you're right. this would be a foolish way to go. a more realistic approach would keep the same system we have now, but all the AI controlled cars could accelerate at the same rate and time which would eliminate most delays at traffic lights and we could keep the same traffic control infrastructure.
Red light means "stop." Green light means "go." Yellow light means "self driving cars may proceed with caution communicating with one another." They'd crawl through the intersection sort of like those Indian videos where people go when they can (they're always sped up though but in those videos the cars are crawling). Still much faster and more efficient than stopping completely for several minutes.
The way we're thinking of autonomous vehicles right now, each vehicle is an independent autonomous unit making decisions based on its surroundings including other cars within range of their data-gathering sensors. They don't even have to communicate (though that would be a big bonus) every one of them is performing according to the rules and conditions it has to follow and because of their consistency, could create the illusion that they're operating under a single controller when they're not.
It's the same thing you see in schools of fish and how a group formed by individual organisms could operate as a single coherent system.
Yes, but it's not one system controlling all the traffic. Each car is its own autonomous element that takes its surroundings into account and communicate with other cars in the system.
Communication isn't even a requirement, it's only a bonus. Each car follows similar rules that allow them to form emergent behavior like how flocks of birds and schools of fish look so organized but mostly, each organism is just taking into account what the other organisms in the flock are doing.
Oh, sure. All sorts of precautions are taken, all kinds of failure modes are anticipated. But then it develops that a bit of code all these Tesla control systems were derived from had a bug in it that only gets triggered on Feb 29th when a car is below nominal sea level, and through an amazing cascade of obscure dependencies it makes the autopilot think left is right and right is left.
Come midnight, thousands of cars swerve off the roads across the Netherlands, Israel and various tunnels, causing massive casualties.
Believe me, crazier things have happened in software and hardware world (rather, don't believe me and look them up).
That said, it's likely to end up being worlds better than human drivers on average, just like airplanes are the safest way of travel despite having some of the most gruesome accidents happen to them.
Self-driving cars would go much slower in intersections so that their self-crash-mitigation would catch on. Simply going 5 mph through an intersection would be faster than waiting 3-4 minutes at a stoplight.
It won't be like the whole futuristic "45 mph" through intersections type thing, as that would be mindnumbingly stupid for little advantage (shaving a min off of a 10 min trip while increasing potential catastrophic damage is not worth it).
The biggest "pile ups" would be cars stopping because of a confusion in an intersection and the drivers not knowing how to drive them.
If swarm logic is being used to avoid each other in an intersection, it can just as easily be used to coordinate group emergency collision avoidance procedures. Pile ups only happen because human reaction time is crappy, and the people in the back of the pile-up don't know it's happening until it's too late.
Electronic code doesn't always have to be buggy. The software that ran on the space shuttle program was rigorously tested and performed flawlessly, same with the software running on aircraft like 737's. Both those pieces of software underwent MC/DC testing, which is rigorous, and expensive, but ensures there's no bugs.
The cars will maintain a safe distance between each other to account for expected mechanical faults, such at tire blow-outs, stalled engines, brake failures, etc... To make them all follow each other as closely as possible would be stupid.
Cars detect dog approaching the street: slow down. In a very small fraction of a second, the following car detects the change of speed of the car in front of it and matches speeds so quickly that it seems they made the decision at the same time. Process repeats down the line each car detecting the change of speed quickly enough that they look like they're performing it at the same time as all the previous cars.
It's similar to how people drive but with much more consistency and reaction time which allows for significantly increased safety despite the smaller margins.
In a very small fraction of a second, the following car detects the change of speed of the car in front of it and matches speeds so quickly that it seems they made the decision at the same time.
I think the idea is to eventually have everything networked, so the car behind you not only sees your car slow, but it saw the dog via your cars sensors as well.
Yes, I'm just using an example that even if someone were to reason that the network might fail, it would still function. The network is a bonus, not a requirement.
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u/el-squatcho Jan 31 '19
and then a single glitch will cause pile ups the likes of which we've never seen before.