I highly recommend watching the notjustbike video on autonomous vehicles.
It outlines a disturbingly plausible path to a dystopia simply by following the lobbying incentives to logical conclusions. This feels like step 0. I'd strongly suggest that if this is coming to somewhere near you, you object, tell your city no, protest, etc.
This will be used as a special sign to indicate to drivers that autonomous vehicles are controlling the road at that moment. Today, traffic lights tell us when to stop or go on, but autonomous cars can communicate among themselves and with these traffic lights to organize the traffic flow in a faster and more precise way than humans.
in other words corporate interests cant develop a tech that works reliably so they take over a public chattel to change the standard for everyone so they can operate a weak tech development.
> in other words corporate interests cant develop a tech that works reliably so they take over a public chattel to change the standard for everyone so they can operate a weak tech development.
This sounds like a bit of a nightmare. Follow the car ahead of me, if it’s autonomous. How do I know the capabilities of other cars on the road? What if I don’t know and don’t follow, does it revert back to giving me a normal light even if there are a bunch of autonomous cars around?
What about non-vehicle traffic, like bikes and pedestrians?
What happens when there is an accident. How does one argue they had right of way, when all the lights are white and everyone is just crossing their fingers and playing follow the leader?
Does this assume all autonomous vehicles are speaking the same language? Has that standard been established, or is this another format war that will need to play out?
Traffic circles seem like they would play out better. When autonomous cars meet they can negotiate things optimally, while normal cars slot in as they normally would with no change in behavior. Carmel, IN would be a good test bed for that theory.
> follow the car in front of them (if that car is an autonomous one, it will know exactly when to continue or stop)
If the car in front of you is not autonomous, you're still supposed to follow it -- presumably, it's following an autonomous car further down the line. In other words, an autonomous car is responsible for stopping and starting human traffic behind it in the same lane, up to the next autonomous car behind it.
All the same, this sure does sound like it has a lot of failure modes.
The United States will get extra traffic lights (and the literally obscene amount of money it will take to attach that to every single intersection across the country) before we spend the time, money, social and political capital to keep moving toward more walkable cities, so overall car load can be dramatically reduced and population health can be improved.
Why wouldn't the autonomous cars just follow the normal 3 light traffic patterns? We have a great number of human drivers running red lights daily. Now we are to have these same human drivers “following” an autonomous car through them too? Is this article just lacking a lot of critical detail or is this just a terrible idea?
I highly recommend watching the notjustbike video on autonomous vehicles. It outlines a disturbingly plausible path to a dystopia simply by following the lobbying incentives to logical conclusions. This feels like step 0. I'd strongly suggest that if this is coming to somewhere near you, you object, tell your city no, protest, etc.
Link to the start of where he starts outlining a path to dystopia (though the first half of the video is informative too) https://youtu.be/040ejWnFkj0?si=_RPIAzkW9LGBJmmA&t=1683
The white light
This will be used as a special sign to indicate to drivers that autonomous vehicles are controlling the road at that moment. Today, traffic lights tell us when to stop or go on, but autonomous cars can communicate among themselves and with these traffic lights to organize the traffic flow in a faster and more precise way than humans.
in other words corporate interests cant develop a tech that works reliably so they take over a public chattel to change the standard for everyone so they can operate a weak tech development.
> in other words corporate interests cant develop a tech that works reliably so they take over a public chattel to change the standard for everyone so they can operate a weak tech development.
Eventually they will reinvent trains! (:
This sounds like a bit of a nightmare. Follow the car ahead of me, if it’s autonomous. How do I know the capabilities of other cars on the road? What if I don’t know and don’t follow, does it revert back to giving me a normal light even if there are a bunch of autonomous cars around?
What about non-vehicle traffic, like bikes and pedestrians?
What happens when there is an accident. How does one argue they had right of way, when all the lights are white and everyone is just crossing their fingers and playing follow the leader?
Does this assume all autonomous vehicles are speaking the same language? Has that standard been established, or is this another format war that will need to play out?
Traffic circles seem like they would play out better. When autonomous cars meet they can negotiate things optimally, while normal cars slot in as they normally would with no change in behavior. Carmel, IN would be a good test bed for that theory.
> Follow the car ahead of me, if it’s autonomous.
The statement in the article is not conditional:
> follow the car in front of them (if that car is an autonomous one, it will know exactly when to continue or stop)
If the car in front of you is not autonomous, you're still supposed to follow it -- presumably, it's following an autonomous car further down the line. In other words, an autonomous car is responsible for stopping and starting human traffic behind it in the same lane, up to the next autonomous car behind it.
All the same, this sure does sound like it has a lot of failure modes.
The United States will get extra traffic lights (and the literally obscene amount of money it will take to attach that to every single intersection across the country) before we spend the time, money, social and political capital to keep moving toward more walkable cities, so overall car load can be dramatically reduced and population health can be improved.
Why wouldn't the autonomous cars just follow the normal 3 light traffic patterns? We have a great number of human drivers running red lights daily. Now we are to have these same human drivers “following” an autonomous car through them too? Is this article just lacking a lot of critical detail or is this just a terrible idea?
Whoa, this is absolute trash.