On Sun, 7 Mar 2004 17:17:11 -0800 (PST), you wrote: >On Sun, 7 Mar 2004, murdoch wrote: > >> http://www.nature.com/nsu/040301/040301-15.html >> >> They're pretty much what you'd think, from the name. >> >> Just saw an ABC news presentation on this contest and the vehicles. >> By 2015 apparently the Pentagon has said that 1/3 of military vehicles >> must drive themselves, or some such. We're spending $1 billion per >> day on the military, one spokesperson said, and they're looking for >> ways to cut that. Since a lot of that goes to the personnel, ways to >> stop them from getting into costly accidents and-or take care of tasks >> for them are on the agenda. I wasn't 100% clear on this last part (as >> to what exactly is the money-saving aspect of robotizing the driving >> task.) > >To start with, if we designed cities to have all public transportation >robotized (eg using guide wires under the roads), traffic fatalities would >be a rarity. In a city the size of Vancouver (about 6 miles x 6 miles with >550,000 people) that means 30 lives a year saved. > >Sky Train, operating here since 1986 has had only one accident and that >was when a construction crew dropped an object onto it. It has no human >operator. > >POC
For a long time I've been thinking that concepts of Anthropology and other in-depth Human-Behaviour-Related-Fields are important to those of us who follow 21st Century Technology and Social issues and how we do or do not implement solutions to perceived problems. In this case, one objection that is often raised (or simply assumed without being even explicitly mentioned) that helps prevent the advent of robotized transportation are socio-political conceptions, right or wrong, that the car is the center of much of our "freedom" and that we must be the ones who are driving it at all times. I am in favor of pursuing robotized driving of vehicles, both individual and mass-transit, in large part for the immediate reason you name, which is the potential for extreme reduction in fatalities and injuries. Cars are killers, very bad killers (and mamers), and we should (in hy view) do more to get that problem under control. I am also in favor of somehow finding a way to address those who would prevent not only pursuit of such robotized solutions but who would have wholesale dismissal of all consideration and all discussion and all thought and all effort toward such vehicles, on the grounds that the first few efforts will result in some fatalities, or on the grounds of not wanting to give up their "freedom". Is it true that if we follow past patterns that our first efforts will result in injuries and deaths, even as they prevent other injuries and deaths? Yes, it is. Somehow we should learn from the past and find a way to bring *some* robotization to vehicles while at the same time not being arrogant... not assuming that the first computerized solution that seems partly to work is perfect and we should stop there. Perhaps for many years we should leave control in the hands of people but start to bring robotic controls somewhat into cars, allowing the human and car to interact to improve safety. I'm not sure we will ever get to a point of absolute safety in such matters, where there are idyllically no injuries or accidents or fatalities, ever. But we can do many many orders of magnitude better than we presently do, and I think we can do that by attacking these issues on many fronts... public transport, traffic engineering, social and political rules as they relate to these other matters, and YES, pursuing improved vehicle self-driving, until it's good enough to be a benefit if only in some limited way. I think our first efforts going forward into the next few decades will and probably should be limited, as it looks to me like a tremendous engineering and computing challenge, with life-and-death at stake, not to be taken lightly or for-granted. I would not want a robotically driven car until much more had been proven to me. But I think it should be pursued and researched and, if it can be done, then pursued even further. I look at it sort of like with Air Travel. Yes, it's dangerous, but over the decades it has become less dangerous in many ways. This has even included building some limited robotic control capabilities into aircraft, introduced in cautious ways. And yes, in one instance we saw a fatal demonstration of how this was introduced too arrogantly without considering all the possibilities and resulted in a totally unnecessary catastrophe. Biofuel at Journey to Forever: http://journeytoforever.org/biofuel.html Biofuels list archives: http://infoarchive.net/sgroup/biofuel/ Please do NOT send Unsubscribe messages to the list address. To unsubscribe, send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Yahoo! Groups Links <*> To visit your group on the web, go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/biofuel/ <*> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] <*> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to: http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
