Also, this is a little unrelated but to extrapolate on the driving while sober issue. I really think that the next 20 to 50 years when self-driving cars are completely mainstream and more common than manually driven vehicles, the licensing agencies will actually require a special restriction on your driver's license to drive manually driven vehicles. A lot of the safety concerns that we have these days will be taken out of the pool because cars will be inherently safer with less user control. As long as everything's still working. Then, I think that as these self-driving cars become mainstream, municipalities are going to start setting up tracks to streamline the driving process and override/control the individual vehicles computers for safety reasons. It might take another 200 years to get to that point though considering how far behind we are on maintaining normal infrastructure these days.
ETA: Because this is a serious thread and I'm not supposed to just post videos . . . I guess what I'm saying is we don't need more laws, and government control, we need more responsible citizens.
Human driven cars will be banned on public roads in your life time. Forget this special restriction nonsense, a focused, alert, sober human will effectively be a weaving drunk compared to the machines.
I agree that that's eventually going to happen, but you see how people are about gun control. Any small restrictions are a huge fight. I think that the restrictions will start small as a part of your licensure but eventually manually driven cars will be banned altogether. It will be easier to ban them completely once the older cars fade out of use. We'll be talking about "back in our day" when you could drive your own car. I think the most realistic issue with self-driving cars is their hackability. They are not secure. That's why I suspect that Lanes controlled by municipalities of some sort will be developed so that the hackability danger of that isn't really an issue.
I suspect they will take an agent based approach. Each car makes its own decisions, and is constantly broadcasting its "intentions" to other cars to use in their own internal decision making process.
I completely disagree - unless you think 'wildered will live to be 195. I didn't just post that video because I'm a Rush nerd. The song draws its inspiration from an essay in Road & Track, "A Nice Morning Drive." This is one of those things where opinions are formed based on perspective - like how people that live in Manhattan think the world is overcrowded and headed to doomed pollution, while the farmers in South Georgia think they're nuts. Your assumption of what will happen in her lifetime may seem more likely in urban areas, but as long as there are rural schools, people who enjoy driving for pleasure on windy mountain roads, and dudes who want to rev the motor of a truck with a hemi, the will not happen, except at the point of a bayonet.
This. I can see driverless cars taking over certain aspects of commercial transportation, and I think we'll live to see the trucking industry become 100% automated, but people are way too obsessed with the driving experience of their cars to ever give it up. Good luck implementing that in an area where racing is the most popular sport and every other guy spends his weekends tinkering in his garage.
Not to mention motorcycles, good luck getting folks to give up their bikes. And then there's the very rural areas....many times I've been in places where my GPS says that I'm in some roadless void while gathering firewood or just fucking off in the woods on an old logging road. Also there are folks that own large chunks of property that need to get from A to B on their land by driving across fields, you kind of need to be in control of the vehicle to do that.
It is flimsy, if you consider keeping a job a flimsy argument. If it becomes legal it will be on the state level and won't change the federal regulations for a time. That means workers can "legally" smoke or eat edibles but if they get hurt they're still getting fired regardless of the wishes of their employer. Again, I'm cool with it being legalized. Hell I bought edibles when I was in Seattle before my cruise to Alaska and enjoyed them, I just think it will cause a clusterfuck for employment unless federal regulations catch up or the testing is proven effective to show they weren't high at work. Include driving in that if you want but that wasn't my main concern. Should people be sober while working? Absolutely they should be. But if is "legal" in that state and there is no test to determine they are currently high, on whatever they choose to use, they still lose their job but potentially for something that isn't technically illegal. There are a lot of people out there who aren't smart enough or haven't been in a position to know what regulations exist outside of "Sweet, we can legally get high now". I suppose it's all a moot point anyway, here in Indiana it won't ever be legalized. We still can't buy alcohol on Sunday.
That happened in Spokane. A TV news station interviewed the first guy who legally bought pot in Spokane and he was on the air "420 blaze it! You can't stop me from smoking weed now! It's a great day." He went to work and found out his employment was terminated.
