[SmartCat]

This sounds like just an off the cuff remark - something he did not give much thought to before speaking, rather than a policy that the Government made after months of deliberations.

[dark.knight]

These are just sound bites from people who just say stuff to stay in the news and keep the public adulation alive. I just had to see the headline to know that this is just platitudinous, something being mentioned just because the rest of the world keeps mentioning it.

Driverless cars are not the majority in any country on earth, if any there are a few hundreds.. to become popular even in the most advanced of nations where there are wide roads, pedestrian etiquette, intelligent signalling systems and round-the-clock monitoring, it'll take well over a decade if not much more. India being nearly 5 decades behind such nations, naturally is 5 decades further away from such cars.

I'm against the concept of driverless cars, of course.. I love to drive and I feel computers cannot match man's ability of caution by any stretch of imagination. The employment-lessening argument is weak though, we all know the era of Skynet is upon us.. we will work for machines soon.

[agambhandari]

Why doesn't the honorable minister open driving schools for the idiot taxi cab drivers who were clearly given the license to drive without checking their sense of traffic or heck, even common sense.

If they wish to keep so much employment, why not stop with the computerization? lets go back to abacus instead of calculators and manual phone operators.

This remark is nothing more than an uninformed knee jerk reaction to something that probably his driver mentioned to him

While I do agree, it is difficult to see an autonomous car driving comfortably in the indian scenario, putting hurdles like this will not help it. Personally,I would love to see self driving cars here. I love driving for the love of driving, not for commuting. Nothing beats the relaxed mind when you get to the destination after being chauffeured.

[MCR]

I pity the minister, if he has really said that!

Technology will eventually make way whether some people will keep their jobs or not! With basic pay (also read as uncouth work ethics in some cases) and inflation rising in India, it's not far when the days of highly automated industry becomes a reality.
Similarly, it's not too far in the future that companies like UBER will have automated Taxi's which can operate 24/7 without hesitation or wanting something in 'extra'.
So some whimsical wish cannot decide whether a technology will be used or not. It's market driven.

But to instill high level of discipline on Indian roads, it's better to have automated driving, since some senseless 'driver' does not end up with a license and goes around breaking the law and causing harm, which is what is happening now.

[blackasta]

The minister can relax - barring several major miracles, there is no chance whatsoever of driverless cars having even a remote possibility of plying on the Indian roads in the foreseeable future.

Let him concentrate on what the industrialized nations achieved decades earlier - good roads, educated drivers and correct signalling.

[Samurai]

Originally Posted by tsk1979

I don't think the analogy applies here. If driverless cars are banned, will people use remote brainlink to hire a robot oversees and steer the car for them?
In manufacturing, if you stop technology, you suddenly find yourself unable to compete with others. But in case of a taxi driver, there is no such problem.

Not really. The current system of human drivers is very inefficient. But we don't have a choice right now. The driverless cars haven't matured enough to takeover from us.

Consider what happened to human computers. Yes, prior to the electronic computers we all use today, all computers were human, mainly women. Watch the movie Hidden Figures if you are not sure.

Let me quote from the other thread I mentioned.

Originally Posted by Samurai

Right now, on average private cars spend 96% of their time parked somewhere. Yes, the utilization of private car is about 4%. And they spend this time parked in expensive real estate called parking lot. Driverless cars will allow us not to own cars at all. Imagine driverless Uber cars. There will be no driver tantrums, the closest available driverless rental car will accept your request, all the time. Only people living in remote areas need to own cars, which can still be driverless.

This will take out 90% of the private cars out of circulation. And bikes, why do you need bikes when air conditioned cars can take you anywhere?

Just 4% car utilization is a massive waste, which driverless cars can bring close to 100%. The savings and environmental benefits will be way too much to ignore.

