KraneXL

Aka, an "educated" guess. It works well enough for me and more times than not.We're now living in a highly regulated society. We leaned the theater popcorn is using oil that' bad for you. Instead of just warning people and letting the decide, its use has been banned. More times than not, if its something new, it will be controlled.

Dave Cutter

Sure! Because no one complains if something brand new that they don't have is regulated. If cyclists end-up regulated to using bike paths only.... what portion of the population would care.... be upset... or cheer because the finger-flippers are off "their" highways? I really hope my thoughts are wrong. But I think road use for bicycles with be restricted as well as for human driven cars. I expect a quick change to all computer control... very quickly.

I-Like-To-Bike

This includes your claims about so-called testing and stats demonstrating how much safer so-called self driving cars are than the current methods. Nothing but guesses founded on your cursory reading of press releases and click bait articles ("historical events" in DaveSpeak) from industry flacks with a stake in the promotion of the latest thing.

Dave Cutter

No, no, no.... based on everything I've read this new tech works great. And it/this represents the normal advancement of technology. Since ole Ned Ludd…. took a large heavy tool and severely beat his loom (and supervisor)… tech has advanced faster than people can adapt.

Of course... self driving works... and will change forever the automotive industry. And with that change will come a huge change in the culture and society we live in. You did read the piece at the beginning of this thread... right?

I-Like-To-Bike

Yes of course it works; you read about "it" somewhere, believe whatever you think you read and expand on "it" with your own bold predictions; got it.


Yes I read the "piece" in your OP, see post #15 https://www.bikeforums.net/20388993-post15.html for my comments.

tandempower

I once heard a bus driver describe their bus as driving more like a Cadillac than other buses. As passengers, we don't generally pay attention to the brand of bus we're in, but we recognize that some buses feel more comfortable to ride in. I think it will be the same with self-driving cars. Some will feel better, look better, etc. and auto companies will put lots of market research and development into figuring out what appeals to passengers in order to market their cars in bulk to ride-share operators that buy lots of cars in bulk.

Probably the more sparsely-populated an area is, the more privately-owned self-driving cars there will be. In more populous areas, there will be more shared self-driving vehicles and less privately owned ones, while the opposite will be the case in less-populous areas, and it will take longer to wait for a ride-share in those less-populated areas because of that, which will prompt more people to want a private self-driving vehicle instead of waiting for a share-car.

Speed limits will decrease and there will be more roundabouts as self-driving cars gain popularity because that allows people to go the same distance in the same amount of time with less stopping and starting. Already these changes are happening because it's just silly to have 45mph speed limits when the average 5-mile trip still takes 15 minutes due to intersections and traffic. Human-driven cars give people the illusion of control over their speed when in reality they are just dependent on traffic patterns, light-timings, etc. When self-driving cars can cooperate to allow each other to enter a roundabout better than humans by adjusting their speed slightly long before entering the roundabout, traffic will flow much smoother without human drivers than with them.

Maybe driving jobs will be replaced with traffic-management jobs where people are assigned to monitor roundabouts and send out signals to certain clusters of vehicles to adjust their speed to stop congestion. Probably algorithms will be able to do a lot, but there may be some subjective/heuristic analysis and tweaking that benefits from including one or more human brains in the traffic management process.

Walter S

+1. IMO the real world and real weather conditions and the expense of good sensors and unresolved liability issues will keep self driving at bay for much longer than many pundits like to wish.

Rollfast

As long as my mom is driving me there no machine will do.

I-Like-To-Bike

"Like to wish" is an apropos description of the "critical thinking" process of BF dreamers deluded by the wishful thinking from pundits and media flacks who regurgitate Silicon Valley press releases.

Dave Cutter

You may very well be correct. Your guess of the time-table of future events.... should be as good as anyone's… certainly as good as mine. In my lifetime... I've seen some advances take place seemly overnight. Television went from a 3 city market of a few thousand households.... to nearly 80% of America... in a timespan of just two years. At the time.... it seemed like over night. Yet... the "advanced (better) battery" that will change everything.... has been as elusive as flying jetpacks.

Electric cars have been easily available (and even affordable) in the American car market since 2012. Yet even with (I believe... ) an anxious pool of consumers waiting for electric cars.... far less than a million electric cars have been sold in the US. Yet... Apple has managed to sell over BILLION iphones (since 2007) world-wide.

I myself.... am very active with "smart home" technology (Home Automation)… which has been around for over 40 years. And even with HUGE advancements recently... smart homes are still somewhat (if not extremely) rare. It's hard to figure.

Walter S

People tend to both over-estimate or under-estimate forecasts of technological progress in specific areas. That's because there is no crystal ball. To some people technology seems ultimately relentless - it will solve all technical problems eventually. Just look at how the modern world would be seen as magical in many ways to people that lived only one or two hundred years ago. But opportunities for advancement are in fact based on discoveries that lie in a huge spectrum that ranges from the likely to the unlikely to the impossible based on the laws of physics (not the laws as we understand them but the laws in reality). The likelihood of an advancement is improved by other enabling advancements but may continue to lie dormant undiscovered because actual advancements are also based on need/demand in society - i.e. how bad do people want it or maybe how much would they like it assuming it's not even on the radar.

