Guest Post by Eric Peters
They can’t even get automated traffic lights to work – to sync the green/red cycles in order to smooth the flow of traffic – but we’re supposed to believe that millions of automated cars are going to sync perfectly, whizz along at 100 MPH in tight formation, without a hitch – just like the Blue Angels, the Navy’s precision flying demonstration squadron.
In the rain and snow. The heat of high summer, the bitter cold of January. Dirt, sand, potholes. 24/7, year ’round – for year after year after year, ongoing. Mechanical and electrical components will never wear out – or crap out, unexpectedly. 
Really?
Traffic lights are pretty simple things – even the “smart” ones that have cameras and sensors with which they can “see” traffic (just like automated cars). But coordinating lights to go green at the same time – instead of one going green and then the next one just ahead going red, causing needless stop-and-go traffic congestion – seems to be a bridge too far for the same technocrats who promise a seamless, Blue Angles-like automated car experience.
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Even when traffic lights are successfully synced, they rarely remain synced for long.
Something always goes wrong. A power outage scrambles their brains. A software/programming/hardware glitch upsets the apple cart. The timing gets jumbled. Red light, green light, red light.
Stop – and go.
But at least you can stop (and go).
For now.
Your current autonomous car – the one controlled by you – still has brake/accelerator pedals and a steering wheel.
Your Future Car may not. The idea being to automate those functions, in order to take away your autonomy.
The good news is that it’ll probably work about as well as automated traffic lights.
Leavings aside the emasculation that automated cars would impose on us – male and female alike – by depriving us of the ability to control our vehicles, which would mean a return to childhood, a time when our parents took us places and we sat in the back and had little to no say in the matter – there is the false assumption about the omniscience and perfection of automated vehicle technology.
Notwithstanding the abundance of evidence that technology – much simpler technology than the technology necessary to automate millions of cars – routinely craps out.
Traffic lights, for instance.
Or the computer you’re probably reading this on. Your smartphone. Have either ever crashed or done something Weird for no apparent reason? What happens when you accidentally spill some coffee on them? Drop them? What about five or six years from now, when the drive is getting arthritic, the OS out of date?
At least they’re not moving down the road at 70 MPH.
Automated cars will – we’re told – move down the road at much higher speeds. Inches apart, us asleep in back or watching YouTube videos.
Whisk, whisk.
In perfect safety. Just like the automated Uber . . .
The Blue Angels also fly inches apart and at hundreds of miles per hour. Usually, without crashing. But they are piloted by autonomous humans, who do not depend on rote programming or technology to maintain formation in an environment of constantly changing variables which they – their autonomous intelligences – must recognize and correctly deal with, independent of technology. Each pilot makes minute course corrections, based on his independent judgment. No programmed auto-bot can anticipate every scenario. Computers can only react in ways anticipated by the programmer.
Unlike an autonomous human pilot at the controls. Or a competent human behind the wheel – assuming he’s allowed one.
Also: Aircraft are obsessively maintained and inspected according to a schedule that would never fly in a daily-driver (or daily driven) automated car scenario. It’s too complicated – and much too expensive. There is a reason why most people don’t own airplanes – even single-engine Cessnas. It’s not so much the training (and skill) needed to learn how to fly. That part is affordable, a few thousand bucks and a few months, if you’re interested. About the same in expense and time as it takes to get a driver’s license in Germany.
But the aircraft is a six figure proposition and the FAA mandatory scheduled safety inspections/teardowns and rebuilds double down on that. Combined, it’s beyond the financial means of nine (point nine) out of ten people.
Yet it would take something along those lines – assuming the technology can even be made to work reliably and safely outside of the attenuated world of a handful of demonstration mules – for this automated car thing to ever scale.
Millions of automated cars would have to be tied in to an FAA-esque infrastructure and mandatory scheduled inspections/teardowns/rebuilds very similar to those currently mandatory for aircraft.
This will get into serious money.
Who will get the bill?
How will they pay it?
Is anyone buying this?
Yup, they are.
It’s a carny’s market out there.
Drivers have to strictly obey traffic laws to make light synchronization to work.
