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One thing I would love someone to explain is how can people assume cars are going to be automated soon when both planes and trains haven't been automated for va

One thing I would love someone to explain is how can people assume cars are going to be automated soon when both planes and trains haven't been automated for various reasons. They are different issues I have gathered but essentially shouldn't trains be dead simple but to this day at least the trains(not metras though) often have someone to stop the train in case of emergencies. Planes are more complex but have lower crash ratings and less obstacles but can't stop and still have 2 plus pilots.

jordache 9y ago
vehicular traffic is a cluster.. esp with the variables involving non autonomous cars, non-vehicular traffic... random objects that end up in the road compounding the complexities of all other variables.
qntmfred 9y ago
less economic or safety incentive with those modes of transportation. there's much more to be gained by automating cars and trucks.
wnevets 9y ago
>when both planes and trains haven't been automated for various reasons. I thought both were already highly automated?
- Tobani 9y ago
  Some trains are very automated. And there is autopilot/autolanding for jets, BUT the pilot has to engage them, and they can't be used in all circumstances. That is to say that they are about as automated as the Tesla Autopilot. Once you get on the highway, the car can keep course and maintain the appropriate speed. This is a long way off from the world of "Enter the destination from my garage, take a nap, and wake up an hour later at my destination," of "Full Autonomy." There is a distinct inflection point of utility where Autonomous vehicles require you to be paying attention to take over in emergency, and the point at which that is no longer required.
- w0utert 9y ago
  Automated: yes. Autonomous: no. There's a fundamental difference between the two. Airplane autopilots are basically scripted, and operate fully within the parameters set by the pilot. There is almost no intelligence, and very little adaptivity there. The pilot needs to reprogram the autopilot manually when the flight plan changes, for example. Flight conditions can change in many ways that require the autopilot to be reprogrammed, reconfigured, or even switched off. Airplanes have actually crashed more than once because the pilot configured the autopilot incorrectly. I don't know much about trains, except that fully automating without adapting all the rail infrastructure is more difficult than you would imagine, for example because there is basically no standardization in how semaphores are placed, for example.
  - cmurf 9y ago
    FAA flight plan plus an IFR clearance is basically a script. Before autopilots, the pilot followed that script, without radar, with waypoint and next fix ETA reporting by radio. And it has a fallback in place for lost communications, the flight is expected to fly and land at its destination per it's clearance (or most recently amended version of it). And the fallback also includes the possibility of being unable to land at the destination, and instead having to go to the specified alternate in the flight plan. http://delta.jepptech.com/jifp/help/Images/FAAFlightPlan.gif http://delta.jepptech.com/jifp/help/Images/FAAFlightPlan.gif
  - diggernet 9y ago
    Thanks for this. I wish there was more awareness of the distinction. Too many comments here are describing automated things as autonomous.
adrianN 9y ago
There are no good technical reasons why trains are not automated more often. The technology is there, many trains do in fact run autonomously. It's just unpopular for long distance trains because current systems don't do obstacle detection and its hard to secure long distance tracks against obstacles. But for high speed trains at least there is no point in trying to visually recognize obstacles: if you see an obstacle it's already too late to brake meaningfully.
- noobermin 9y ago
  >It's just unpopular for long distance trains because current systems don't do obstacle detection and its hard to secure long distance tracks against obstacles. That doesn't sound like it's just because "unpopular", in fact, that sounds like a technical reason. It sounds like you're really saying "they are limited, but people are bad too, so it shouldn't matter."
- SEJeff 9y ago
  Level 4 automation trains do in fact do obstacle detection and are capable of unattended operation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_automated_urban_metro_subway_systems#Grade_of_Automation_4_Systems https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_automated_urban_metro_...
cryptoz 9y ago
30,000 people in the USA alone are killed each year because of human driving error. Humans are not getting any better at driving. Car safety mechanisms have reduced road death rates significantly in the last 50 years, but still - 30,000 deaths/year in the USA alone due to human driver error. Cars will be automated because cars have to be automated.
- chrismealy 9y ago
  Other countries have much lower car death rates. It's a social problem that can be solved without waiting technological miracles.
  - Bahamut 9y ago
    The US death rate is lower than most countries: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_traffic-related_death_rate https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_traffic...
    - stevenwoo 9y ago
      The general trend from that data appears that the higher the standard of living, the higher the safety is per driving mile and the US is where one would expect in such a list, better than third world countries, worse than Europe.
      - chrismealy 9y ago
        Canada has 40% fewer road deaths by population. I don't think they're that much richer or smarter than Americans. Complacency is killing people.
        stevenwoo 9y ago
        Good point. Probably no single simple correlation will do - higher fuel prices points to the one thing that Western Europe and Canada share off the top of my head compared to the USA. (That and nationalized healthcare. :) )
maratd 9y ago
> One thing I would love someone to explain is how can people assume cars are going to be automated soon when both planes and trains haven't been automated for various reasons. Planes are mostly automated, except for liftoff and landing. They can probably automate those too ... but there's no point. You'll still need a pilot. Would you get into a plane flown entirely by computer with no pilot available to take over? Trains are entirely automated. At least, the ones where there isn't a union enforcing some form of employment. I've been on a number of trains in airports that don't have any kind of operator.
sannee 9y ago
The price of a plane/train is astronomical compared to what you have to pay for a pilot. I mean, you could literally buy a pilot for a millenia for the price of a jetliner (100M$ for jetliner / 100k$/year for pilot). There just isn't a very large economical incentive to automate that job out.
- ceejayoz 9y ago
  It's not one pilot, though. It's two pilots, times two shifts a day, plus some extras to cover vacation, sickness, etc. There was enough pressure to engineer away flight engineers, navigators, and radio operators in cockpits. I wouldn't expect them to pass on potential savings in the low-margin world of airlines.
  - throwawayjava 9y ago
    And still, the pilot portion of the cost of operation for planes is in the single digits. You barely scrape into the double digits (maybe 20% MAX, closer to 10 I think) if you count all labor.
    - ceejayoz 9y ago
      http://www.cnn.com/travel/article/how-airlines-make-less-than-6/index.html http://www.cnn.com/travel/article/how-airlines-make-less-tha... > "With a net profit margin of just 2.4%, airlines only retain $5.42 per passenger carried," said Tony Tyler CEO of International Air Transport Association (IATA) at the group's 70th AGM in Doha, Qatar. I suspect they're interested in single-digit cost reductions.
