4 more comments have been lost in the ether at this killed duplicate.

Taken to it's logical conclusion (where all road vehicles are automated) things like processing visuals becomes a lot simpler.

Most of the information will be preprocessed data - the road infrastructure, and knowledge of every other vehicle in the system. That's what it becomes - one homogeneous and optimisable system; not a single robot car making it's own decisions. Processing is done by servers in advance, not individual vehicles.

Real time visual processing then only has to be on the look out for things that are out of the ordinary, such as a deer running onto the road, and take caution. Something that is much easier to do when done with well coordinated cooperation with every other vehicle around you. The car behind isn't going to hit you; nor is the oncoming car in the opposite lane.

Even if every car in the situation doesn't have the stopping distance, they will all turn (where possible) in a coordinated manner to avoid or reduce collisions. The situation may be avoided in the first place, because the system knows about dangers specific to this stretch of road and will have limited speed and increase distance between vehicles appropriately.

If there is one thing that humans absolutely suck at, it's unspoken mass cooperation in an emergent system; our roads being the prime example.

People can't even keep the appropriate distance from the car in front to prevent collisions in an emergency stop; let alone leave enough distance to prevent traffic jams. Imagine a red light (real or virtual) turns green, and every car for a mile back accelerates at the same time. There's no queuing (the cause of jams).

Emergency services get a clear, safe and direct path to their destination.

Who knows, maybe the system even knows you have a flight reservation or a business meeting, or if you're just going to the mall or visiting friends and can prioritise intersections accordingly (though that is getting a little Orwell meets Skynet).

The hard part is going to be getting from our current fully manual and emergent system to a fully automated and coordinated system; but I'm really excited by the prospect it might happen in my lifetime.

so..im trying to play devil's advocate here.

Let's say the woman was a complete ass and completely disrespectful to the cop and let's even say she was talking on her cell phone so that there was actually a law broken. Let's say she did everything negative except actually being violent or being a threat.

and let's even say that the taser is completely 100 percent safe.

when is it ok to use non-lethal force on someone who is resisting and being antagonistic but yet not being violent and is completely NOT a threat.

If I was a police officer and I had to choose between getting physical/baton/fists/etc and just pressing a button on a compliance device, I'd want to just press a button too. Anyone would I suspect. How long do you attempt to reason with someone before saying, ok we're just spinning our wheels here and accomplishing nothing...time to take you in whether you like it or not.

My problem with the actual situation is that yeah, the taser is not non-lethal, it is LESS-lethal, big difference. so even if the woman was talking on her phone and thus committed a crime, I'd have a problem with using a taser on someone, risking their lives over something like that. ESPECIALLY since the woman posed absolutely zero threat.

And then you have the kids, even if you arrested her without incident, you still got two kids sitting there crying and scared as fuck. In the best situation the dad would go pick them up, but even that would take a ton of time and you still have the car sitting there. At worst, you've got no one to pick the kids up and you have to have another officer (a stranger to the kids) watch over them until the situation is resolved. Even in the best situation, the cops seem ill equipped to deal with that sort of situation.

There's got to be a better way to arrest people for smaller crimes like that instead of pulling them over and dragging them out of the car I can't stand people who talk on phones either and would agree there needs to be punishment for that as it is a risk to other drivers, but I REALLY don't want a situation like this either. Seems it would be safer for the cop too.

give me some robot cars damnit, remotely shut them down or divert them to the police station while locking the vehicle so they can't just jump out and a video screen notifying them of the infraction and communication with the cops so they can make arrangements for kids or other odd situations.

something that forces them to comply, but without endangering anyone needlessly.

Pretty cool but I'll be really impressed when we make a robotic car that can race up a mountain it's never seen before.

>> ^MarineGunrock:
NO! Just because something is in the tech channel, does NOT mean it belongs in the geek channel! There's NOTHING geeky about solar heating or tidal generators. Geek is more of comic books, computers, video games, D&D and that shit.
Tech could be all KINDS of things that don't belong there!


Kinda was my thinking for the channel, high tech stuff including new/alternative energy technologies, electronic devices, robots, cars, planes, ships, spacecraft, whatever. I was also thinking video games & computers etc. but more of a new technology/cutting edge kind of stuff, not the average run-of-the-mill games/computers type stuff.

What's wrong with hand-made? We have yet to make a robot that has the ability of the human hand, with all of it's sensory inputs. It's puzzling, that some things are perceived to be best made by hand and others aren't.

Do you mean DARPA? The Defense research robotic car race? That's neat stuff.

Tags changed from "video,funy, music,song ,videobuzz,car" to "robot car, japanese, park, prius, car" by gold star member Krupo.

It's one of those American robot cars.