But if I am not controlling my car, if it is fully automated, they why should i even be carrying insurance (other than comprehensive to cover a tree falling on my car or theft). Right now most states require all cars to carry bodily injury and damage to property insurance. There would also be no debate about it being driver error vs "sudden acceleration" these kinds of things would need to be streamlined instead of involving the car owner suing the manufacturer which is what is necessary most of the time these days.

If these are vehicles replace our current ones then people will not learn how to drive.... Why would you learn a skill for the .001% chance that you will need to use it instead of calling AAA and getting a tow.

Very true, but if all cars were fully automated all accidents would be "equipment failure" and none would be pilot error. That means a big change to insurance laws.... Why should I have insurance on my car when any failure isn't my fault?

From what I understand google has been arguing that the manufacturer should be held responsible.... Whie that probably does not mean jail time except in cases of gross negligence it would mean that insurance wise it would not be on the owner if his properly maintained equipment failed due to manufacturer flaw.

This is how it works today except most accidents are pilot error, not malfunction. When the car does the driving that will change, even if the number of accidents goes down the percent that is due to "equipment/software failure" will go up considerably.

Thats what we should call the first model.

"The True Scotsman, send your kids off to school in comfort while you sip coffee and read the news paper."

Wait.... news paper? Hummm.

And those people are held responsible for their fucked up mistakes. Who is responsible when the car makes a mistake. I sure as hell don't want to be financially responsible for some companies fuck up.

This isn't about FUD its a legitimate question of insurance policy and law that will have to be addressed if autonomous vehicles are going to become commonplace. They are not unsolvable problems but neither can the be ignored by sticking ones head in the sand the way you clearly would like to do just because "omg self driving cars... COOL!"

well if you started doing that I might vary my rate of deceleration quickly in order to avoid you, or stomp on the gas and try to pull around you to the side. I might do any number of things that a computer might particularly because those things might be technically illegal. More importantly though, the car will do what it is programmed to do and nothing else. If you know its programming you can exploit it including getting it to do things that the designers did not actually intended but that are behaviors that emerge from unusual or unexpected inputs. Humans are less predictable. Not that you can't still run someone off the road.

If I have to pay attention but the reality is that I dont actually have to do anything 90% of the time then long distance driving goes from a somewhat boring activity to a mind-blowingly monotonous hell which will almost certainly result in less attention being paid by the people who are the human backups to these systems. Keeping people engaged keeps them alert. After 3 hours of staring out the window for trouble and not seeing any "drivers" are going to be even more likely to get distracted.

Not really, apparently they cost about $100 to produce as is. I suppose they would get cheeper if you took out some of the computing based functionality.

People who have not used glass usually have expectations of ti that are not realistic... like they believe its a HUD that will overlay useful information over your field of vision, put peoples names above their heads and other magical things when the reality is it is a small, low res screen hovering at the edge of your vision that doesn't do a particularly good job of much of anything while not being very reactive to user input.

Part of those expectations are thanks to hollywood but you see the same thing in articles about the tech like the ones recently about doctors using them. People expect more than a few lines of text hovering off to their right because hell... these things are going to be used by doctors performing surgery, they must do something magic!

Oh yea, also they are insanely expensive, which also adds to the belief that they will be mind blowing and adds to the disappointment when they are not.

Generally speaking, given those expectations, it is not surprising that the reality is disappointing.

Ever since the beginning of time, man has yearned to destroy the sun...

No, it does not. I had a friend switch from an iPhone to a android. IT clearly indicates that the messages failed and if you tap them again it asks if you want to send it as a text message. The thing is the fail takes a few seconds and most people don't wait to see if a message actually sent before they jump off to doing something else.

Also, the woman's ability to send and receive texts was not hampered at all. She cannot receive the iMessages that her friends are trying to send her but she can text them and she can receive actual texts from anyone. Certainly it would be good for apple to be invalidating iMessage accounts that go off line like that the way they do with push notifications and I suppose that could be pushed back to the receiving phone to take that person off of the iMessage path. As it is the sender is best off removing the old messages and sending a new one to re-set it to text, that could be done automatically.... but it is actually the person sending the message that is experiencing the bug, the person who switched to android has a fully functional phone. I'm not sure she has much of a case here.

When the contacted me about a job in Seattle after I checked the box on their application that said I would not relocate I ignored the email. I got another one from the same recruiter a week later that was acting as though I were the rude one and that she had done me a favor by showing interest in hiring me for a totally undefined job in a location that I had no interest in moving to.

I have no idea why anybody works for them... they sure don't make the company seem appealing.

How about this AC... hydrogen fuel cells produce electricity, they do not drive electric generators.