    - btian 9y ago
      Airlines will kill to get another 10% in margin.
      - throwawayjava 9y ago
        So are flight attendants impossible to automate/do without? Or are there perhaps other forces -- beyond technical ones -- keeping humans in the plane?
jbob2000 9y ago
There's no good reason to automate trains right now, aside for the sake of automating them. It would take a lot of cash to accomplish and it would put us exactly where we are now.
- Piskvorrr 9y ago
  Fairly good reasons for passenger transport, actually. Transport authorities are reporting safer and smoother (which directly translates to "cheaper", both in power savings from optimal profile and in fewer scheduling delays) operation. For heavy cargo without a highly regular, high turnaround schedule, not so much: too many potential operating profiles.
- majewsky 9y ago
  Here's a reason: If trains were automated, low-demand lines with long headway (i.e. 2 hours and more) could be serviced more frequently (with proportionally shorter trains) with about the same amount of fuel usage. A shorter headway will make the line more attractive and increase passenger numbers.
  - jbob2000 9y ago
    Right, but it could cost 100's of millions of dollars to support that. You might need to buy new train engines. You might need to add more signalling, or upgrade existing signalling. You might need to build bridges over/tunnel under the tracks to avoid crossings with roads. Your staff need to be retrained or you need to bring in new people to support the new system. All of that work to support a small rail line? It might never pay off.
    - majewsky 9y ago
      1. There are plenty existing train systems where large trains are formed by coupling together multiple small trains that all have their own engines. That way, train lengths can be varied to optimize for demand. This wouldn't be happening if it were prohibitively expensive. 2. Why would you need to avoid crossings with roads just because it's autonomous? Trains use signals that only turn green when the section ahead is clear of other trains or vehicles. It's not like train conductors check road crossings by sight to decide whether to drive or brake.
limsup 9y ago
Consider the proportion of the cost of an Uber ride that goes to the driver compared with the proportion of the cost of an airplane ticket that goes to the pilot. A driverless car has the potential to be much cheaper, but a pilotless plane would not be much different. Many new train systems are automated. The cost of retrofitting older systems is just too great.
blktiger 9y ago
With regards to airplanes, you have several issues. The main one being that airplanes are not equipped with sensors capable of detecting other aircraft nearby. Without a complete picture of the airspace to a very significant distance a fully autonomous aircraft isn't possible. Today that is managed by the air traffic control system which is entirely run by people communicating with other people. That said, aircraft are capable of fully autonomous landings - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autoland https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autoland.
- JorgeGT 9y ago
  > The main one being that airplanes are not equipped with sensors capable of detecting other aircraft nearby. Well, there's ACAS/TCAS (airborne collision avoidance system / traffic collision avoidance system) and certainly we are moving towards ASAS (airborne separation assurance system), based mainly in transponder / ADS-B radio signals. But as others have commented, there are other reasons (psychological, economic, etc.).
Eridrus 9y ago
If we had autonomous planes it wouldn't significantly reduce cost or increase usage. But there is a lot of investment in autonomous drones. Planes also have a very high safety bar to begin with, which cars do not. Same thing about trains, there's very little value in doing so, and resistance in the form of unions in some locations. Some trains are fully automated though, here's an article with some more info: https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/wnj75z/why-dont-we-have-driverless-trains-yet https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/wnj75z/why-dont-w... Frankly having some dude from Toyota, who don't seem to be very invested in this space, tell me he doesn't think it's going to work isn't very convincing. Chris Urmson saying it might take up to 30 years is far more convincing: http://spectrum.ieee.org/cars-that-think/transportation/self-driving/google-selfdriving-car-will-be-ready-soon-for-some-in-decades-for-others http://spectrum.ieee.org/cars-that-think/transportation/self... But that's 30 years for the entire planet, not until it works at all. WayMo is already letting people ride their cars in Phoenix - presumably one of the places with good weather and easy roads, so I think metro-level deployment in the next 4 years seems about right. [EDIT]: And on the topic of trains. The MTA in NYC can't even seem to handle basic technical projects, like upgrading signaling infrastructure, or just extending a rail line a few miles without spending billions of dollars, so there's probably a decent chance that some of these are not automated due to sheer incompetence.
- ScottBurson 9y ago
  Gill Pratt is not "some dude" -- he's a robotics researcher with a PhD from MIT, and was a DARPA program manager [0]. [0] http://corporatenews.pressroom.toyota.com/article_display.cfm?article_id=5423 http://corporatenews.pressroom.toyota.com/article_display.cf...
  - Eridrus 9y ago
    To engage with the substance of his argument a bit more, his argument is that perfection is a long way away: > “Historically human beings have shown zero tolerance for injury or death caused by flaws in a machine,” Pratt said. “As wonderful as AI is, AI systems are inevitably flawed… We’re not even close to Level 5. It’ll take many years and many more miles, in simulated and real world testing, to achieve the perfection required for level 5 autonomy.” I can believe that, but I also disagree that we need to be there for it to be useful. Level 4 is enough for large scale deployments.
mjamesaustin 9y ago
One of my friends is a train engineer. I can tell you that it's ABSURD how little automation is used in many train systems, and it's definitely not because of a lack of technology. To give an example, my friend has to memorize the required speeds for each different section and turn in every train he runs, and has to manually adjust the train's speed accordingly. Literally all of that can and should be done automatically, but the industry hasn't caught up with what is technologically possible.
- manmal 9y ago
  I would not want to ride a train where a memorization error can lead to a crash.
- Theodores 9y ago
  In Japan it works the same way, although, as everywhere outside of the USA, automation is coming/inevitable. The white glove pointing is all about being on time, it is a discipline and hitting those exactly on time arrival-departures comes down to train drivers knowing what speed they are doing without looking at instruments, which are covered during training. Maybe the Danes have their own variation of this obsessive stop-watch training. A system that works efficiently does not have to be computerised, fantastic teamwork and dedicated professionalism can suffice. In other endeavours, we still have not fully automated coffee, instead of a perfectly adequate beverage from a machine some prefer a human operator to operate the machine as if it was some rocket-surgery skill/craft. I don't think train operation is like that, a faux professionalism, maybe programming is nearer the mark, some programmers use a text editor which is ridiculous when they could use an IDE. Furthermore some programmers roll their own code rather than just re-use some existing module.
