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> Their future is in autonomous however, which will never be the ambulance business (it will never be autonomous, ambulance drivers frequently have to break sta

by dsacco 9y ago

> Their future is in autonomous however, which will never be the ambulance business (it will never be autonomous, ambulance drivers frequently have to break standard driving laws in emergencies, drive at high speeds, drive around vehicles, etc). None of these are reasons for ambulances to not be autonomous. If you accept that most other vehicles will be fully autonomous, ambulances do not require anything further extraordinary to also be autonomous. The vehicles on the road would likely be networked, at least within a nexus of proximity, and move out of the way of the ambulance so it could speed past them. NB: I’m not saying ambulances will be autonomous. I’m just saying that if everything else is, the ambulances have no significant (technical) obstacle for also being autonomous either. A significant theoretical advantage of fully autonomous vehicles is not simply that the modal vehicle is safer than a human, but that a networked and autonomous fleet is hyper-efficient and hyper-aware as a hive mind.

namelost 9y ago
It is very problematic, e.g. how would you develop such a system? No city is going to allow you to break traffic laws to train an autonomous ambulance. At best you could make one for rural areas. I think the problem is probably AI-complete and would require human-like abilities of abstraction to train.
- WWLink 9y ago
  Once autonomous cars become common enough, and we have a common protocol for communicating between them, I'm pretty sure the cities will be ok with it. The autonomous cars could be instructed to move out of the way for an ambulance to come through and/or stop at intersections, which would actually make things much safer for the ambulance. Shoot, it'd be safer even if the ambulances weren't autonomous - because the cars would be reacting in a predictable manner.
  - adrianN 9y ago
    So in a few decades we can start thinking about it.

by dsacco 9y ago

namelost 9y ago

It is very problematic, e.g. how would you develop such a system? No city is going to allow you to break traffic laws to train an autonomous ambulance. At best you could make one for rural areas. I think the problem is probably AI-complete and would require human-like abilities of abstraction to train.

WWLink 9y ago
Once autonomous cars become common enough, and we have a common protocol for communicating between them, I'm pretty sure the cities will be ok with it. The autonomous cars could be instructed to move out of the way for an ambulance to come through and/or stop at intersections, which would actually make things much safer for the ambulance. Shoot, it'd be safer even if the ambulances weren't autonomous - because the cars would be reacting in a predictable manner.
- adrianN 9y ago
  So in a few decades we can start thinking about it.