Tuesday, May 12, 2015

Port of Long Beach to Go Driverless and Google News

Supposedly, late in 2015, we will see a new terminal at the Port of Long Beach, called Middle Harbor (reference to Middle Earth?), that will have driverless tractors. Some tractors are already on site and working, supervised by humans.

Google is talking pilot-less planes for commercial air travel, though flying logistics are complicated because planes do not operate on a two-dimensional street surface network, but rather move up and down as well as in other directions. I do not know how the essentially driverless aspects of airline travel now relate to those where we have a pilot in control. Drone deliveries are also part of the plan. No more brown shorts on those UPS delivery men; maybe brown drones.

Really?

Anti-driverless writers have embraced the news that Google cars have been involved in 11 California accidents despite the fact that the accidents were very minor and that no one was hurt. They fail to emphasize that the cause of the accidents were human drivers of other vehicles. There is no indication that human drivers in the Google cars would have been able to avoid these accidents; nor have we seen data that the number of accidents are high or low when considering the number of miles driven and where they were driven.

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