- wang_li 9y ago
  Systems to manage train speed already exist, it's just that operating companies have not deployed them fully. It's required by law that these systems be in place, but either they've requested waivers, or the law keeps being amended to accommodate their failure to deploy.
l5870uoo9y 9y ago
The Copenhagen Metro[1] have been running driverless for a decade. It was the first metro in Copenhagen. Had there been a legacy system to replace I doubt it would have been made driverless. It is properly due to the general "conservatism" (vested interests, old ways of doing it) in established systems. It takes a certain power to disrupt this. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copenhagen_Metro https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copenhagen_Metro
SEJeff 9y ago
Planes are mostly automated. The pilots are involved for takeoff and landing or emergencies, but little else. All modern Airbus or Boeing planes are mostly flown with autopilot. The human component is still involved primarily for the "what if it breaks" case where the software isn't there today. A computer would likely have never considered putting a plane into the Hudson river, but that pilot saved a lot of people by doing it. Actual aircraft can be fully automated for landing at least. In the US Army, I flew the Shadow 200 TUAV and it had a thing called the T.A.L.S. (Tactical Automated Landing System)[1] which does exactly what you'd assume it does by the acronymn. It is a monopulse radar tracking system on the ground with a transponder on the plane. You fly the UAV (Unmanned Aerial Vehicle) into a small area at one end of the runway and click the "Land AV" button (A.V. == Aerial Vehicle) and the landing is 100% hands off. You have the option to cancel the landing if wind or the parameters are off down to 10ft, but below that it is land or crash trying! For trains, the safest ones are automated, but Unions (in the US at least) prevent most of the autonomous technology from being deployed. Where I live, in Chicago, we had a train conductor fall asleep and the train went up the escalator and crashed into the turnstiles at terminal 2 of Ohare[2]. A computer would have prevented this from happening as a computer would neither have been speeding or sleeping. In that incident, the automated breaking systems had never been tested and in fact were configured / setup wrong, so they both failed. This has been rectified since and additional barriers have been constructed. That being said, there are lots of fully automated trains[3], you just might be unaware of them. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AAI_RQ-7_Shadow#Design [2] http://www.chicagotribune.com/g00/news/ct-ohare-blue-line-crash-ntsb-report-met-20150326-story.html?i10c.referrer=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.google.com%2F [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_automated_urban_metro_subway_systems#Grade_of_Automation_4_Systems
- nradov 9y ago
  Military UAVs have a high crash rate. There's no autopilot which could have successfully landed an Airbus A320 in the Hudson River.
  - throwawayjava 9y ago
    And no autopilot would intentionally ram a plane into the side of a mountain. These edge-cases are uninteresting IMO.
trekky1700 9y ago
From what a pilot told me, I believe the A320 he flies can take off, fly, and land totally on its own. I'm sure the same is true for other planes. Also, if I recall correctly, he said in certain conditions it's against regulations for a pilot to be manually controlling the aircraft, such as landings in high winds.
- Piskvorrr 9y ago
  Fairly sure it still needs the pilot to tell it "now we're taking off", "now we're cruising", "now we're landing" (and under what parameters). Doing that switch automatically seems unsafe. The other part sounds improbable - quite the opposite, a pilot always needs to be able to take over in case the automatic systems fail.
- cmurf 9y ago
  Literally none of this is true. "land totally on its own" suggests autonomy. In reality it's a three part certification: pilot, plane (autopilot), and runway. There is only one zero visibility landing system, and that's the ILS CAT IIIc.[1] If there's no ground capability for the runway (does not exist or is down for maintenance) then the plane can't do a CAT IIIc landing. In practice there is no such thing as landing without an explicit clearance to land. Clearance is given by ATC to the pilot via AM radio. The autopilot has no language listening or speaking skills at all. Numerous clearance modifications happen during a flight, given verbally.[2] The plane also doesn't taxi itself into position, and it doesn't retract or subsequently deploy landing gear. Many tasks aren't available to the autopilot, nor are many transitions between tasks. About the last statement, FAR 91.3(a) The pilot in command of an aircraft is directly responsible for, and is the final authority as to, the operation of that aircraft. You could construe FAR 91.13(a)No person may operate an aircraft in a careless or reckless manner so as to endanger the life or property of another. as requiring the pilot to use automation if the aircraft manufacturer requires it in certain situations. Otherwise, no, and I have only ever heard of autopilots needing to be disabled in high wind situations. [1] Example instrument approach procedure. Scroll to the bottom and you'll see it explicitly requires ground navaids and a certified crew. http://155.178.201.160/d-tpp/1709/09077I35RC2_3.PDF http://155.178.201.160/d-tpp/1709/09077I35RC2_3.PDF [2] Example STAR which most airports don't have, but when they do you'll even see these are really just designed to allow ATC to "plug in" a smaller subset of data like an altitude or speed, without having to recite the entire arrival instructions. Can it be automated? No, because the variables are delivered by voice. The STAR is useless without the variables, and variables are useless without the STAR. http://155.178.201.160/d-tpp/1709/09077POWDR.PDF http://155.178.201.160/d-tpp/1709/09077POWDR.PDF
FieryTransition 9y ago
We have automated trains in Denmark in Copenhagen which are widely used everyday by the public, so it's not like it doesn't exist. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copenhagen_Metro https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copenhagen_Metro
mixedbit 9y ago
Can it be that railways are often monopolized, and getting access to the infrastructure is difficult for new companies, which hampers innovation?
TJ-14 9y ago
Subway trains in my city (Vancouver) are autonomous
Bartweiss 9y ago
One point would be that both planes and trains are professionally operated already. That means three of the biggest incentives to automate are missing. First, they have few human-error crashes; they're both significantly safer than automobiles, so unless automation can do better-than-human disaster recovery (not likely yet) there's minimal safety advantage. You have to outperform well-trained humans instead of random people to save lives. Second, they don't take much time per traveller to operate. Both often have 100+ passengers per operator, making it relatively cheap to employ skilled human labor. Cars average around 2:1, so there's a lot more time being wasted per passenger-hour. Third, cars have highly flexible usage. Planes and trains are generally moving people or cargo to approximate destinations, and travel to places design to store them. Cars spend lots of time arriving in storage-free areas - what if your car dropped you off at work and drove to a garage outside the city? And they do lots of last-mile transit - what if your car could go pick up your groceries or dry-cleaning without you? Broadly, I think there's way more safety and financial incentive for 100% driverless operation of cars than any other mode of travel.
