America & World IV: Trump's Taxing Day

[Cassius_Smoke]

I'm all for new tech. We need to advance as a civilisation.

[wakka]

There were totally people a hundred years ago who said, no way am I getting a car. I've got a personal relationship with my horse. A horse can go places a car can't. And plus, I enjoy riding my horse.

But at the end of the day, we switched to cars, because there were a ton of benefits and for most people a horse was just a way of getting from A to B.

Anyway, for anyone dreading the brave new world of automated, steering-wheel-less living rooms zooming us about while we sit in them drinking lagers and playing Xbox, don't worry. It's ages off anyhow.

[kryss]

Space Hoppers could take over from cars. Soup them up a bit (somehow, come on boffins!) and you could overtake slower vehicles by jumping over them, reducing accidents no doubt. Plus potholes wouldn't be an issue. This problem solves itself once you think about it.

The Red Dwarf books want their idea back.

[Lebowski]

Thing is, right now cars kill and maim a hell of a lot of people. And we don't really talk about that because we've accepted it as a societal need - people need to get places. We accept a very high level of casualties for it. It's a high cost. But if we can fulfil that societal need and not have to pay quite the cost? It would seem wrong not to push for that.

The freedom that ownership of vehicles gives is what makes them so attractive. To get people to move on from this mindset you need to make the next leap in technology so convenient so appealing it puts you at a disadvantage not adopting it.

Driver-less hover vehicles that don't need roads dont get stuck in jams and travel at over 250mph is the future you kind of needs a monopoly for this to work with everyone on the same page and all the systems talking to each other.

You move away from a car being a status symbol and more of a highspeed mass trasit system Cars are gonna get boring then, no sleek sexy sports cars just a network of identical drones that you jump in and out of as needed, want to go to work single occupancy drone please, trip to ikea with family flatbed box drone with crazy big storage please. you'd be at the mercy of being more organized or you could just wing it and request whats nearest you. Drone Cars could be like them self cleaning toilets too that hose everything down after someones used it, we will need this as we will be onto some sort of super resistant version of covid78 by then.

[MartyG]

Driver-less hover vehicles that don't need roads dont get stuck in jams and travel at over 250mph is the future you kind of needs a monopoly for this to work with everyone on the same page and all the systems talking to each other.
.

When you have a transport system where everything is part of a mesh network, you don't need to go to the point of hover vehicles - the things that slow things down are generally poor driver decisions or hesitation and the traffic management that tries to prevent those bad decisions, like traffic lights. In a mesh system you don't need traffic lights or stop signs because the vehicles are smart enough not to smash into each other. If people could navigate junctions and give space to merge into the flows, we wouldn't need traffic lights now.

Breakdowns aside, in a mesh network transport system there will be less queuing traffic and jams.

[Neon Ignition]

We can't even make a smart Smart Motorway. There's no risk of self-driving cars making a real dent

[fishbowlhead]

We haven’t even got bike lanes everywhere, to even think that self driving cars are likely on mass any time soon is pretty laughable.

[MartyG]

It's not going to be tomorrow, no one is saying that, but it is coming and will become the norm - it'll happen on motorways first as these are the easiest roads to fully convert as they're well marked and eventually over the next couple of decades, more and more car systems will go from partially to fully automated.

It's poor reasoning to judge things based on current technology, with enough compute power it's a solvable problem space and billions of pounds are being invested into it by car manufacturers to do just that.

[wakka]

30 years ago we didn’t have the internet. Things change. Stuff gets invented. Progress! It’s exciting! And thank goodness we’re not all so negative as some, or we’d still be amusing ourselves with a hoop and stick instead of 4K online deathmatches.

[Hirst]

It's worth bearing in mind that things never change as much or as fast as we think they'll do. The year is 2021 and there's no hovercars, the trains are largely the same ones I rode when I was a child, I've still got to do ironing and window cleaners still want paying in cash.

What is technically possible and what the government will feasibly want to spend are two completely different things. We could have probably had fully automated roads in the 1990s if someone wanted to pay for it. It's also worth considering how laughably slow our government are at dealing with transport infrastructure - the current official date for HS2 to reach the North is 2035 to 2040, if it doesn't slip! 2040! I'll be nearly retired by then.

[MartyG]

It's not likely to need huge infrastructure change and conceivably changes that may need to be made can be ofset from other savings, such as not needing to attend as many RTCs and increased national productivity due to increasing efficiencies from automation. A self-driving system needs to know where it is on a road and what things are around it, it doesn't need hundreds of boxes on poles every hundred yards.

People shouldn't just be worrying about AI taking your driving away, it's coming for your jobs too

[Hirst]

It can bloody have it.

[Brad]

We used to have supersonic passenger planes!

I know why we don’t anymore; I don’t need a history or economics lesson from anyone.

[Neon Ignition]

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The vote in the senate looks set to take place on the 22 April and so far it seems like it just needs a simple majority which if passed would likely give the Democrats two extra seats in the Senate.

[Asura]

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The vote in the senate looks set to take place on the 22 April and so far it seems like it just needs a simple majority which if passed would likely give the Democrats two extra seats in the Senate.

The Republican opposition cracks me up, because surely that's just argument for argument's sake. It's shocking to the rest of the world that in a country of federated states, the territory in which the US capital is located isn't a state.