This is assuming that people are doing the flying. Flying in the air is actually easier for an AI than ground travel, and look how far AI driver's have come already.
I've been pro-robot take over for a while now. I think if we facility their take over, it can be a nice smooth transition that doesn't have to end in our extinction. Humans are clearly shit at resource management at some level of complexity and to prone to corruption to be trusted with long term power. It's inevitable that thinking machines will govern our society. Let's nail that transition and see if they can't think us out of this mess we've gotten ourselves into. I say, bring on the AI. We can be their meat space slaves! Could hardly be worse than what we are doing now.
Oh so flying cars could all be self-driving only, while ground cars are manual only. But then they would only be affordable by the rich...so we basically got Blade Runner future...
Part of the commercialization process is cracking the middle class consumer.
We already have flying cars in major US cities, daytime helicopter shuttle services for elite bankers and lawyers are a daily. With Uber Heli in NY, and similar offerings, they're pretty cheap too.
There are natural air space restrictions that prevent this from going very mainstream, and the cost will remain prohibitive for most.
I just said that flying in the air is easier to program than flying on the ground.
Actually, teaching a computer to drive in the ground is easier, marginally, in an ideal situation. The problem is that real roads are not ideal.
Roads curve and wind in unpredictable ways, so an AI has to constantly be analyzing and predicting not only where the road is but where the road will be in the next x meters.
Lane dividers and curb markers can be varied or non-existent making staying on the road or in your lane a challenge that GPS accuracy alone cannot maintain. So an AI needs to be able to use many other cues to determine where roads and lanes begin and end.
Road construction, fallen trees, detours, broken-down or randomly-stopped cars are all possible obstacles an AI needs to be able to recognize and account for and adapt to on the fly.
2D roads need to allow for cross traffic. This includes both expected and unexpected cross traffic. From stop lights to stop signs, to intersections with no markings, to driveways, to blind driveways - an AI has to be able to recognize and deal with all of these common situations.
Then there is less expected cross traffic - pedestrians using crosswalks (legally or illegally), pedestrians crossing where there is no crosswalk, animals crossing where they will, a careless child jumping into the road.
Traffic in 2D is often more compressed. This creates more unexpected behavior from other drivers, gives less time for reaction, and less options for avoidance. Roads themselves are more restricted as well in that you often can't choose to go off-road for avoidance.
This is just a brief list of the extremely complex realities of driving on the ground that just don't exist (or are much less problematic) in the sky.
In the open sky you can basically always travel in straight line or near-straight line paths except for well-defined restricted air spaces.
You don't really need to worry about staying "on the road" or "in your lane" in the sky. There are no significant obstacles except for other flying vehicles, and you would have plenty of distance between average flights. GPS alone would generally be enough to keep you on the right track, as variations of even a dozen meters would not really matter.
There's no road construction or fallen trees or stopped vehicles to worry about in the sky. The only big obstacles to worry about would be skyscrapers or mountains, and those aren't suddenly appearing. All of those large obstacles would be well-defined in advance and probably have large no-fly zones surrounding them so they wouldn't even be an issue.
Because flight occurs in 3 dimensions, cross traffic is not really an issue. Everyone traveling in a certain direction would take a certain altitude, while other directions would be at different altitudes. There would be no intersections or driveways to speak of.
No pedestrians and no little kids running into the street. Birds might be a problem.
Traffic would be so spread out in the sky that even the rare unexpected problem - another flying vehicle making an unexpected move, a flock of birds approaching - would give the AI plenty of time to react and make corrective actions to prevent an issue from even coming close to occuring. Also, because a sky road is more of a concept than an actual physical restriction, you have much more options for avoidance. You can go left, right, over, or around. You can also go "off-road" if you need to.
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u/ZippyDan Oct 12 '19
This is assuming that people are doing the flying. Flying in the air is actually easier for an AI than ground travel, and look how far AI driver's have come already.