Hey I'll tell you somethin' f'r free. Your MOM is an automation. Eh? How's that compute fer ya?
Because Google’s working on a driverless car, it might make you think of a scene where a lone New York Cabbie drives around abusing, effectively, passengers in cars which they do not directly control. After all, it is the Google. They’ve made a bunch of things possible, and mostly for free at that.
But I smell a rat. I’m not even talking about the technology problems, like how to sense the appropriate speed to drive, the lines on the road, and basically making it impossible to have a catastrophic crash (for example, accidentally changing lanes into the wrong side of the road). I’m not talking about the human problems (for example, retard drivers cutting people off, speeding, driving too slow, or otherwise reading their intent correctly). I’m not even talking about legal problems (if a driverless car is in an accident, who’s at fault? What if there are two driverless cars in accidents?).
I’m talking about the elephant in the room: If driverless cars, a difficult problem to solve, are so great, where are all the driverless trains? Driverless trains are almost trivial as a problem to solve. The system is centrally controlled, there are key points for starting and stopping, and it is literally on rails. However, look at the list of driverless trains. Fairly short, right? I’m talking about having trains that are roughly the size of a bus, and they arrive pretty much every minute at every station, and can skip many spots. Multiple “trains” could park at a station, wait until people are on it, then move again.
If this isn’t ubiquitous by now, what makes anyone think that driverless cars are going to become popular?