How self-driving cars will take over

The technology for self-driving cars already works. In fact, it works spectacularly well. Not only are the latest algorithms able to drive vehicles in the real world, but they can also do something far more difficult: They can anticipate the strange and irrational behaviors of human drivers, and react to those behaviors in safe ways.

Which is a far more difficult problem than those algorithms will need to tackle in a world where all cars are driven by computer. In a future where there are no human drivers, traffic will essentially be a physical analog to today’s internet packet switching. Rather than many independent and often conflicting decision makers, the system will consist of cooperating actors with complete knowledge of each others’ goals and priorities.

In essence, what will superficially look like independent vehicles will actually be a single highly granular mass transit system. The network will efficiently weave its “packets” through that system, bringing people to their intended destinations in an optimal way.

But how do we get here from there? What would induce people to give up their beloved habit of driving? I think there is an analogy with smoking: Cigarettes were once ubiquitous in the culture. But after people were faced with the stark facts of the effects on life expectancy, smoking fell out of favor.

So here’s my prediction: Google, which is currently bankrolling much of the development of self-driving cars, will eventually realize that it needs to create a large scale working example. It will then design an economic inducement for some town or city, somewhere in the U.S., to go “driverless”. In that town, deaths and maimings will plummet. Life expectancy will tick upward dramatically.

Once the populace is faced with the facts on the ground (literally), our culture will shift accordingly. In a few years we will reach a tipping point, after which the entire country will quickly go driverless (except for some hobbyists here and there, under controlled conditions).

In a few years, people will look back on earlier decades and wonder how anybody could ever have lived in a society where to go out on the road meant risking your life.