It only takes a few drivers ignoring them to screw the traffic flow up and make synchronization worthless if traffic is heavy.
I’ve been in cities where it worked on streets that employed mid block stop lights to keep traffic flowing in sync, but even then people running those lights was fairly common and caused problems with the synchronized traffic that obeyed them.
Greetings,
Sometimes systems can grow beyond the ability of any single person to understand. There are now more than 300,000 traffic lights in the United States and there isn’t anyone around that can tell you how it all works were it viewed as a single system which is how it should be viewed.
You don’t need to synchronize all traffic in the entire United States, that would probably be impossible, just the main traffic arteries in the larger cities where the most traffic concentrates. They’re where the jam ups occur.
And those can be understood, and most of them are probably already computer controlled already.
The problem is probably more one of just not doing those things necessary to do it than it is the logistical challenge involved. For some reason, there seems to be no will to actually do it, just talking about doing it someday instead.
Our traffic lights are synchronized to turn red automatically when you get within ten car lengths of them.
Maybe that is part of the bigger plan….have the lights UN-synchronized so then the ‘smart cars’ don’t have to do much but inch along in the congestion with very little situational awareness needed…..inch forward, brake…..inch forward, brake……..a really dumb level of smart car can do it !
Self driving cars are a fantasy. They will never be able to interact safely with humans. In northern climates – ice / snow / curves / exit ramps – no amount of AI software can compare to human judgement. If they loose their GPS / Internet connectivity they are lost.
The fabulously wealthy idiots that run Google / Tesla / Amazon / Uber / Lyft are cumming in their pants over the thought of eliminating paying employees to deliver shit.
From what I see on the streets on a daily basis, human judgment isn’t very reliable either.
The problem isn’t the “ability” of the sensors/computers compared to a human. These cars already outperform the average human driver in that regard. Their reaction time is instantaneous, they have 360° vision, and they aren’t affected by distractions, lack of sleep, alcohol or drugs. I’d bet within 5 years that an autonomous car could win a Formula 1 race.
The problem is that computers crash, get hung up, get viruses, and can be hacked.
“Little red light, little green light
Stop on red
And you go on green
Don’t you get caught by Mr. In-between” Taj Mahal/Giant Step
Why don’t ya’ll build more and taller buildings and cram more businesses and appartments into Urban Jungles for “sustainabiity”; build them right over the roads, hahaha.
I gave Dutchman a thumbs-up, because he is right.
If there were only self-driving cars, then it would work. But that kind of build-out is impossible for us with our current deficits, and even if we look at digital TV, cable TV, cellular service and internet – the entire country is not covered. I have to drive 3 miles from my farm to get a single bar of cellular, which recedes even farther when it is bad weather. There is no cable, and a landline requires $150/month and contract for 5 years for them to run a copper wire to my farm. The satellite downlink we use is $150/month with throttle and limits.
Just the GPS adjustments with the north and south poles wandering make the GPS system require weekly corrections. Even then, my daughter has been sent down one way streets in the wrong direction and has been sent into dead ends by her talking GPS. They don’t even have that right.
The phone has been around for 100 years, and the main line still isn’t anywhere near my farm. Cellular has been out since the 1990’s, and it is nowhere near my farm.
Those far less expensive things are yet to arrive at my farm. And they were promised so long ago…
Only an idiot cannot see that this entire self-driving thing is pump and dump stock plays and company pimping for investors. It only works with big companies – notice that Genius Johnny down at the college is not getting investors for this – because it isn’t going to work anywhere, not even a little bit, without huge infrastructure capital tossed at it and more computing than we have coming down the pipe. In the complex real world we live in, the human brain is unlikely to be dethroned by software for hundreds of years. Just run the math on brain interconnections versus silicon.
Peters is right on this one.
I say let them try their best – but you won’t catch me in one because I do not trust the tech with my life or my kids lives. Will you?
Do you see highways, roads and interstate highways IMPROVING? Because I see them degrading as I use them due to neglect. Some counties are unpaving roads because gravel is cheaper – self drive that you frakking clown cars…