- Piskvorrr 9y ago
  Good points. Automated train control maps are not even 2D: they're directed graphs, precisely mapped to sub-foot precision, with all permissible edges fully checked in advance, at design and at mapping. Far easier to navigate than a road network, which can be simplified and approximated to a directed graph, but 1. at the cost of some precision, and 2. orders of magnitude more likely to change unnoticed.
  - fastball 9y ago
    Unions.
ZeroGravitas 9y ago
One argument is just scale. So, if it costs a billion dollars to make a good AI driver, then if you put it in a million cars then it's costs 1000 dollars each and you could eliminate lots of jobs where the main cost is the human (delivery, taxi) so providing a ready sales avenue for your self-driving car (or tech). If you put it in trains then you can maybe drive thousands of trains, and the human is a relatively low cost element of a train service so there's less room to expand. I don't know if this is true, or even if the logic I outlined above pencils out with real data but it probably contributes in some way.
dreamcompiler 9y ago
Planes have been automated to some degree for 100 years. Fully automating a plane at the equivalent of Level 5 is almost a trivial problem compared to doing so with cars. The reason planes aren't automated is mostly social, not technical. Whereas with cars it's decidedly both.
- cmurf 9y ago
  Planes aren't automated mostly for technical and infrastructural reasons, the exact opposite of what you stated. The social worry of pilotless airplanes inhibits the massive investment that would be required to solve the technical and infrastructure limitations of the existing system.
  - dreamcompiler 9y ago
    There are very few technical and infrastructure issues remaining. No such investment is necessary. https://jonathannen.com/captain-ai.html https://jonathannen.com/captain-ai.html
    - cmurf 9y ago
      Really? No investment at all? At least it's a falsifiable statement. Denver International Airport has 10 runways. Only three have ILS CAT IIIc approaches, and that is the only instrument approach procedure that permits full autoland in zero visibility. So you're saying it's completely OK to have 1/3 utilization of the airport's runways for automated landings. Oh and, those three runways? 34L, 34R, 35R. They all point north. So you can't do auto landings to the east, west, or south. Due to wind direction, your planes won't be able to land on quite a few days out of the year, at all. And in fact the wind could shift while a flight is enroute and now where does it go? All of a sudden the required alternate may be insufficient because a simple wind shift, rather than a change in visibility, becomes the new metric for whether a plane can land or not, and whether the alternate is legal. This is one logical flaw. There are thousands of these. Totally surmountable, with metric tons of money. But you said no investments necessary.
colordrops 9y ago
Modern airliners _are_ mostly autonomous, and can even land themselves if necessary. Pilots are there as a safety margin. I've been on an automated city train as well, I believe in China.
- cmurf 9y ago
  Modern airlines are not mostly autonomous. I'll define it this way: remove the pilots from a flight at various stages along its route and see what happens. Multiple outcomes are possible but one is certain, it's not landing at the intended destination. If it were mostly autonomous, it'd land at destination at least some of the time. The chances of this happening today are 0.
  - colordrops 9y ago
    That's because human checkpoints are intentionally wired into the workflow of a modern airliner. If those checkpoints were automated, the plane could indeed fly and land on its own. And I suspect the safety margins are not far from what is needed to automate the rest of the flight. The space shuttle's only system that absolutely required human intervention was the landing gears, and that was to ensure that humans were always necessarily in the loop. That doesn't mean that the shuttle wasn't _MOSTLY_ automated.
    - cmurf 9y ago
      automated != autonomous, the assertion I replied to was that "airliners _are_ mostly autonomous" which is not true. >If those checkpoints were automated If there were unicorns... >the plane could indeed fly and land on its own. No, and its annoying that you're asserting things you clearly don't understand. As I mention elsewhere, the only technology we currently have for precision instrument landings in zero weather visibility (the only 100% autoland) is the ILS CAT IIIc approach. The overwhelming majority of airports in the country do not have that infrastructure, nor do most airplanes. I'm a pilot, you clearly aren't. There are numerous other factors here, but just the fact you can't land wherever you want, at most airports with most aircraft, is enough to prove your assertion false.
keithly 9y ago
Also, planes and trains have unionized employees who don't want give up their jobs to automation.
Piskvorrr 9y ago
Oh, new trains are full auto, no worries. Retrofitting an entire fleet and tracks, now there's the issue - follow the money, and you'll see why even automatic trains are only programmed to follow the usual route, and for diversions, the driver would need to step in. Plus having a person in the cockpit to push the Big Red Button helps with all sorts of legal issues.
throwawayjava 9y ago
The economics couldn't be more different. Driver salary is 26% of the cost of trucking. Driver salary is 52% of the cost of a taxi. Those numbers are in the single digits for aircraft and trains. We could replace pilots and train operators, technologically speaking. But the incentives are not (yet) large enough to overcome the regulatory and cultural barriers. We'd rather have that extra order of magnitude of safety, because it costs so little compared to other expenses. The cost/benefit calculation for drivers is fundamentally different.
- BurningFrog 9y ago
  > Driver salary is 52% of the cost of a taxi. On top of that, the space and interfaces for the driver is a substantial part of the cost and weight of the vehicle itself.
- ghaff 9y ago
  >Driver salary is 52% of the cost of a taxi. If you drop the utilization, the cost of the driver as a percentage probably goes up a bit. But here's the thing about those numbers. Yes, driver salary is a big chunk of taxi cost but flip things around. It's only about half the cost. In other words, there's this widespread assumption that autonomy totally changes the nature of automobiles and automobile ownership even though it only cuts the cost in half. Ask yourself. If you own a car today, would getting a 50% discount on taxi rides completely change your behavior. Maybe it would for some at the margins but only at the margins.
  - euyyn 9y ago
    Getting a 50% discount on taxi rides would make me never consider any other option when I need a taxi.
    - ghaff 9y ago
      It depends on the circumstances. On the other hand, for me, if taxi rides were half the price I doubt it would affect my ridership at all over the course of a year. MAYBE for one or two marginal car rentals.
AndrewKemendo 9y ago
Planes can take off, cruise and land themselves in any survivable weather condition with existing automated controls. However, people would be terrified of flying without a pilot and there are so many legal hurdles that it's not cost effective to do so.
dboreham 9y ago
Also: where are the self-driving attorneys? A very constrained problem domain where all the answers can be looked up in books, prior cases etc. Vastly expensive human drivers needs at present. No chance of killing anyone. We should have armies of automated lawyers already, no?

