Uber-ish business model even more. When the utilization of the car nears 100%, you can justify that capital expense. It doesn't make sense for the average person to own a very expensive autonomous car, because they probably only use it two hours a day at most. When it is running 24/7 except for maintenance, that is a totally different story.

I do not believe that. For freight, more efficient use of freight vehicles will decrease the number of vehicles needed, but I guess that will be compensated for by more demand for freight transport because it will get cheaper.

As to personal transport: http://traveltrends.transportation.org/Documents/CA10-4.pdf, page 5 shows that about 120 million people travel to work by car each day in the USA. To get them there in those 2.4 million vehicles, each vehicle would have to drive 50 people to work each morning and back each evening.

Picking a optimistic average car sharing load of 2 persons (the PDF puts carpooling at about 10%), that would be 25 trips. At a moderate 5 minutes a trip, it would take those cars 250 minutes to do that. That's about 4 hours, so the first people would arrive at work at 07:00 and the last ones at 11:00.

With realistic figures, those number will easily blow up to over 8 hours. So, it will require huge other changes (job los, working from home or highly increased car sharing) to get down to that 2.4 million number.

I also think those who can afford a car now will want to own a driverless car, too. Reason? If you do not need to drive, your car can become more of a living room: you will want to keep your favourite books and games in it. That in itself will slow down a decrease in the number of vehicles, but there is a second factor: once your car is your living room, chances are people will be less bothered about long commute trips.

What about all the rural locations, or people who like to go on long trips?

And I think 50 cents per mile is extremely generous I think uber will charge more than that. Isn't IRS reimbursement rates something like 55 cents per mile? That's basically to cover costs not make any profit.

For that matter I won't promise you 2025. But I will say that if self-driving cars truly do become practical it will rewrite the economy in a lot of ways, and that if you stop and think and analyze, a lot of them aren't that difficult to guess, IMHO. For instance, that the nature of the capital expenditures will heavily favor "renting" over "owning" once we can easily rent on-demand is just obvious. A lot of this other stuff is too, really.

Of course, painting a full picture or correctly guessing timelines is essentially impossible. But some of the broad sketch isn't that hard.

Today "cars are driven just 4% of the time". If you assume for a moment that people's transportation usage time stays the same, and "the number of vehicles on the road will be reduced by 99%", then the average car must be used 400% of the time. That would be possible if every self-driving car is carrying 4 passengers 100% of the time, 24 hours a day 7 days a week, which seems very unlikely. What am I missing?

I also don't see the justification for saying "90% reduction of vehicles in operation would reduce our overall emissions by" 90% of their greenhouse gas emissions. There might be 90% fewer vehicles, and you certainly save on environmental impact of vehicle production, but they will be used more per vehicle.

In fact, per-person transportation usage time may increase. If catching a ride is easy, fast, and cheap and allows us to work, sleep or play while riding, then many people will ride more often, or might buy a house that means a longer commute.

Autonomous vehicles will likely be electric - this is the other component that will reduce our need for fossil fuels.

Autonomous vehicles will be electric but so will some (perhaps a smaller fraction of) non-autonomous vehicles. Anyway, that doesn't save the calculation. It's clear all these benefits are there but maybe not to the degree you claim, at least not in such a simple way.

Also, lots of trucks carry flammable or toxic materials: gasoline, heating/diesel oil, propane, pesticides, etc. These will probably be required to have human drivers for a long time to come.

The law hasn't passed yet, but apparently, Scania will start testing trucks in February. I am not sure that will be fully autonomous vehicles, though. It may be trucks that can follow a lead truck driven by humans.

Obviously 2025 software will be better than 2015 software but this question will still have to be answered strongly for mainstream adoption.

I do understand your point, but I think a lot of people would trust software over a completely unknown person behind the wheel.

Drivers are careful because of others, but also because they too will suffer in an accident.

As one of my teachers used to joke: 'If you want to see an enormous improvement in the accident rate put a very sharp stainless steel spike on the steering wheel and remove the seatbelt from the drivers seat'.

Youtube is full of human examples - start here as an example https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qwL7S--E5oQ - and note that it ranges from minor fender benders through some very serious injuries and destruction.

There are lots of examples of not being able to stay in lane, pulling out, not seeing stopped traffic, not paying attention to surroundings. Humans can't even get the trivial simple things right in broad daylight.

A 9/11 of deaths happen on US roads every month.

That depends on what the alternative is:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_traffic-re...

Regardless, how many cars without software do you think there will be by 2025?

Tesla -- now thats another story (for me).

Re this article, I think the numbers are a bit drastic, but using less drastic numbers does not weaken the central point of the argument.

Replacing them was slow because of the government.

The private sector will have no problem replacing taxi drivers when the technology is available from Google and every car manufacturer.

That being said, I think pretty much all of silicon valley is built on the principle that the future will "reward people with access to capital and/or technology."