Ah, but they could do better, and why shouldn't they? Or anyway, why shouldn't cars do it for us? Anyway, there's no need to be quite so close together if a) you don't have human-induced accidents to begin with and b) the vehicles smoothly manage their speeds, rather than jerking back and forth. So the self-driving cars can get us where we're going faster and with less fuel burned in spite of it still not being a good idea for them to ride one another's bumpers.

Right, but only because the cars won't tailgate to begin with. They also won't weave through traffic; they'll smoothly organize themselves into lanes by speed with or without VtoV communications, and the speeds will be based on efficiency by default rather than someone trying to milk a few minutes out of their trip time. They'll efficiently plan for merges and make them ahead of time to keep the freeways flowing. All of this will make a massive difference without anything so silly as car trains.

I'm not against trains, they simply belong on rails.

They could, but a QR code sticker would take you straight to the product ordering page whether you used their app or not. I'm pretty sure the Amazon app already does that, anyway?

Why are you talking about the present like it's the future? This is the current situation. You have to keep your hands on the wheel, but this tech is already being sold.

The best ABS is better than the best human drivers in all driving conditions. Sadly, not all cars have the best ABS. All ABS in the USA since 2011, however, is at least marginally aware of its situation, because that's when yaw control became a mandatory feature. That's why all mass-production autos in the USA now have 4-wheel ABS. However, not all ABS is clever enough to do things like deliberately lock up a wheel to build up snow or gravel in front of the tire, so even if it knows where it is, it may not be able to do anything about it.

Even when ABS won't let you stop a car, it will still let you control it. Even very old ABS will do that on ice and snow. Only very good drivers will do better, though that is a case where you don't need to be superhuman to outwit the computer. That's not an indictment against ABS, however, only against cheap implementations.

I think we'll get a single pedal which controls speed, and the vehicle will simply act to prevent us from crashing into things. We'll have a brake pedal there to make us feel better, but we won't need to use it. EVs are already heading down this path.

Wait, what? Retail is going away, being replaced largely with internet sales. You can telecommute to those jobs all day. Medicine is increasingly being performed via telepresence and an expert system can do a better job of diagnosing most conditions than a physician. You could get it in the mail, stick the probes in the proper orifices and your finger into a receptacle for blood draw, then mail it back. Your internet-of-things scale (looking forward to that, eh?) can integrate. Freight is going away; the majority of OTR trucks (in the US, anyway) are owned by private fleets and those fleets carry a slight majority of all goods by mass, and they will certainly adopt self-driving trucks when the opportunity arises. Mining can absolutely be done by telepresence; in fact, mining vehicles already drive themselves between end points, and they could do the loading and unloading but that stuff is currently done by human operators last I heard. Farming is much the same; a human operator sits in the cab, but the latest and greatest machines actually steer themselves and the human is mostly there to press the big red button if someone should stray in front of the machine and not be recognized by onboard systems. Restaurants, yeah, that's a service industry. Refining is now mostly automated, a relative handful of workers run a whole plant.

Your argument is valid, but your examples are ridiculous. If a job isn't done directly by hand, and doesn't depend on face to face interaction, it can be automated out of existence or done by telepresence, or somewhere in between. Service and hand crafts are somewhat rapidly going to becone about the only jobs done by actual humans outside of setting up CNC machines... and it's obvious that doing machining setups is a job whose days are coming to a close as well. It won't be long before that's completely automated.

If you live in the USA, and you don't live in NY, then it's quaint to not have a car. It makes you a second-class citizen in a broad number of ways, and wastes your time brutally. It's easy to lose your shirt buying a car, but there's lots of cheap and reliable basic transportation options which are in fact cheaper to own than using public transportation for all but the most basic travel.

In countries with an emphasis on functional public transportation, reasonable rent control and the like, sure. You can reasonably exist without a car, even flourish.

No, no they can not. The reason is roads. To expand upon that, using roads as the infrastructure for self-driving vehicles only makes sense when you already have many roads. Obviously, that is the situation, but it is one which is far less than ideal. You don't want vehicles driving in close formation because of the risk of failure. If the vehicles were on rails, then the risk would be far lower, and safe failure modes far easier to design in. Even with vehicle-to-vehicle communications, and even assuming you could trust them which would be stupid in any case, you'd still have the inherent physical problems of dealing with roads and rubber to deal with.

And I imagine the first really magnificent high-speed umpty-hojillion-fatality incident involving one of these coordinated car trains putting a quick stop to the practice, assuming anyone is stupid enough to try it in the real world to begin with.

I imagine a future in which people stop asking this incredibly stupid question and recognize that the car will (a) be less likely to be in that position to begin with since it won't break the law regarding getting into those situations and (b) will simply follow the law, and won't make any ethical decisions whatsoever. It will drive into whatever is in its lane, but it won't drive in such a way as to erroneously drive into something in its lane to begin with — see point (a).

I also imagine a future in which people don't mod up such inane comments, but I imagine that future is even further away. So far I've gotten modded up making this same response on the last two or three different autonomous driving conversations here on Slashdot. Is it Groundhog day, or what?

Now that is fascinating. FTFN[ewspost]:

Uh, no. No, that is not the problem. The problem is that the CA has been demonstrated to use untrustworthy practices. They are fundamentally untrustworthy, and Google did the Only Right Thing(tm) while Mozilla is failing, and hard.

Well if the robot is built by a (now human-less) American robotics company, in (the former) USA, and sent back in time to assassinate/protect an American living in Los Angeles, I would think the machines would program it with an American accent.

Weird coincidence: watched part of it last night. (Through Harry the cabbie. Too tired to watch any more)

A better solution would be a QR code sticker. You can change the water filter, then scan the code with your phone. The transaction goes through your phone anyway... assuming you left bluetooth on, which I imagine is the technology used for these devices. Better to just use the phone to begin with.

If Amazon would just slap a QR code on everything they sell, you could use your phone to buy another one. It might also be used for verification that a picking robot has located the correct item.

The state doesn't have unlimited resources, so by definition it should not make laws it can't or shouldn't reasonably enforce.

Alas, we know that's not how it works.

Only if you have poor reading comprehension skills.

Nobody suggested abolishing the state.

This rubbish is Office 365.

No. This is about Office 365, not about Office for Windows.