My dad told me years ago that if the average driver was one percent more intelligent, that driving would become 10% more efficient.
The key to increasing traffic load is either to force people to drive smarter, or to use artificial intelligence to automate the drive smarter function.
However, the question boils down to cost. Cost reflects national and international realities concerning oil, resources, population, and, food prices. These costs in the future, will, as always been the case, vary between nations and between parts of nations. While the technology is fascinating, the economic realities and consequent governmental effects will provide the roadmap.
IMO, the central issue over the next 50 years, assuming a future with police actions but without world war, will center on redefining property for the sheeple of the world. While the well to do, worldwide, will continue to live in luxury, the masses will have to contend with using less of everything. The best way to accomplish this is propagandize future hipsters with the concept that sharing apartments, public transportation, and public cars will aid them in their quest to get laid.
In addition, future hipsters (or whatever the moniker of the hour will be) will have to be far more obedient in public (what is done in one's residence between consenting adults and the legal status of these adults is of no real relevance). Far more orders will be issued in response to more intense data mining on a person by person basis. Hipsters, in my view, in 2040 or so, will have algorithmic orders given directly to each of them via whatever interface(s) evolve. Once the future hipster leaves his or her dwelling, he or she will receive instructions concerning walking across streets (already done in Japan), instructions from cars to which riders respond verbally, real time instructions directed specifically to them while driving, instructions given directly to them by employers, etc.
What makes corporate owned autonomous cars likely will be the combination of the need for constant supervision and the reduction of peoples need for individual space.
I seriously doubt that privately owned autonomous vehicles have much chance, except in upper middle and lower upper class niche markets and these vehicles will have a fold away steering wheel and the convenient option for human control. I do believe, however, that autonomous control of public transportation and autonomous control of corporate owned rent-a-rides for the masses is inevitable.
Of course, users will realize that an autonomous car will lock it's doors and take the rider to the police station if the riders show "antisocial behavior",if any of the riders have warrants out for their arrest,if they own tax money, and, if the rider owes money to either the car owner or to any vendor that pays the car owning entity for the right to collect past due bills (I would imagine that bill collecting companies will be huge and completely algorithmically driven.)
As I said, we will become even more obedient than we are today.
I guess investing in the incarceration business will be a good investment, long term.
Last edited by Wizened Variations; Jul 21, 2014 at 2:41 PM.
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