This week I had a conversation with some colleagues about self-driving cars. I reiterated my long-standing opinion about the best way for the idea of self-driving cars to gain traction.<\/p>\n
I said that somebody would need to decide to create a “self-driving car only” zone, perhaps in a small town somewhere. The key is to avoid mixing with human drivers.<\/p>\n
If the only vehicles on the road are self-driving cars — without the need to account for the unpredictability of human drivers — then the whole thing essentially becomes a cooperative packet switching network. Such networks are well understood, and known to be safe and reliable.<\/p>\n
“But what about traffic lights?” somebody asked. “Self-driving cars sometimes get those wrong.”<\/p>\n
I pointed out that there would be no need for traffic lights. Cars would all be communicating with each other behind the scenes to cooperatively maintain the most efficient traffic flow.<\/p>\n
Eventually I realized that the problem was the terminology. For many people, “self-driving car” is a trigger word.<\/p>\n
So instead I think we can just use more appropriate and descriptive language. The future is not about self-driving cars. The future is about a small-vehicle public transportation system.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
This week I had a conversation with some colleagues about self-driving cars. I reiterated my long-standing opinion about the best way for the idea of self-driving cars to gain traction. I said that somebody would need to decide to create a “self-driving car only” zone, perhaps in a small town somewhere. The key is to … Continue reading “Terminology”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26422"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=26422"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26422\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":26423,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26422\/revisions\/26423"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=26422"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=26422"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=26422"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}