jordache 9y ago

vehicular traffic is a cluster.. esp with the variables involving non autonomous cars, non-vehicular traffic... random objects that end up in the road compounding the complexities of all other variables.

qntmfred 9y ago

less economic or safety incentive with those modes of transportation. there's much more to be gained by automating cars and trucks.

wnevets 9y ago

>when both planes and trains haven't been automated for various reasons. I thought both were already highly automated?

Tobani 9y ago
Some trains are very automated. And there is autopilot/autolanding for jets, BUT the pilot has to engage them, and they can't be used in all circumstances. That is to say that they are about as automated as the Tesla Autopilot. Once you get on the highway, the car can keep course and maintain the appropriate speed. This is a long way off from the world of "Enter the destination from my garage, take a nap, and wake up an hour later at my destination," of "Full Autonomy." There is a distinct inflection point of utility where Autonomous vehicles require you to be paying attention to take over in emergency, and the point at which that is no longer required.
w0utert 9y ago
Automated: yes. Autonomous: no. There's a fundamental difference between the two. Airplane autopilots are basically scripted, and operate fully within the parameters set by the pilot. There is almost no intelligence, and very little adaptivity there. The pilot needs to reprogram the autopilot manually when the flight plan changes, for example. Flight conditions can change in many ways that require the autopilot to be reprogrammed, reconfigured, or even switched off. Airplanes have actually crashed more than once because the pilot configured the autopilot incorrectly. I don't know much about trains, except that fully automating without adapting all the rail infrastructure is more difficult than you would imagine, for example because there is basically no standardization in how semaphores are placed, for example.
- cmurf 9y ago
  FAA flight plan plus an IFR clearance is basically a script. Before autopilots, the pilot followed that script, without radar, with waypoint and next fix ETA reporting by radio. And it has a fallback in place for lost communications, the flight is expected to fly and land at its destination per it's clearance (or most recently amended version of it). And the fallback also includes the possibility of being unable to land at the destination, and instead having to go to the specified alternate in the flight plan. http://delta.jepptech.com/jifp/help/Images/FAAFlightPlan.gif http://delta.jepptech.com/jifp/help/Images/FAAFlightPlan.gif
- diggernet 9y ago
  Thanks for this. I wish there was more awareness of the distinction. Too many comments here are describing automated things as autonomous.

adrianN 9y ago

There are no good technical reasons why trains are not automated more often. The technology is there, many trains do in fact run autonomously. It's just unpopular for long distance trains because current systems don't do obstacle detection and its hard to secure long distance tracks against obstacles. But for high speed trains at least there is no point in trying to visually recognize obstacles: if you see an obstacle it's already too late to brake meaningfully.

noobermin 9y ago
>It's just unpopular for long distance trains because current systems don't do obstacle detection and its hard to secure long distance tracks against obstacles. That doesn't sound like it's just because "unpopular", in fact, that sounds like a technical reason. It sounds like you're really saying "they are limited, but people are bad too, so it shouldn't matter."
SEJeff 9y ago
Level 4 automation trains do in fact do obstacle detection and are capable of unattended operation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_automated_urban_metro_subway_systems#Grade_of_Automation_4_Systems https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_automated_urban_metro_...

cryptoz 9y ago

30,000 people in the USA alone are killed each year because of human driving error. Humans are not getting any better at driving. Car safety mechanisms have reduced road death rates significantly in the last 50 years, but still - 30,000 deaths/year in the USA alone due to human driver error. Cars will be automated because cars have to be automated.

chrismealy 9y ago
Other countries have much lower car death rates. It's a social problem that can be solved without waiting technological miracles.
- Bahamut 9y ago
  The US death rate is lower than most countries: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_traffic-related_death_rate https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_traffic...
  - stevenwoo 9y ago
    The general trend from that data appears that the higher the standard of living, the higher the safety is per driving mile and the US is where one would expect in such a list, better than third world countries, worse than Europe.
    - chrismealy 9y ago
      Canada has 40% fewer road deaths by population. I don't think they're that much richer or smarter than Americans. Complacency is killing people.
      - stevenwoo 9y ago
        Good point. Probably no single simple correlation will do - higher fuel prices points to the one thing that Western Europe and Canada share off the top of my head compared to the USA. (That and nationalized healthcare. :) )

maratd 9y ago

> One thing I would love someone to explain is how can people assume cars are going to be automated soon when both planes and trains haven't been automated for various reasons. Planes are mostly automated, except for liftoff and landing. They can probably automate those too ... but there's no point. You'll still need a pilot. Would you get into a plane flown entirely by computer with no pilot available to take over? Trains are entirely automated. At least, the ones where there isn't a union enforcing some form of employment. I've been on a number of trains in airports that don't have any kind of operator.

sannee 9y ago

The price of a plane/train is astronomical compared to what you have to pay for a pilot. I mean, you could literally buy a pilot for a millenia for the price of a jetliner (100M$ for jetliner / 100k$/year for pilot). There just isn't a very large economical incentive to automate that job out.

ceejayoz 9y ago
It's not one pilot, though. It's two pilots, times two shifts a day, plus some extras to cover vacation, sickness, etc. There was enough pressure to engineer away flight engineers, navigators, and radio operators in cockpits. I wouldn't expect them to pass on potential savings in the low-margin world of airlines.
- throwawayjava 9y ago
  And still, the pilot portion of the cost of operation for planes is in the single digits. You barely scrape into the double digits (maybe 20% MAX, closer to 10 I think) if you count all labor.
  - ceejayoz 9y ago
    http://www.cnn.com/travel/article/how-airlines-make-less-than-6/index.html http://www.cnn.com/travel/article/how-airlines-make-less-tha... > "With a net profit margin of just 2.4%, airlines only retain $5.42 per passenger carried," said Tony Tyler CEO of International Air Transport Association (IATA) at the group's 70th AGM in Doha, Qatar. I suspect they're interested in single-digit cost reductions.
  - btian 9y ago
    Airlines will kill to get another 10% in margin.
    - throwawayjava 9y ago
      So are flight attendants impossible to automate/do without? Or are there perhaps other forces -- beyond technical ones -- keeping humans in the plane?

jbob2000 9y ago

There's no good reason to automate trains right now, aside for the sake of automating them. It would take a lot of cash to accomplish and it would put us exactly where we are now.

