I've decided not to continue on this subject.

Would be much easier to charge up a bunch of car batteries and short them for a giant arc flash explosion. Throw in a couple tanks of hydrogen and oxygen.

"No, we get to work on time because we leave with enough time to get there. Maybe if you have to speed and drive recklessly to make it to work, you should just leave five minutes earlier?"

Do you even drive? I'm glad to see you have absolute control of everything in your life and on the road. Just sanctimonious nonsense. Live in the real world, the autocars will have to.

"The irony here is that autonomous cars will be able to tell you fairly accurately how long it will take to get anywhere based on the possible routes and current traffic conditions. So, if your car says it'll take 27 minutes to get to work but you don't leave until you only have 15 minutes left because you're sure you can make it... that's your own fault."

Irony? And how many digits from a calculator do you use? Alexa tells me it will take 40 minutes to get to work. It never does. That is her best calculation at that instant. It takes me 20 minutes to get to the place that may have a traffic jam of some unpredictable intensity. She can't predict the future any better than I can.

At this point I'm not sure if you're trolling or not. That's what people currently do -- just stare out of the window in front of them for hours every day, trying not to run into another person. Can you not think of anything else you could do with that time if you didn't have to keep your eyes on the road? Maybe read a book, catch up on the news, or play a video game?

Trolling? More reflexive commenting from your internet bag of comment tricks (logic, irony, trolling)? If you are just staring out the window when you drive I hope never to see you on a road I'm driving on. And there is a large difference between reading a book or playing a video game when you want to and when you have to. Am I supposed to do those things every single day whether I feel like it or not -- "for hours every day"?

You live in a theoretical techie world where everything is predictable, but people live in a much messier world, the real world. And your absolute trust in computer technology is sweet - innocent and naive, but sweet. Don't change.

Ever seen an arc flash explosion?

Autonomous vehicles will have to scrupulously obey the law. But society and business depend on the mass NOT obeying the law. We get to work on time because we cheat. How long would it take you to do anything if you could not depend on the timing from route selection and speed? You would not be able to project the future. And huge chunks of your life would disappear into these prison-pod vehicles full of people desperately checking their watches. Also, how about the fact that actually driving the vehicle takes up the time. Do you really want to sit staring out the window for the entire trip? Are we there yet? Are we there yet?

So far, emotionally overwrought. And according to the modern way, it humanizes Daredevil to the point that he is just a weird karate guy who just happens to stumble to a win in a fight. I'm waiting for the inevitable feminization of the storyline and the turning it from a male-centered story about a male superhero to a story about women. That seems to be "de rigueur" today. I hope they avoid the incredibly stupid mistake of the Ben Affleck version where the hero gets his ass kicked by a women (boot in the face scene.). The whole thing has a "Dexter" feel to it somehow. As for superheros, a bit of dark is good, but the trend is to make them psychopathic now. Not good. They should avoid that.

that a fully charged car battery is a bomb? Or will we have to have some nut job terrorist drive a truck full of these up to a building and short them to understand that? Energy is energy and high voltage, high current shorts are explosions capable of creating expanding plasmas at thousands of degrees. I roughly calculated once that the energy equivalent of the gasoline in my gas tank was 240 sticks of dynamite. Should we expect it to be any different for batteries? Tell me why not.

Watch the noise level in our communities go through the roof as these devices become commonly used by business, government, and police. When you see drones in videos you seldom have audio.

P.S. In the area of promises by techies with a need to make a buck: http://graphics.latimes.com/mi...

wind, rain, tornadoes, hurricanes, crazy drivers, mechanical breakdowns etc etc etc along with a few Black Swan events and then you are "only" killed, what, 20% of the time instead of 1%? They will promise you anything to make a buck, and they will kill as many as they have to to accomplish the goal of making a buck.

"People like to ride horses too but you don't see many of those around these days do you? For most people cars are an expensive tool and little more."

Childish and irrelevant.

"Not really following the logic of this. Yeah people like cars but there are plenty of ways to be social that do not involve cars."

Just another way of saying you don't understand the point.

" How about tens of thousands of auto fatalities per year"

You are either incapable of perspective with regard to numbers, or you are a hyperliberal who demands that all rights and freedoms of the mass recede before the needs of the individual. Are you one of those who believe that "if one life can be saved..." all rights have to be destroyed? Do you know that the national death rate of all americans is over 2 million per year? In ten years that is over twenty million dead - a real holocaust except it is not. It is life. The Fraction of motor vehicle deaths relative to total population is close to 0.0001. Miniscule. See this for some adult perspective: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L...

"Quite a few planes are already highly automated. Big airliners aren't far from being able to handle the entire flight without a pilot actually being technically necessary for routine flights. Autopilot and navigation has been routine for a long time now and a lot of the technology for drones is easily transferable to manned flight. Heck the space shuttle and most space flight is essentially fully automated - the "pilot" is mostly just a backup system."

I'm well aware of this. We need to allow something that has been doable for decades.

People actually like to drive. And, I doubt the randomness of destination will be able to be replicated by an autonomous vehicle. That is to say, it won't be able to drive anywhere. There is also a tremendous social good to the population interacting with each other by driving. That positive will disappear if autonomous cars were to take over. But they never will. It is once again naive science fiction-ism perpetrated by those who desire to make money off a forced change for no good reason. Now, planes flying themselves, that would be good considering recent headlines.

Calling programmed machines "robots" is a childish mistake because it evokes almost a hundred years of sci-fi emotion. I suggest we stop calling programmed machines robots. And let's stop the over promising of what they can do. Besides, there is no such thing as "artificial intelligence." It is just clever programming. Why do we invent such nonsensical phrases and then feel we much stick slavishly to them generation after generation? Nature built the "robot" for this environment, and it is us. We are not going to replicate our ability to deal with our environment easily, or at all.

Get rid of human pilots. Planes have been able to fly and land themselves for decades now. Strangely, we change laws to allow testing and use of driverless cars that are fairly primitive but well-developed technology that flies planes and lands them is not trusted. Start with one plane on one route and give steep discounts on tickets.

A camera inside the cockpit and a camera outside at the door. There should be a remote door unlock capability that allows a locked out person to access the cockpit. They knew there was a problem before the crash. They could have monitored the door and cockpit and unlocked the door remotely.