SUBSIM Radio Room Forums - View Single Post - Will driving license be obsolete in the future ?

Oberon · 10-27-15, 04:43 PM

I think it's going to be a few decades yet before driverless cars and transport come into full service. We've had driverless trains now for over two decades but they've remained either as small light transport devices (Docklands Light Railway) or have a driver on stand-by to take over if something goes wrong (Jubilee line underground) and the idea of taking the driver completely out of the cab has received a lot of negative pushback from Transport Unions. I can understand this, after all, it's going to make a lot of people unemployed if you remove the human factor from transportation driving. Likewise in aircraft, they can pretty much fly themselves on autopilot now, I'm not sure about take-off but I'm pretty sure the most recent Airbus (and therefore likely Boeing too) craft can land on autopilot. The amount of crew in the cockpit has reduced since I was a child, once upon a time there would be at least three, sometimes four. Pilot, Co-pilot, Navigator and Engineer. Now it's just Pilot and Co-pilot, with computers taking the role of Navigator and Engineer.

One question that I have seen come up again and again with regards to driverless cars, and it's one that I don't think that anyone has been able to get a good answer to. So far driverless cars have avoided accidents through their superior computing reflexes, but what would the computer car do if there came a time when it had to choose between crashing into a pedestrian, or into an inanimate object, thus injuring or killing the occupants of the car. Would it determine how many occupants are in the car and weigh that against the life of one person on the road and thus hit the person on the road and spare the four occupants of the car? How would it determine who to hurt and who to save?
That's a determination that is special to a road based vehicle as opposed to a train or ship or plane because of the open nature of the path the vehicle is travelling, you can't swerve around someone in a train

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I would be very interested to see how such a scenario would be played out by the onboard computer, because you can guarantee that it will happen at some point and when it does and someone is hurt, the media will be all over it like flies.

10-27-15, 04:43 PM	#2
Oberon Lucky Jack Join Date: Jul 2002 Posts: 25,976 Downloads: 61 Uploads: 20	I think it's going to be a few decades yet before driverless cars and transport come into full service. We've had driverless trains now for over two decades but they've remained either as small light transport devices (Docklands Light Railway) or have a driver on stand-by to take over if something goes wrong (Jubilee line underground) and the idea of taking the driver completely out of the cab has received a lot of negative pushback from Transport Unions. I can understand this, after all, it's going to make a lot of people unemployed if you remove the human factor from transportation driving. Likewise in aircraft, they can pretty much fly themselves on autopilot now, I'm not sure about take-off but I'm pretty sure the most recent Airbus (and therefore likely Boeing too) craft can land on autopilot. The amount of crew in the cockpit has reduced since I was a child, once upon a time there would be at least three, sometimes four. Pilot, Co-pilot, Navigator and Engineer. Now it's just Pilot and Co-pilot, with computers taking the role of Navigator and Engineer. One question that I have seen come up again and again with regards to driverless cars, and it's one that I don't think that anyone has been able to get a good answer to. So far driverless cars have avoided accidents through their superior computing reflexes, but what would the computer car do if there came a time when it had to choose between crashing into a pedestrian, or into an inanimate object, thus injuring or killing the occupants of the car. Would it determine how many occupants are in the car and weigh that against the life of one person on the road and thus hit the person on the road and spare the four occupants of the car? How would it determine who to hurt and who to save? That's a determination that is special to a road based vehicle as opposed to a train or ship or plane because of the open nature of the path the vehicle is travelling, you can't swerve around someone in a train . I would be very interested to see how such a scenario would be played out by the onboard computer, because you can guarantee that it will happen at some point and when it does and someone is hurt, the media will be all over it like flies.