While I growing up there was a technology called typewriters and there were typing schools in every street. My uncle owned 3 such typing schools and taught typing and shorthand to 100s of students every year. He was forced to close them all before he turned 50. He managed to survive by typing court documents in Kannada, which become a rare skill after that. Now practically everybody uses a computer keyboard, but almost none of us know the art of typing. We manage because of backspace/delete key.

Anyone knows shorthand here? My uncle is an expert. But the skill of shorthand was replaced by tape recorders and video cameras. If you have a smartphone in hand, you don't need to shorthand to take notes.

Someday our grandkids are going to marvel about the fact that we drove cars by ourselves. Right now my son can't understand how I grew up without having TV or Internet, or how my parents grew up without electricity.

[reignofchaos]

Originally Posted by djay99

I believe driverless cars cannot be designed to drive alongside cars driven by humans in India.
Add poor road conditions, no/less lane markings, potholes, craters on major roads will lead to further problems.

This is a misconception that requires some clarification. This misconception is based on the thought that one has to define every single rule for the system by hand. In classification terms this means the features of the classifier are defined as a set of rigid rules that must not be broken. This used to be the case before but not anymore.

Anyone with some exposure to recurrent neural networks which is the modern system for classification will tell you that rules for the classifier are inferred automatically from the training data. You do require 100x-1000x(or even more) the amounts of training data as a classical system but if the data has multiple instances of steering around a pothole or jumping red lights, the system will do the same :.

So in essence any current gen machine learning system is completely data driven. Give it the data of our crappy driving as input and it will mimic the same. The strange bit is that no one really knows why RNNs and CNNs work so well as they do. What we do know is that they can almost do anything as long as you give them enough sample data to train.

[NaXal]

Can some one point to that minister, that Indian Railway is testing driverless Metro operations in many metro routes of Indian cities.

Driving jobs are already been taken away by the Gov run institution.

[roy_libran]

Originally Posted by reignofchaos

Anyone with some exposure to recurrent neural networks which is the modern system for classification will tell you that rules for the classifier are inferred automatically from the training data. You do require 100x-1000x(or even more) the amounts of training data as a classical system but if the data has multiple instances of steering around a pothole or jumping red lights, the system will do the same :.

So in essence any current gen machine learning system is completely data driven. Give it the data of our crappy driving as input and it will mimic the same.

Absolutely - You have nailed it here! This is what the machine is going to learn and it will, in all likelihood, mimic the errors that humans knowingly make, just that there wouldn't be a conscience or judgement over-ride kicking in at the last second.

[GJ01]

I agree that we are still 10 odd years away (at a minimum) to get to the state of infrastructure that can support driverless cars - Hell todays roads dont even support a safe ride in a car with a driver in it !

The second point - one that has been raised already by many - is that machines can do work on a set of predefined rules. The rules are based on certain trigger points being met and the "if, what, then" conditions that are coded in. It is very difficult to code multiple parallel universes and have the car computer move through all the modes.

Example: Rule says: If there is a vehicle in front of you, flash lights to ask for a pass. Once vehicles gives way, check surroundings and overtake. Now this is what is the 'standard' process. But we also will have times when we have to take an overtake from the left. Now this is just one instance - add to this the bikers crisscrossing (without indicators), people coming on the wrong side of the road, Police barricades put up randomly, cows, dogs, people . . . . You'll need a supercomputer to crunch all the permutation combinations before it can even do an overtake.

I agree, in theory (and in limited practical application) this will work in India. But then consider this. You are paying top dollar (selling your family gold and mortgaging your house) to get this cutting edge technology and all that, but you only ride at 40 kmph. Now do you want that ?

[King_pin09]

Driverless cars, although has the full potential to be the future of motoring technology, it is still in its neo-natal stage as of now. I believe it would rely heavily on satellites for providing GPS co-ordinates for its navigation. In the affairs of our present day, GPS is not entirely bug proof as it gets disrupted even during cloudy days or shady areas. As of today GPS needs to be interpreted together with human intelligence. There are enough examples where people relying on G-maps (or other GPS navigation systems) have landed in strange / unintended localities. This thread on our own forum says it all http://www.team-bhp.com/forum/travel...travelled.html.