Piskvorrr 9y ago
Fairly good reasons for passenger transport, actually. Transport authorities are reporting safer and smoother (which directly translates to "cheaper", both in power savings from optimal profile and in fewer scheduling delays) operation. For heavy cargo without a highly regular, high turnaround schedule, not so much: too many potential operating profiles.
majewsky 9y ago
Here's a reason: If trains were automated, low-demand lines with long headway (i.e. 2 hours and more) could be serviced more frequently (with proportionally shorter trains) with about the same amount of fuel usage. A shorter headway will make the line more attractive and increase passenger numbers.
- jbob2000 9y ago
  Right, but it could cost 100's of millions of dollars to support that. You might need to buy new train engines. You might need to add more signalling, or upgrade existing signalling. You might need to build bridges over/tunnel under the tracks to avoid crossings with roads. Your staff need to be retrained or you need to bring in new people to support the new system. All of that work to support a small rail line? It might never pay off.
  - majewsky 9y ago
    1. There are plenty existing train systems where large trains are formed by coupling together multiple small trains that all have their own engines. That way, train lengths can be varied to optimize for demand. This wouldn't be happening if it were prohibitively expensive. 2. Why would you need to avoid crossings with roads just because it's autonomous? Trains use signals that only turn green when the section ahead is clear of other trains or vehicles. It's not like train conductors check road crossings by sight to decide whether to drive or brake.

limsup 9y ago

Consider the proportion of the cost of an Uber ride that goes to the driver compared with the proportion of the cost of an airplane ticket that goes to the pilot. A driverless car has the potential to be much cheaper, but a pilotless plane would not be much different. Many new train systems are automated. The cost of retrofitting older systems is just too great.

blktiger 9y ago

With regards to airplanes, you have several issues. The main one being that airplanes are not equipped with sensors capable of detecting other aircraft nearby. Without a complete picture of the airspace to a very significant distance a fully autonomous aircraft isn't possible. Today that is managed by the air traffic control system which is entirely run by people communicating with other people. That said, aircraft are capable of fully autonomous landings - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autoland https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autoland.

JorgeGT 9y ago
> The main one being that airplanes are not equipped with sensors capable of detecting other aircraft nearby. Well, there's ACAS/TCAS (airborne collision avoidance system / traffic collision avoidance system) and certainly we are moving towards ASAS (airborne separation assurance system), based mainly in transponder / ADS-B radio signals. But as others have commented, there are other reasons (psychological, economic, etc.).

Eridrus 9y ago

If we had autonomous planes it wouldn't significantly reduce cost or increase usage. But there is a lot of investment in autonomous drones. Planes also have a very high safety bar to begin with, which cars do not. Same thing about trains, there's very little value in doing so, and resistance in the form of unions in some locations. Some trains are fully automated though, here's an article with some more info: https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/wnj75z/why-dont-we-have-driverless-trains-yet https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/wnj75z/why-dont-w... Frankly having some dude from Toyota, who don't seem to be very invested in this space, tell me he doesn't think it's going to work isn't very convincing. Chris Urmson saying it might take up to 30 years is far more convincing: http://spectrum.ieee.org/cars-that-think/transportation/self-driving/google-selfdriving-car-will-be-ready-soon-for-some-in-decades-for-others http://spectrum.ieee.org/cars-that-think/transportation/self... But that's 30 years for the entire planet, not until it works at all. WayMo is already letting people ride their cars in Phoenix - presumably one of the places with good weather and easy roads, so I think metro-level deployment in the next 4 years seems about right. [EDIT]: And on the topic of trains. The MTA in NYC can't even seem to handle basic technical projects, like upgrading signaling infrastructure, or just extending a rail line a few miles without spending billions of dollars, so there's probably a decent chance that some of these are not automated due to sheer incompetence.

ScottBurson 9y ago
Gill Pratt is not "some dude" -- he's a robotics researcher with a PhD from MIT, and was a DARPA program manager [0]. [0] http://corporatenews.pressroom.toyota.com/article_display.cfm?article_id=5423 http://corporatenews.pressroom.toyota.com/article_display.cf...
- Eridrus 9y ago
  To engage with the substance of his argument a bit more, his argument is that perfection is a long way away: > “Historically human beings have shown zero tolerance for injury or death caused by flaws in a machine,” Pratt said. “As wonderful as AI is, AI systems are inevitably flawed… We’re not even close to Level 5. It’ll take many years and many more miles, in simulated and real world testing, to achieve the perfection required for level 5 autonomy.” I can believe that, but I also disagree that we need to be there for it to be useful. Level 4 is enough for large scale deployments.

mjamesaustin 9y ago

One of my friends is a train engineer. I can tell you that it's ABSURD how little automation is used in many train systems, and it's definitely not because of a lack of technology. To give an example, my friend has to memorize the required speeds for each different section and turn in every train he runs, and has to manually adjust the train's speed accordingly. Literally all of that can and should be done automatically, but the industry hasn't caught up with what is technologically possible.

manmal 9y ago
I would not want to ride a train where a memorization error can lead to a crash.
Theodores 9y ago
In Japan it works the same way, although, as everywhere outside of the USA, automation is coming/inevitable. The white glove pointing is all about being on time, it is a discipline and hitting those exactly on time arrival-departures comes down to train drivers knowing what speed they are doing without looking at instruments, which are covered during training. Maybe the Danes have their own variation of this obsessive stop-watch training. A system that works efficiently does not have to be computerised, fantastic teamwork and dedicated professionalism can suffice. In other endeavours, we still have not fully automated coffee, instead of a perfectly adequate beverage from a machine some prefer a human operator to operate the machine as if it was some rocket-surgery skill/craft. I don't think train operation is like that, a faux professionalism, maybe programming is nearer the mark, some programmers use a text editor which is ridiculous when they could use an IDE. Furthermore some programmers roll their own code rather than just re-use some existing module.
wang_li 9y ago
Systems to manage train speed already exist, it's just that operating companies have not deployed them fully. It's required by law that these systems be in place, but either they've requested waivers, or the law keeps being amended to accommodate their failure to deploy.