Your battery thing is a great example. Of course people would like more powerful longer lasting quick charging lightweight inexpensive batteries. We know the market would be huge especially to improve by orders of magnitude. I don't doubt that improvements will be seen. Maybe even dramatic improvements. But also maybe never. Or at least not till many other enabling and unlikely achievements are made. And when it comes to what discoveries are likely, who the hell can decide that?? If the discovery has already been made but faces some market development issues and economy of scale barriers then yes you could reasonably estimate something forthcoming. But otherwise you have little to go on when predicting specific technologies based on unknown discoveries.

Waiting since 2012 is not very long given the cycle of car ownership. But electric cars have had very limited range, especially the affordable cars you mention. Most people don't want a car that's only good for their commute (if that) but not for going on a trip cross country. And real life is not always following a routine. If you need to charge your car to make it thru the next day but you're going to spend the night at a friends house is it really appropriate for you to be drawing multi Kwatts off your friend's electrical system? And what if there's a bad storm and the power is out for a day or two?

I recently setup my home entertainment system around a Harmony Elite. I have a A/V receiver in my closet along with some remote-control devices including a roku, apple tv, google chromecast inputs to the receiver as well as a Echo Dot in my living room also wired to the A/V. When I say "alexa turn on cnn" the system turns on my A/V receiver, selects the roku receiver source, tells the roku to select sling-tv and choose cnn as the channel, turns on my tv screen and picks the hdmi1 input source. Now cnn plays on the tv. If I then say "alexa turn on youtube" it will know the receiver is already on and roku is already selected and will just tell the roku to exit to the main menu and then pick youtube were I see my home feed selections. While this is all cool and I've had fun making it work it did take quite a number of hours to configure it all and work thru the details. Not all of it was obvious. For example the harmony uses RF to talk to a hub in my closet to control my devices. But my tv is not in the closet with the other devices. I could have hooked up a "IR blaster" and wired that so my tv in the living room could receive instructions from the hub. But ultimately I found the hub could be configured to control the tv with IR instead of RF in which case you only need to point the remote at the tv, which comes naturally anyway. But getting all this figured out and teaching the harmony what all my devices are and arranging them into "activities" the harmony understands - that's a lot of work. WAY easier than stuff like this used to be (for example auto-discovery of many devices by scanning your home wifi router). But still a market that IMO is not ready for prime time. It's still for tech people.

I-Like-To-Bike

After configuring the audio controls for your home entertainment setup, what would you estimate is the actual progress gained over using a few "old fashioned" remote controls from your favorite easy chair or sofa, other than of course the gee whiz/oh wow factor ?

Dave Cutter

I use the terminator quote... to describe technologies progress:

https://youtu.be/zu0rP2VWLWw

Quote:

Originally Posted by Walter S

…

Yes.... I (somewhat) recently set-up several Amazon devices around the home.... as much of my lighting and other devices are also automated. I originally added Home Automation to control my Home Theater, and added voice control more than a decade ago using Microsoft's old SAPI5 Voice Recognition (running 24/7 on an XP laptop). The conversion to Amazon devices was a great step towards reducing the required technology and hardware. I now use a Raspberry Pi and the cloud allows for world-wide control (using my smart phone). But... IMHO I think Home Automation will never be more than a niche market.

Walter S

The difference is between locating four different remote controls and operating them correctly in the right sequence versus saying "alexa turn on cnn".

I-Like-To-Bike

That is useful.


Can Alexa recognize more than one specific person's voice commands to operate your system?

Walter S

Yes. No need to train it for your specific voice. I do see it make mistakes when there's lots of possibilities. For example I have to speak clearly when telling it which pandora station to play because I have some 50 or so and some sound alike. But it does a real good job - recent generations are real good at filtering other sound, like so you can speak over your music to tell it to turn it down or switch to another source etc.

Also cool to me is I have no visible equipment or hdmi cables or speaker wires or even power cords visible in my living room (except for a subwoofer on a shelf and the echo DOT that listens for commands). The speakers and the tv are in the wall. Everything else is behind a shut door in a closet.

Dave Cutter

Alexa (because I am a Amazon prime member) will also play almost piece of music I can think of... on [verbal request]. Even when that request is spoken by my 3 year old granddaughter.

Another cool function.... Alexa will call, connect, and [then] act as a hands-free phone for.... every number in my mobile phone directory.

Rollfast

That is like leaving a cellphone near a five year old. Make sure you tell it to ignore that feature until you give it password...

KraneXL

Does all that technology make you're more connected or less connected to everything around you?

Mobile 155

That was good, but it made me think, i guess you aren't married or have a interest in another person? MTBing must take up most of your time? LOL

Dave Cutter

I'm a gummy bear is a very popular song now-a-days in my home.

Dave Cutter

I don't really know.

I am positive my [mobile smart] phone has increased my connectivity to family. And.... my phone is also pretty solidly "remotely" connected to my home as well. So as far as "operatively connected" to my home... the answer would have to be a yes. But if the connectivity you refer to is the modern emotional connection people feel with other people then no. I don't feel [emotionally] connected to the machinery.

350htrr

Exactly… It's the beginning of the end of personal car ownership... IMO...

Mobile 155

Rollfast

I used to be attached to a battery powered device that took my attention away from the world, but they don't make cassette albums anymore and I want to hear the squealing tires before I die.

I'm practical now.