Speech recognition will continue to get marginally better, but it will never reach a point where you'll be able to freely talk to a computer just as another person. Speech recognition has already been around for decades, and there's not a single system that I've used that's anything but frustrating. Improvements to speech recognition since last decade have been less than marginal. And speech recognition is a far simpler system than whats required for self driving cars, not to mention that self driving cars will also have to deal with making decisions of legal and moral liability.

 

oh really?
https://www.engadget.com/2017/03/10/...curacy-record/
https://play.google.com/store/apps/d...andwriting.ime

my phone transcribes voicemail into text and i almost never need to actually listen to the voice mail these days.

more and more phone calls are being taken AND INITIATED entirely by computers. some are better than others, but the better ones are pretty incredible, allowing entire conversations with only one human on the line. and since the computers work 24 hours a day, answer the phone right away, and get better continuously, and cost a fraction of actual call centers, the latter are in their last dying breath.

it's actually self-fulfilling... as drivers 'do less', are distracted more, they will basically become useless in the vehicle anyway and anyone with common sense wouldn't want 'that' person having anything to do with driving! now i do believe while some cars will be smarter than others, that there will be situations (as you've outlined over and over) where a car basically 'gives up' and just pulls over and stops. at that point the occupants can get out and walk, or request another car to come pick them up. it will work itself out.

 

The question is not "Can it react fast enough?". Computerized systems make decisions hundreds or thousands of times every second.

The question is "Can it react correctly?". Humans react "correctly" because we continually learn and we continually learn because we have been taught since we were old enough to understand what is happening around us. But we do not know what we are teaching and what we are learning, so it is extremely difficult to "teach" (program) a computer with everything that we know, especially when it comes to something as complex as reacting to something as haphazard as human and motor vehicle traffic.

 

There was a TV commercial playing here recently sponsored by one of the big Canadian banks. It shows a woman calling the calling centre of the bank and assuming that she is talking to a machine when, in fact, she is talking to a real, live person.

We may not yet be at the point where we can carry on a real-time, one-on-one argument with a machine, but for most day-to-day, question-and-answer-with-instructions interactions (such as when you are initially calling a bank or calling to make a voice order as opposed to online shopping), voice recognition now works quite well.

The problem with in-car systems is background noise and (very) limited memory space. Voice recognition is a memory hog: interact with a large computer (over the phone or over the internet) is not a problem but interacting with a hand-held (including in-car system) without a large computer backup is not very good.

 

I'm glad you brought up transcribed voicemail. Usually the transcribed email is half assed, and then it's your human mind that makes sense of out seemingly a bunch of gibberish, depending on the content, on whom the voice mail came from, your expectation, and generally what it reads similar to. It takes a human mind to make those analogies.

Here's another good example, think a computer can be coded to read that accurately? When it gets to an a combination of letters that can be rearranged several possible ways, there's no way for it to differentiate which one is right - it takes a human mind to do that.

 

There is no question the technology isn't perfect now. But I'm really surprised that anybody doesn't see a future where this and many other technologies will be perfected...including technology we can't even conceive today.

Remarkably short sighted to think otherwise IMHO.

 

in fact, AI is advancing so fast that many visionary geniuses (including elon musk and stephen hawking to name two) are very concerned about it being used for no good.

 

Yes, I've read that as well. The "robots" will have the higher intelligence and will be taking us humans over! Not saying it couldn't happen, but I have to wear my tin foil hat as I write this. I'm waiting for the 2nd season of Westworld to see if it actually happens.

 

^^ Exactly. And this is also the reason why I feel it's important that for those of us who actually value human driving as an act of passion and skill that inherently requires training, safety, attentiveness, alertness, intuition and experience to do as much as we can to take it all seriously both in terms of standing up for responsible human driving as well as every single time we do drive a car.

By and large I see see increased automation of the driving experience as a boon for safety but also a slippery slope that is currently on a fine line. In reality it is very possible to be a human driver and maintain a very acceptable level of safety most automobiles currently on the road even today (and not just brand new ones). But in a future where it is an optional thing that is not required of someone, the less you engage in this skill the less you will be suited for it compared to a machine that does not suffer any distraction of fatigue and can see in 360 degrees all the time and which never gets rusty on the particulars.

It is my hope that the limitations of human beings as drivers who choose to fairly constantly engage in the practice exactly as we do today will be tolerated while the extremely obvious problems of distraction and inebriation will be eliminated through countermeasures embedded in devices as well as in the vehicles themselves.

All the more reason for anyone who actually likes doing this to continue using the steering wheels, pedals, gearshifts (if applicable), training, perception and intuition and put down the distractions and refrain from driving when we aren't in an alert enough state to drive.

We'll all be using self-driving appliances in one form or another but in the far future not everyone will want to drive themselves and it may be relegated to a minority of society no matter the age of the person in question but I hope there is still respect for those of us who wish to put in the effort, work and evaluation time with complete seriousness to either maintain driving qualifications and for the younger people to build up those qualifications and maintain them from the start.

 

^^^ good post.

as far as those wanting to continue to drive in the future, it should still be possible, with two caveats... insurance may become much more expensive for those who choose to still drive, and the car is likely to intervene by itself if it detects any 'inappropriate' driving. it's also likely the car will be sending all telemetry directly to the insurance provider anyway, so reckless driving will mean more than risking a ticket, your insurance will simply be canceled.

 

I have no doubts that autonomous driving is in our future, and there are at least 40% of drivers that I currently encounter that I wish had it already. No movement at green lights, swerving into other lanes, taking a left from the right-hand or middle lane, driving lower than the speed limit. You name it. It may actually make life for those of us who actually focus on driving more pleasant. I may be willing to make higher insurance payments to keep traffic safe.

 

I missed this news, but California DMV recently released rules for self-driving cars to operate on CA roads.
http://money.cnn.com/2017/03/10/tech...page_tech_pool

The (fully) autonomous driving car is in our future, and it may be here sooner than we think or care for. Och, stay away from CA !!

 

If the focus here is on autonomous driving, I will offer a different perspective. Someone told me his friend owns a mess of car dealerships in the xth largest city in the nation. He is trying to over the next 10 years, get out of the business. He doesn't see this as being a growth industry nor profitable in the near future. Demographics are changing. The younger generation is not interested in cars as you and I are, and were. To use an example, this person cited his own daughter, who is one of those under 27 power brokers on Wall Street. She has never owned a car, and has no interest in ever owning a car. Now, some of this is because she's lived in Chicago, New York, Boston, Philadelphia, San Francisco, blah blah blah. Her generation uses a smart phone app and a car arrives to take them where they need to go.

My son is 3. Will he ever need to know how to drive a car? Easily, the answer is NO. When I was in Scandinavia in the late 90's, I was amazed how everyone I knew did not have a driver's license, and they were all in their mid 20's. this will be the case in the USA eventually.

You think car dealers resort to some pretty shady tactics to generate profits today? Wait until 2027!

 

It's true that a number of young people today are not car-enthusiasts, but that doesn't mean that the industry is going down the drain. A lot of sales are simply converting over to SUVS. That's why I can't even get a new 2018 Verano in the American market any more (I would have considered one).....Buick is dropping them in America (And maybe Regal sedans as well) for more SUV production.

 

https://www.macrumors.com/2017/04/27...s-suv-spotted/

A C/NET podcast about it....