l5870uoo9y 9y ago

The Copenhagen Metro[1] have been running driverless for a decade. It was the first metro in Copenhagen. Had there been a legacy system to replace I doubt it would have been made driverless. It is properly due to the general "conservatism" (vested interests, old ways of doing it) in established systems. It takes a certain power to disrupt this. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copenhagen_Metro https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copenhagen_Metro

SEJeff 9y ago

Planes are mostly automated. The pilots are involved for takeoff and landing or emergencies, but little else. All modern Airbus or Boeing planes are mostly flown with autopilot. The human component is still involved primarily for the "what if it breaks" case where the software isn't there today. A computer would likely have never considered putting a plane into the Hudson river, but that pilot saved a lot of people by doing it. Actual aircraft can be fully automated for landing at least. In the US Army, I flew the Shadow 200 TUAV and it had a thing called the T.A.L.S. (Tactical Automated Landing System)[1] which does exactly what you'd assume it does by the acronymn. It is a monopulse radar tracking system on the ground with a transponder on the plane. You fly the UAV (Unmanned Aerial Vehicle) into a small area at one end of the runway and click the "Land AV" button (A.V. == Aerial Vehicle) and the landing is 100% hands off. You have the option to cancel the landing if wind or the parameters are off down to 10ft, but below that it is land or crash trying! For trains, the safest ones are automated, but Unions (in the US at least) prevent most of the autonomous technology from being deployed. Where I live, in Chicago, we had a train conductor fall asleep and the train went up the escalator and crashed into the turnstiles at terminal 2 of Ohare[2]. A computer would have prevented this from happening as a computer would neither have been speeding or sleeping. In that incident, the automated breaking systems had never been tested and in fact were configured / setup wrong, so they both failed. This has been rectified since and additional barriers have been constructed. That being said, there are lots of fully automated trains[3], you just might be unaware of them. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AAI_RQ-7_Shadow#Design [2] http://www.chicagotribune.com/g00/news/ct-ohare-blue-line-crash-ntsb-report-met-20150326-story.html?i10c.referrer=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.google.com%2F [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_automated_urban_metro_subway_systems#Grade_of_Automation_4_Systems

nradov 9y ago
Military UAVs have a high crash rate. There's no autopilot which could have successfully landed an Airbus A320 in the Hudson River.
- throwawayjava 9y ago
  And no autopilot would intentionally ram a plane into the side of a mountain. These edge-cases are uninteresting IMO.

trekky1700 9y ago

From what a pilot told me, I believe the A320 he flies can take off, fly, and land totally on its own. I'm sure the same is true for other planes. Also, if I recall correctly, he said in certain conditions it's against regulations for a pilot to be manually controlling the aircraft, such as landings in high winds.

Piskvorrr 9y ago
Fairly sure it still needs the pilot to tell it "now we're taking off", "now we're cruising", "now we're landing" (and under what parameters). Doing that switch automatically seems unsafe. The other part sounds improbable - quite the opposite, a pilot always needs to be able to take over in case the automatic systems fail.
cmurf 9y ago
Literally none of this is true. "land totally on its own" suggests autonomy. In reality it's a three part certification: pilot, plane (autopilot), and runway. There is only one zero visibility landing system, and that's the ILS CAT IIIc.[1] If there's no ground capability for the runway (does not exist or is down for maintenance) then the plane can't do a CAT IIIc landing. In practice there is no such thing as landing without an explicit clearance to land. Clearance is given by ATC to the pilot via AM radio. The autopilot has no language listening or speaking skills at all. Numerous clearance modifications happen during a flight, given verbally.[2] The plane also doesn't taxi itself into position, and it doesn't retract or subsequently deploy landing gear. Many tasks aren't available to the autopilot, nor are many transitions between tasks. About the last statement, FAR 91.3(a) The pilot in command of an aircraft is directly responsible for, and is the final authority as to, the operation of that aircraft. You could construe FAR 91.13(a)No person may operate an aircraft in a careless or reckless manner so as to endanger the life or property of another. as requiring the pilot to use automation if the aircraft manufacturer requires it in certain situations. Otherwise, no, and I have only ever heard of autopilots needing to be disabled in high wind situations. [1] Example instrument approach procedure. Scroll to the bottom and you'll see it explicitly requires ground navaids and a certified crew. http://155.178.201.160/d-tpp/1709/09077I35RC2_3.PDF http://155.178.201.160/d-tpp/1709/09077I35RC2_3.PDF [2] Example STAR which most airports don't have, but when they do you'll even see these are really just designed to allow ATC to "plug in" a smaller subset of data like an altitude or speed, without having to recite the entire arrival instructions. Can it be automated? No, because the variables are delivered by voice. The STAR is useless without the variables, and variables are useless without the STAR. http://155.178.201.160/d-tpp/1709/09077POWDR.PDF http://155.178.201.160/d-tpp/1709/09077POWDR.PDF

FieryTransition 9y ago

We have automated trains in Denmark in Copenhagen which are widely used everyday by the public, so it's not like it doesn't exist. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copenhagen_Metro https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copenhagen_Metro

mixedbit 9y ago

Can it be that railways are often monopolized, and getting access to the infrastructure is difficult for new companies, which hampers innovation?

TJ-14 9y ago

Subway trains in my city (Vancouver) are autonomous

Bartweiss 9y ago

One point would be that both planes and trains are professionally operated already. That means three of the biggest incentives to automate are missing. First, they have few human-error crashes; they're both significantly safer than automobiles, so unless automation can do better-than-human disaster recovery (not likely yet) there's minimal safety advantage. You have to outperform well-trained humans instead of random people to save lives. Second, they don't take much time per traveller to operate. Both often have 100+ passengers per operator, making it relatively cheap to employ skilled human labor. Cars average around 2:1, so there's a lot more time being wasted per passenger-hour. Third, cars have highly flexible usage. Planes and trains are generally moving people or cargo to approximate destinations, and travel to places design to store them. Cars spend lots of time arriving in storage-free areas - what if your car dropped you off at work and drove to a garage outside the city? And they do lots of last-mile transit - what if your car could go pick up your groceries or dry-cleaning without you? Broadly, I think there's way more safety and financial incentive for 100% driverless operation of cars than any other mode of travel.