The place my wife works test for nicotine. If they find it in your system you get fired. I have no issue with an employer not allowing you to smoke pot.
I agree... it's no different than if you take serious narcotics... if you're in a position where you can't be fucked up to do your job, then don't get fucked up. If you have a problem with that, then get another job.
I think the discrepancy is that pot takes so long to metabolize out of your system... if you drink, or do coke, or meth, or a bunch of other stuff, it's harder to test for and detect. A wild weekend won't really show up, depending on how hard they look. Getting stoned on a Friday night will be detectable for a hell of a lot longer.
It shouldn't matter for the rest of us that your employees have to be drug free. If it becomes legal, you and employers in other industries will have to continue to hire people who will choose to remain drug free, if they don't they lose their job, nothing changes for you or them. Sure, there are people out there that aren't smart enough to stay sober and keep their job, are you employing some of those people now? Do you want people like that working for you, drug free or not? So you have to fire someone for something that is legal but not acceptable behavior. That's company policy and it can remain in place. I've had people use company equipment to make money on the side. It is not illegal for them to do that, but company policy makes it an act that will get them terminated.
I believe that any company should be able to impose a policy around employee behaviour, even off the clock, that could be reasonably expected to have an impact on your job performance from a safety perspective; drug use, criminal record checks, driver's licence status for drivers, etc. If you don't like it, then tough shit, go find another job.
I think maybe you are misunderstanding or I haven't been able to clearly state what I mean. I'm not the one setting my policy or rather my policy is what my commercial insurance mandates me to tell my employees. I personally don't care what they do on their own time. I will however lose my commercial (liability, umbrella, and everything needed to actually be in business) insurance and or face issues from OSHA if my employees have an accident and pop positive for alcohol (which means they were actively under the influence in which case they should be fired) or other "illegal" or "legal" drugs if mary jane is legalized by the state (even if there is no way to show it was residual or they were actively under the influence) unless I terminate their employment immediately. I think this is a nation wide thing since many insurance companies write policy to comply with federal law. If that were to change then all the better. I'm sure I'm being overly careful and there are almost certainly ways around it but I don't play with insurance. Again, I'm in Indiana so it will probably never be legalized here and doesn't matter. You may want to check what your employer's insurance policy looks like to see if it actually does effect you in your industry to see if it does actually matter to you, if not then that's awesome. So to be clear, I'm only talking about what I as an employer must do to be insured and the issues related to the workplace. I'm for legalization, but I think that federal law will have to change, not just state law. This clearly doesn't affect everyone, if you're white collar you probably don't have to worry about it now, I just thought it was worth pointing out that there are unintended consequences possible.
I disagree with this. It might take longer for driver less vehicles to be the norm in these areas but it will happen and probably faster than you think. The google car was taken out to the desert and driven around for many months so it would learn how to drive over rough surfaces. Why do you think driving in an rural offroad situation is any different? With a computer that's hooked up to a GPS and enough time acquiring the data on how to do it, the driver less car will probably get there faster and be much safer than a human driver. You'll enter a GPS location and the car will take you there. It'll probably even learn that there's a specific location you go to frequently and ask you if that's the location you want to be taken too first. i.e. I get in the truck at 8am and go to GPS coordinates X on Monday - Friday. I get in the truck at 8:01am on Tuesday and the truck says press 1 to go to GPS coordinates X or press 2 to enter new location. Hell even if you go to 3 different locations throughout the week it'll learn what those are and offer those as options. Manually driven cars will be relegated to a hobby status (racers, aficionado's, etc) within 20 years, similar to how horseback riding is pretty much just a hobby with a few niche applications today. My daughter is 18 months old, and I doubt she will ever get a drivers license.
The problem I would see with this is that I have no idea what the coordinates were for any point on my property, let alone the coordinates for a specific spot I may have wanted to go, and sometimes I didn't even know where I wanted to go till I got somewhere else and realized there was something else I needed to check out. Until a car can understand "I need to go over yonder", I just don't see it as being a viable option.
I doubt they'll be %100 self driven at all times and will have a manual override for exactly that reason, as well as emergency and network loss/malfunction situations.