Driverless Cars in 2016

Rajaah said:

Reviving this old thread because I got into a tangent about this in the Rustled thread.



So would I. Having them mixed might be a bad thing. It's a situation where in order to have everything functioning at peak efficiency, like 95% of the cars would need to be under AI control with the computers communicating with each other wirelessly. Maybe 100%. An old pickup truck with no computer tech in it might end up being functionally invisible to the AI-driven cars, at least until it gets close enough to register as an object.



There's a good possibility that those cars could alleviate most city congestion. Everyone would need to be using them though, or almost everyone. Cause then the cars can all coordinate and go through lights efficiently, etc. If the lights are also hooked into the system, even better. No more sitting at a red light with nothing going on the other side. The light could adjust on the fly and turn green to let the lane with actual cars in it go.

All in all there's a good chance everyone would get where they're going a lot faster, and without having to stress behind the wheel, they wouldn't be road raging and all that. Course this is all probably 5+ years in the future if it happens at all.

Come to think of it, FLYING cars would actually be a lot more feasible under this paradigm, as well. Cause right now, we probably have the tech to develop them, but nobody's going to because of the risk of people using them as flying missiles. Essentially small planes that anyone can hijack. If they were all under computer control, that risk would mostly disappear (outside of, say, hackers in terror groups trying to get into the system, I guess).

So if all the kinks were ironed out and this self-driving system had a 100% success rate, flying cars could gradually be developed and added to it. First for wealthy people of course, then more and more common as the production costs come down. Whenever you see flying cars in sci-fi, they're usually all flying in a perfect straight line right? That's an AI system at work. It'd alleviate even more traffic. Maybe by 2050, getting around won't be any kind of hassle at all because there'll be people in the air and everyone on the ground will be moving with actual efficiency.

And speaking of efficiency, productivity would also go up because people could spend their commute time getting work / school stuff done. Also we'd have more leisure time to play games or whatnot.

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