Piskvorrr 9y ago
Good points. Automated train control maps are not even 2D: they're directed graphs, precisely mapped to sub-foot precision, with all permissible edges fully checked in advance, at design and at mapping. Far easier to navigate than a road network, which can be simplified and approximated to a directed graph, but 1. at the cost of some precision, and 2. orders of magnitude more likely to change unnoticed.
- fastball 9y ago
  Unions.

ZeroGravitas 9y ago

One argument is just scale. So, if it costs a billion dollars to make a good AI driver, then if you put it in a million cars then it's costs 1000 dollars each and you could eliminate lots of jobs where the main cost is the human (delivery, taxi) so providing a ready sales avenue for your self-driving car (or tech). If you put it in trains then you can maybe drive thousands of trains, and the human is a relatively low cost element of a train service so there's less room to expand. I don't know if this is true, or even if the logic I outlined above pencils out with real data but it probably contributes in some way.

dreamcompiler 9y ago

Planes have been automated to some degree for 100 years. Fully automating a plane at the equivalent of Level 5 is almost a trivial problem compared to doing so with cars. The reason planes aren't automated is mostly social, not technical. Whereas with cars it's decidedly both.

cmurf 9y ago
Planes aren't automated mostly for technical and infrastructural reasons, the exact opposite of what you stated. The social worry of pilotless airplanes inhibits the massive investment that would be required to solve the technical and infrastructure limitations of the existing system.
- dreamcompiler 9y ago
  There are very few technical and infrastructure issues remaining. No such investment is necessary. https://jonathannen.com/captain-ai.html https://jonathannen.com/captain-ai.html
  - cmurf 9y ago
    Really? No investment at all? At least it's a falsifiable statement. Denver International Airport has 10 runways. Only three have ILS CAT IIIc approaches, and that is the only instrument approach procedure that permits full autoland in zero visibility. So you're saying it's completely OK to have 1/3 utilization of the airport's runways for automated landings. Oh and, those three runways? 34L, 34R, 35R. They all point north. So you can't do auto landings to the east, west, or south. Due to wind direction, your planes won't be able to land on quite a few days out of the year, at all. And in fact the wind could shift while a flight is enroute and now where does it go? All of a sudden the required alternate may be insufficient because a simple wind shift, rather than a change in visibility, becomes the new metric for whether a plane can land or not, and whether the alternate is legal. This is one logical flaw. There are thousands of these. Totally surmountable, with metric tons of money. But you said no investments necessary.

colordrops 9y ago

Modern airliners _are_ mostly autonomous, and can even land themselves if necessary. Pilots are there as a safety margin. I've been on an automated city train as well, I believe in China.

cmurf 9y ago
Modern airlines are not mostly autonomous. I'll define it this way: remove the pilots from a flight at various stages along its route and see what happens. Multiple outcomes are possible but one is certain, it's not landing at the intended destination. If it were mostly autonomous, it'd land at destination at least some of the time. The chances of this happening today are 0.
- colordrops 9y ago
  That's because human checkpoints are intentionally wired into the workflow of a modern airliner. If those checkpoints were automated, the plane could indeed fly and land on its own. And I suspect the safety margins are not far from what is needed to automate the rest of the flight. The space shuttle's only system that absolutely required human intervention was the landing gears, and that was to ensure that humans were always necessarily in the loop. That doesn't mean that the shuttle wasn't _MOSTLY_ automated.
  - cmurf 9y ago
    automated != autonomous, the assertion I replied to was that "airliners _are_ mostly autonomous" which is not true. >If those checkpoints were automated If there were unicorns... >the plane could indeed fly and land on its own. No, and its annoying that you're asserting things you clearly don't understand. As I mention elsewhere, the only technology we currently have for precision instrument landings in zero weather visibility (the only 100% autoland) is the ILS CAT IIIc approach. The overwhelming majority of airports in the country do not have that infrastructure, nor do most airplanes. I'm a pilot, you clearly aren't. There are numerous other factors here, but just the fact you can't land wherever you want, at most airports with most aircraft, is enough to prove your assertion false.

keithly 9y ago

Also, planes and trains have unionized employees who don't want give up their jobs to automation.

Piskvorrr 9y ago

Oh, new trains are full auto, no worries. Retrofitting an entire fleet and tracks, now there's the issue - follow the money, and you'll see why even automatic trains are only programmed to follow the usual route, and for diversions, the driver would need to step in. Plus having a person in the cockpit to push the Big Red Button helps with all sorts of legal issues.

throwawayjava 9y ago

The economics couldn't be more different. Driver salary is 26% of the cost of trucking. Driver salary is 52% of the cost of a taxi. Those numbers are in the single digits for aircraft and trains. We could replace pilots and train operators, technologically speaking. But the incentives are not (yet) large enough to overcome the regulatory and cultural barriers. We'd rather have that extra order of magnitude of safety, because it costs so little compared to other expenses. The cost/benefit calculation for drivers is fundamentally different.

BurningFrog 9y ago
> Driver salary is 52% of the cost of a taxi. On top of that, the space and interfaces for the driver is a substantial part of the cost and weight of the vehicle itself.
ghaff 9y ago
>Driver salary is 52% of the cost of a taxi. If you drop the utilization, the cost of the driver as a percentage probably goes up a bit. But here's the thing about those numbers. Yes, driver salary is a big chunk of taxi cost but flip things around. It's only about half the cost. In other words, there's this widespread assumption that autonomy totally changes the nature of automobiles and automobile ownership even though it only cuts the cost in half. Ask yourself. If you own a car today, would getting a 50% discount on taxi rides completely change your behavior. Maybe it would for some at the margins but only at the margins.
- euyyn 9y ago
  Getting a 50% discount on taxi rides would make me never consider any other option when I need a taxi.
  - ghaff 9y ago
    It depends on the circumstances. On the other hand, for me, if taxi rides were half the price I doubt it would affect my ridership at all over the course of a year. MAYBE for one or two marginal car rentals.

AndrewKemendo 9y ago

Planes can take off, cruise and land themselves in any survivable weather condition with existing automated controls. However, people would be terrified of flying without a pilot and there are so many legal hurdles that it's not cost effective to do so.

dboreham 9y ago

Also: where are the self-driving attorneys? A very constrained problem domain where all the answers can be looked up in books, prior cases etc. Vastly expensive human drivers needs at present. No chance of killing anyone. We should have armies of automated lawyers already, no?