"peter" wrote in message
ups.com...
Agreed. But the idea has been around for a long time without much
progress being made to implement it.

I think it's possible it may NEVER happen. Culturally, especially here in
the US (but I think this is somewhat of a problem nearly everywhere), I
seriously doubt enough people could be convinced to relinquish control of
their cars to a computer. For the same reasons that they think that
spending hundreds of billions of dollars trying to prevent a handful of
deaths from terrorists makes sense, they would rather be in control of their
own demise, even if it means that demise is more likely than if they gave up
control to a computer.

The average person just isn't all that good at evaluating risk and benefit.

So even if all technical hurdles of pilotless airliners can be solved I
don't expect to see them in operation by 2030 or for a long time beyond
that.

Pilotless airliners likely will happen before cars, and I agree that "by
2030" is VERY optimistic. I don't know how old you were at the '64
World's Fair, but I fear you may not live long enough to see pilotless cars
OR airplanes, even if you live to 100 years.

Pete