Behind the wheel, not all distractions are equal

[thewayne]

Researchers rigged a car and a test to vary the amount of cognitive load that a driver encountered to measure how impaired they could become. The results were interesting.

http://www.wired.com/autopia/2012/03/behind-the-wheel-not-all-distractions-are-equal/

Comments

[silveradept]

That is quite interesting. I'm still hoping that things like the self-driving Google car will be able to be mass-produced, so that the robots take the cognitive load of driving and the humans can take the cognitive load of the rest.

[thewayne.livejournal.com]

I think self-driving cars are a step in the right direction. I question how secure such systems are: consider a theoretical hacker who wants to snarl/shut-down a city's traffic control. And there's the eternal bane of interoperability, not everyone is going to buy the Google smart car, so there's going to have to be standards, and we know how well those work in the world of computers.

The thing that I think will be tricky will be that a person will still have to be behind the wheel, ready to take over with very short notice. And the insurance companies are going to scream when someone gets t-boned with no chance to react and they technically weren't in control of the victim vehicle (presuming that the striker wasn't in autonomous mode, I'd assume that the programming wouldn't permit a T collision).

But it is a beginning, and a pretty good one at that.