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Forum: General Talk
08-04-2018, 07:19 PM
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Of course someone will think this is a good idea....
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Forum: General Talk
07-31-2018, 02:24 PM
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Thanks for the statistics, now can you give us the population of the US and the percentage of the population that made up these fatalities? Numbers like these sound dramatic, but if 33,000 people is less than one per cent of the population then it gives us a better perspective.
As for the rest, I disagree. teaching people to be good humans and take responsibility for their actions is not what a nanny state is. Making more laws and enforcing them would not be required if people didn't drink and drive or use their mobiles. The way to make that work is get them to understand that these behaviours increase their probability of being involved in an incident, which could result in serious injury or death. As with smoking, if society decided it was not a good idea to do these things and exerted peer pressure on the offenders then the number of instances would reduce. Other countries have driven successful campaigns, or at least they did years ago until people in general decided that their own safety was everyone elses responsibility.
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Forum: General Talk
07-31-2018, 04:24 AM
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Just asking, but how many people are killed on roads in your country per year? What percentage is that of the population? And then what is the number one cause of deaths in your country, and what ratio is that to the number of deaths on the roads? Bet you the number is really quite small when you compare it to the number if individual trips by car, bike, bus, lorry or any other road transport made every day.
Society has decided that smoking is wrong because it kills people, just as it has decided that asbestos should be banned and removed because people dies every year of asbestos related diseases. People die every year because of rock climbing, sailing and countless other activities that they elect to do and during which time they make decisions, and yet no-one is screaming to ban them.
I'm sorry but your proposition that using autonomous cars is a good way to reduce the number of fatalities on the roads stinks of the nanny state.
We are human. Countless generations of our ancestors survived wars, droughts, plagues, pestilence and anything else they world could throw at them to get to this point in time. If you want to reduce the number of deaths on the roads, don't take away all the human decision making processes, teach people to be better drivers!
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Forum: General Talk
07-23-2018, 02:13 AM
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There has been a concern raised in several aviation circles for a while now that pilots are not being trained to fly the aircraft, but are being trained to diagnose the problem first. This is not a recent event, there was a Ansett jumbo landed with the nose wheel up in 1994 and the investigation found that the flight deck crew had been concentrating on working out what the horn they were hearing was for and didn't fly the plane first.
The latest concern is that with the level of automation on flight decks the problem itself may be hidden, which was one of the conclusions on AF447. The flight deck crew spent so long looking for the fault which was giving the instruments the incorrect indication that they forgot to fly. I believe it is still the case that every aircraft must have a set of pitot-static instruments regardless of how computerised the flight deck is, and by concentrating on these the AF447 fault may have been more quickly identified.
As for drones, in my opinion the most significant difference between an autonomous aircraft and an autonomous car is the amount of traffic it has to contend with. OK the car only has two dimensions to care about not three, but the separation distances between the car and the hard things it has to not run into is considerably less than airborne traffic for a drone.
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Forum: General Talk
07-20-2018, 01:18 AM
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I read several very interesting studies into pilotless airliners, and while drone technology is available the learned concensus of opinion is that pilotless airliners will never be acceptable to the general public. The very thought that there is no human influence over the handling of the aircraft was studied and the overwhelming majority were against it.
I've spent too much time in the aviation industry and I'm definately against it. I want a trained flesh and blood pilot up there who can react to emergencies, analyse the symptoms and act accordingly, and if it's all going to end in tears I want him to arrive at the crash site before me.
Saying that if autonomous cars really kick off there may be a case for pilotless planes as societal values change, but then who would buy all the big watches and monopolise cocktail parties if there are no airline pilots.....:rolleyes:
But if we have autonomous vehicles, does that mean we don't need driving licences?
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Forum: General Talk
07-04-2018, 02:31 AM
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I'm on my second car that is fitted with a cruise control, and I hate the concept. The fact that I can set the speed and take my foot off the accelerator just feels wrong
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Forum: General Talk
07-03-2018, 03:35 AM
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They ran an autonomous vehicle trial on the local freeway last year, using cardboard cutouts of "obstacles" to see how it would react. The car successfully "saw" and stopped for other car shapes and people shapes, but ran straight through a kangaroo shape....
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Forum: General Talk
07-02-2018, 06:05 PM
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I agree with you Mark, but the trouble is with computers is they need to be given specific instructions what do to with the information. I'm sure there was another thread recently about artificial intelligence, and this is one of the cases where AI would be required.
I read some of the reports on recently reported incident where an autonomously driven vehicle collided with a pedestrian who was pushing a bike across the road. A lot of the reports pointed the finger at the "driver" (or rather the person who was sitting in the driving seat monitoring the cars progress) as they were not looking at the road at the time and could have prevented the collision. Personally I've had experience of being distracted by looking down at the centre console for something and looking up to find I'm feet from impacting a rather large red deer, so in this case I don't think the "driver" was any more guilty than the rest of us.
But the one thing that struck me about the incident was that the human pushing the bike should have been able to see the vehicle coming yet still decided to cross the road at that point.
Autonomous vehicles need to be programmed (in the strictest sense of the word) to drive defensively. That programming needs to track every other moving object in the vicinity and if there is the potential for an impact either slow or stop the car or taking avoiding action.
As we still have car incidents every day I would suggest we've failed to program human drivers to do it, so what hope have we got with machines?
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Forum: General Talk
06-30-2018, 03:48 AM
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I've been looking at the issue of autonomous vehicles from the perspective of engineering in the safety. As someone who has been involved in safety engineering for few years now, the one thing I've learnt is that having software make safety critical decisions is fraught with danger.
In short, you can't write safe software. Software inherently is either going to work or it won't, there is no point where the level of safety degrades. Software can work 999 times out of a thousand, but for that one other occasion a different set of input parameters means the answer you get is incorrect. So while you can't write safe software all you can actually do is use very strict processes and reviews to create the software with as few bugs in it as possible. Ask anyone with a technical knowledge of modern airliners how hard it is to create an autopilot system, or rather more than one separate autopilot system which works independently of each other and constantly votes on what action to take.
The other issue I have with autonomous vehicles is that the software driving the vehicle can only assume that the vehicle systems will operate when required. This in turn assumes that the vehicle is correctly maintained and the brakes and engine react as the software thinks they will. In order to slow or stop a vehicle efficiently the brake system must be fully functional, and the type pressures must be correct and the same on both sides (lower tyre pressures on one side with make a vehicle slew to one side).
Autonomous vehicles mean more than just not driving, if you can't trust a human to drive safely I wouldn't trust them to maintain the vehicle correctly.
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