If at all it is assumed that, a few more advanced satellites are launched and GPS becomes more reliable and precise than ever, even then there would be conditions such as unmarked temporary diversions, a deteriorated bridge without adequate warnings, an accident spot, a huge rock lying on road, a tractor trailer carrying long protruding steel bars, et-al.; all these can be negotiated only with inputs from human intelligence.

With these concerns in mind, I can see that the driverless technology as it stands today is not very apt and adaptable to our road journeys. Once all the bugs relating to safety, reliability and accuracy of the system are ironed out, it is only when this technology can be considered for implementation. To this context, I find what the minister said was right. The perception of employment generation is only a politically motivated statement.

[ashlil]

History repeats itself. Motorized cars were banned from roads, in the earlier days, as the cars would scare off the horses. How did that work out, I wonder!

All this fear of job loss due to technology has been just so unfounded. Look at the unemployment rates in the industrialized countries vs un-industrialized countries. Does technology take away jobs? Second, look at the unemployment rates in the developed nations since 1940's. They have been steady at aound 4-6% with only few 10%. And the 10% unemployment does not correlate with some ground breaking technology, rather they correlate with economic busts. So, I fail to see how this fear of technology took hold of us.

[Samurai]

Originally Posted by GJ01

The second point - one that has been raised already by many - is that machines can do work on a set of predefined rules. The rules are based on certain trigger points being met and the "if, what, then" conditions that are coded in. It is very difficult to code multiple parallel universes and have the car computer move through all the modes..... You'll need a supercomputer to crunch all the permutation combinations before it can even do an overtake.

No, sorry. What you describe is 20th century technology. Today's computers can learn, they can learn million times faster than humans. So they can evolve million times faster than us. If it took 150 years for humans to move from industrial age to information age, computers will do it in months.

This is the reason why Indian IT services is dying. We are all mostly doing the kind of work where we tell the computer how to do stuff. But the world of computing has moved on. Now you can tell the computer what to do, and they will figure out how to do it. I did some design work using Markov chains last year, and was humbled at what it can do. It could predict events and improved the efficiency of users to 90%. If people were not involved in the process, it could raise it 100% efficiency.

[lazy]

The minister has no idea what he is talking about. Reminds me of a video forward where some chap is talking about Cloud technology and referring to actual clouds.

Driverless cars will be a reality, sooner or later, like it or not, accept it.

I don't care whether human driving is inefficient or not, let people decide what they want to with their time. What I care about is safety - computer driven cars are definitely going to safer compared to human driving by the time they become mainstream - and that is reason enough.

Our chaotic roads and stupid drivers, rather than a hindrance should be a reason to accelerate the move towards this direction.
If not completely driverless cars, there are safety systems that should be mandated already - airbags, ABS, fail-safe seat-belts, proximity based auto-braking, ECU controlled speed, tail-gating prevention.

But yeah, as they say, if wishes were horses.....
Until then, we live with idiots on our roads.

cheers

[pjbiju]

Originally Posted by Samurai

...
Now practically everybody uses a computer keyboard, but almost none of us know the art of typing. We manage because of backspace/delete key.
...
Anyone knows shorthand here?
...

OT:
I learned typewriting on my own and during my first job at Eicher Motors, I was the only one, apart from the stenographers who could use the typewriter. It helped me when I moved to computers to type much faster than others without having to look at the keyboard. Even today, perhaps I am the only one among my peers using the keyboard like a typewriter.

And I did use a lot of shorthand during my college days to take notes since I was slow in writing. But that is one skill that I have now completely forgotten.

Coming to driverless cars - that is one technology I wish should come to our country much sooner than later. Just think of the number of accidents and traffic mayhem and pollution that it would effectively remove from our country. There could be special tracks, trails, roads, drive parks etc. where one could actually hire a car and drive.