We Shouldn't Ban Cell Phones in Cars, We Should Ban Drivers Discussion

[Ed Hardy]

Although the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board wants a complete ban on using a cell phone for any reason while driving, Brighthand's Site Editor has a a better suggestion: let's get rid of driving altogether.

Read the full content of this Article: We Shouldn't Ban Cell Phones in Cars, We Should Ban Drivers

[scjjtt]

I'm looking forward to the day that I don't have to worry about anything going down the highway at 65 miles an hour - except the fact that I can't stop the car because my computer is frozen and I need to open up the hood of the car and disconnect the battery to refresh the computer system.

[Ed Hardy]

I'm looking forward to the day that I don't have to worry about anything going down the highway at 65 miles an hour - except the fact that I can't stop the car because my computer is frozen and I need to open up the hood of the car and disconnect the battery to refresh the computer system.

I'm looking forward to the day I'm driving down the highway at 65 mph and I look my rear-view mirror and see that the truck driver behind me is glancing at the road only every now and then because most of his attention is on the message he's typing on his phone. Oh wait, that day is today.

Here's the result:


Multipy that times 33,000 and that's our current system.

The solution for computer crashes in critical situations is easy: you actually have three computers doing the same job at the same time. If one of them crashes, or just runs into a problem, the other two "outvote" it and carry on.
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[lelisa13p]

Isn't that called system redundancy, the same reason that alien species have 2 hearts?

I'm still amazed at last year's automobile models that can parallel park themselves, going so far as to audibly instruct the driver to "Please remove your hands from the steering wheel."

We already have a generation of crippled drivers who are unable to operate vehicles with manual transmissions. One local news story reported that carjackers were unable to complete their attempted crime because the targeted vehicle was a stick-shift. Now we can add parallel parking to the list of fading skills.

[r0k]

Often when I'm driving, I find that I must order movie tickets online. I whip out my trusty smartphone, enter my 5 digit unlock code, pull up the web browser, enter my 27 character password so I can then enter my 16 digit credit card to purchase the tickets. And all this while driving with my left knee on the wheel so I can use my left hand to hold that hamburger I was almost finished eating. Of course my phone is occupying my right hand so I don't have a hand free and have to use my chin to BLOW THE HORN at some idiot who is texting in front of me. Perhaps I should have used Siri but I was chewing at the time. Now where did I put those fries?

Seriously, though. Or should I say Siri-ously. This rule is dumb. Just plain dumb. Yes people will become distracted when using hands free devices. But wouldn't they be more distracted if they couldn't call to get directions? Is everybody supposed to all of a sudden just pull over to talk on the phone when they have handsfree devices? This is a case of the nanny state doing nothing for too long, feeling guilty then doing too darn much. Fine. Ban phones without handsfree devices but there is very little to be gained by banning hands free devices. Would you include Onstar in the ban? So a device that is lauded as a safety feature gets banned by the zealots who are trying to stop that trucker from playing Nintendo DS while driving? Sometimes I'm ashamed to say I'm from the US. It's embarrassing. Just plain embarrassing.

I just took the final in the ai-class at Stanford. It was a great class but for me there were two high points. One was natural language processing. The other was self driving cars. I can't wait for self driving cars. Right now, the typical competitor in the Darpa challenge is using more than one Mac mini. Let's say that's 10x the processing power in a smartphone. At today's rate of technology capability growth, commonly referred to as Moore's law, we are less than half a decade away from the ability to put self driving CPU power on a car for less than a hundred bucks. Of course this does nothing about reducing the cost of the imaging sensors but self driving cars should be a reality in less than a decade. And yes, ban the idiots who slowpoke around in the fast lane or try to break the sound barrier in the slow lane and we will see our already declining highway deaths approach the number that's really acceptable: ZERO.

[Adama D. Brown]

I am all for this, actually. Don't get me wrong, I like driving--sometimes. Generally on long, deserted country roads, of which I have plenty around here. But go anywhere close to the cities, and I find it more stressful than anything. I'd love to be able to punch in my destination and be a passenger instead.

The irony is, we have probably 95% of the infrastructure to do this in place right now. Extremely accurate GPS, widely available and highly precise maps, radio stations broadcasting traffic data in a machine-readable format via the Traffic Message Channel, and the Google Car shows that you can put all this together into a viable self-driving vehicle without needing to build any elaborate central systems.

[Varjak]

Sorry, but humans are not 'monumentally bad' at driving. They just choose too often not to DRIVE. And I think you're taking what happens here in the USA and imputing it to the rest of the world (which doesn't act idiotically like we do). Why is it that cars in the RoW have digital satellite TV in their cars (on the nav screen) and we don't? Because they know not to use it when they're driving. Why do we have 'lawyer screens' displayed every time we start up the car, when the RoW does not? Because getting a license in many countries is much more rigorous than here, and so are the penalties for misbehavior.

I for one don't want a computer-driven car, but I wouldn't prevent others from having them if they wanted.

[Ed Hardy]

V, this isnt an America-only problem. Over 39,000 people died in traffic accidents in the European Union in 2008. (The most recent year I could find numbers for after a short search.) The World Health Organization estimates that there are 1.2 million traffic fatalities globally each year.

Driving is a monotonous task, and that's something that human beings aren't well suited for -- we get bored after a while and want to do something else. We invented computers to handle repetitious tasks, and it's high time we let them take over this one.
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[lelisa13p]

Ed, I confess that when we first began this discussion I thought that it was with tongue firmly planted in cheek. Now I'm not so sure...

[jbrown50]

It all boils down to our own arrogance and insecurity as a society.

Whether we admit it or not, driving is a dangerous full time job of which we need to pay our full time attention to.

We either put more importance into selfishly getting our point across flapping our yap box or we're so insecure that we can't stand to be disconnected from our family/friends for the little bit of time that we're in a car.

I drive a 6speed manual Toyota Tacoma pickup so, even if I wanted to do it, holding a phone in one hand and driving with the other would be a juggling act at best. My Iphone is connected via bluetooth to the DVD stereo with overhead speaker in case of emergency.