I saw a news story about this sort of thing years ago. When these driverless car experiments were first getting approved, there were some neighborhoods where the cars would basically just go to die. They’d enter a neighborhood and just stop in the middle of an intersection or slow down to a crawl and go in circles til they ran out of fuel. They have never fixed this problem, and people living in the same neighborhoods from 5 years ago are still having to go outside and shoo the cars away like some strange form of lost megafauna.
I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
You can tell the people living in those condos are housebroken middle management types because if this shit was happening outside normal people’s apartments those cars would all have been vandalized so badly they’d be totaled by the insurance company
That was my first thought: how are people not pelting them with bricks from their balconies?
These middle manager types are probably all calling the corporate offices to file complaints without understanding that if they were in the Waymo corporate offices they wouldn’t put any resources into solving the problem until the problem starts costing them money. Meanwhile the normal person just throws bricks and fucks up the gates until Waymo decides it’s worth the resources to geofence the fucking parking lot and disable honking within that area.
I can’t remember for the life of me where I read it, but I remember reading a kinda sci-fi/fantasyish novel in my teens that had universal ai controlled cars, and the main character asked how they didn’t get into accidents sometimes and the other characters were like “are you stupid? It’s one centralised ai controlling them all” and that stuck with me as an obvious requirement for driverless cars.
Anyway I don’t think any current driverless car creators read that book.
driverless cars coordinated and controlled from a single central source to ensure smooth operation and maximum efficiency
each car individually controlled by competing ai each trying to reduce their transit time at the expense of the other AI operated cars
I remember during the initial hype for driverless cars there was a plan for cars to have ad hoc/ mesh networks with each other so they could perfectly optimize traffic and weave lane changes and left turns in between much smaller gaps than humans can. Somehow it seems just as far away as when it was first proposed.
Replace all car roads with trolley tracks, a huge sprawling network of tracks, with streetcars all operated with AI planning. Hell let people buy their own personal trolleys if they want, just don’t let them disconnect from the central planning system, get out where you want and the trolley will head to a tracked storage facility to await your next pickup, out of the way of incoming trolleys all perfectly maneuvering around the city
Life purely on the rails
One central AI controlling all of them is just the first step into reinventing trains, again.
Trains are to transit evolution as crabs are to biological evolution. If you actually try to improve efficiency in any transit system you’ll inevitably reinvent trains.
It’s still funny that these car-brained tech bros can’t go beyond individual cars controlled independently even when faced with both the obvious downsides and inefficiencies as well as clear ways to improve car based transit.
as crabs are to biological evolution
Barely related, but I want to point out that carcinization only happens to hard shelled creatures, possibly only aquatic ones. Different groups of animals have a few different ideal forms.
For predatory mammals, the ideal form is ferret. Become long.
If by “ai” you mean pathfinding and routing algorithms, that makes total sense. If by “ai” you mean the actual driving part and crash avoidance, ping will start killing pedestrians.
Some sort if hybrid system would be great. Knowing that there are no cars on the intersection you plan to cross would save a lot of time with slowing down to check. Equally, having on board systems to slam on the anchors because someone is in the road or whatever would be a requirement.
Waymos as it stands are very good at not crashing. Humans are very bad drivers and frequently hit things, the waymos have been good at not doing that with whatever system they are using now. Obviously there are a few kinks, but it’s not enough to discard the technology. A self driving car is better than a human driven one, but it’s still a car.
lmao, driverless cars that can’t even coordinate parking, do a zipper merge, honking and flashing each other, etc
these cars have learned how to drive just like humans alright
not one person went down there with a crowbar and started going ham? Americans have no dignity
